Portfolio: Cannon Hersey

by Beth E. Wilson and photographs by Hillary Harvey, April 28, 2007

If the world is to be saved, it’s people like Cannon Hersey who will spearhead the effort. The grandson of writer John Hersey (of Hiroshima fame), the peripatetic Cannon has inherited his grandfather’s wanderlust and fascination with the human condition in far-flung places around the globe. At the age of 19, while still a student at Vassar College, he undertook a survey of the Tibetan Fulbright Scholarship program, working closely with the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile as he interviewed program participants in the Chinese-occupied country. Since then, he’s been very active in organizing events and exhibitions promoting global community building through the arts, first by founding the Johannesburg-based nonprofit CrossPathCulture, and, more recently, by starting the independent media company Blackage Media (www.blackagemedia.com), which creates original music and television programming for BET, VH1, and the South African Broadcast Corporation.
Using his camera to capture quotidian moments in the lives of people—whether in Asia, Africa, or Hell’s Kitchen—Hersey’s striking photography often locates unexpected points of commonality, like the visual rhyme of a monk’s saffron robe with the emergency yellow of an ambulance parked at a “Free Tibet” rally at the UN. At other moments, it’s the sheer beauty of a village seen through evanescent fog, as the morning light sifts through to illuminate the scene. In recent years, he’s collaborated extensively with South African artist Samson Mnisi, with whom he shares billing in an exhibition on view at Gallery 384 in Catskill through May 5.
—Beth E. Wilson