Michelle Bogre is a Professor Emerita of Photography and the former Chair of the Photography Department at Parsons School of Design in New York. She is also a copyright lawyer, documentary photographer and author of three books: Documentary Photography Reconsidered: History, Theory and Practice, Photography As Activism: Images for Social Change, and Photography 4.0: A Teaching Guide for the 21st Century. Photography as Activism was selected by Rice University in Houston, Texas as the Fall 2014 Common Reading, which is a practice of selecting one book to be read by all incoming students.
Michelle regularly writes about copyright and photography for national print and online magazines. Her photographs and/or writing have been published in books, including the Time-Life Annual photography series, The Family of Women, Beauty Bound, The Design Dictionary (Birkhauser Press, 2008) and photographer Trey Ratcliffe’s monograph, Light Falls like Bits. Her photographs have been featured in group shows: The Way We Work at the Lawrence O’Brien Gallery in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and Beauty Culture at the Annenberg Space for Photography in LA. She has served on the board of several non-profits devoted to photography, including the Society for Photographic Education, the only professional group in the U.S. dedicated to photographic education. Michelle is working on two new books and an on-going photographic project on Family Farms, released as the Farm Stories.