Inbal Abergil | Artist Talk

Making Peace with Death: What War Leaves Behind Inbal Abergil with guest Tracy Dice-Johnson Center for Documentary Studies Auditorium 1317 W. Pettigrew Street, Durham. October 14th, 1:30-2:30pm

Documentary photographer Inbal Abergil will present her work examining the aftermath of war through grief, memory, and remembrance. Through her projects "Making Peace with Death", "N.O.K.-Next of Kin", and "The Presence of Absence", Abergil documents the people, objects, and memories shaped by loss. Her photographs include portraits of Casualty Notification Officers and military chaplains, personal belongings left behind, and testimonies from Gold Star families. Her work explores how personal objects hold memory, how loss continues across generations, and the human cost of conflict for those who endure it.

Abergil will be joined in conversation by Tracy Dice Johnson, whose wife, Sergeant Donna R. Johnson, was killed in Afghanistan on October 1, 2012, and Caitlin Margaret Kelly, Curator of the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University. Johnson will share reflections on her personal experience of loss and remembrance.

Boxed lunches will be served. Public street parking available.

Inbal Abergil is a documentary photographer and educator. Her research focuses on the aftermath of war and the human cost of conflict, using still and moving images alongside testimony to examine loss, grief, memory, and healing. Abergil is a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and her series Nothing Left Here but the Hurt was nominated for the Prix Pictet Photography Prize.

Her work is held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Hood Museum of Art, New Hampshire; and Duke University's Archive of Documentary Arts, North Carolina, among others. Her first monograph, N.O.K.-Next of Kin, was published by Daylight Books in 2017. Her second monograph, The Presence of Absence, was published by Kehrer Verlag in November 2025. Abergil received her M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Columbia University. In addition to her studio practice, she is an Associate Professor of Photography at Pace University.