Book Spotlight:
The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times
virtual lecture and conversation with Emmy-award winning documentarian and author Lois Farfel Stark
How do humans make sense of the world? In answer to this timeless question, award winning documentary filmmaker, Lois Farfel Stark, takes the reader on a remarkable journey from tribal ceremonies in Liberia and the pyramids in Egypt, to the gravity-defying architecture of modern China. Drawing on her experience as a global explorer, Stark unveils a crucial, hidden key to understanding the universe: Shape itself.
Event Details:
When: Wednesday, July 8, 2020 | 6:00 - 7:00 pm CDT
Where: Hosted Virtually on Zoom
Cost: Free of charge, donations welcomed
“Lois Stark is an imaginative thinker who takes the particular and makes it universal. She is an inspiring guide, who discerns patterns and tells a compelling human story.”
— Edward Hirsch President, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Poet
The Telling Image is a stunning synthesis of civilization’s changing mindsets, a brilliantly original perspective urging you to re-envision history not as a story of kings and wars but through the lens of shape. In this sweeping tour through time, Stark takes us from migratory humans, who imitated a web in round-thatched huts and stone circles, to the urban ladder of pyramids and skyscrapers, organized by hierarchy and measurements, to today’s world of interconnected networks.
In The Telling Image, Stark reveals how buildings, behaviors, and beliefs reflect humans’ search for pattern and meaning. We can read the past and glimpse the future by watching when shapes shift. Stark’s beautifully illustrated book asks of all its readers: See what you think.
Presenter and Author
Lois Farfel Stark is an Emmy Award-winning producer, documentary filmmaker, and author of The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times. During her distinguished career she produced and wrote over forty documentaries on architecture, medical research, wilderness protection, artists, and social issues. With NBC News, she covered Abu Dhabi’s catapult to the 20th century, the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf, Cuba ten years after their revolution, the Israeli Air Force in the Six Day War, Northern Ireland during its time of religious conflict, and Liberia’s social split.
The Telling Image was granted Grand Prize First Place in Nonfiction from The Next Generation Indie Book Award, a Gold from the Nautilus Book Award, and won the National Indie Excellence Award. Along with an Emmy, Lois is also the recipient of two CINE Gold awards, two Gold Awards from the International Film Festival of the Americas, the Matrix Award from Women In Communications, the American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award, and the Silver Award from the Texas Broadcasting Association.
In civic life she has served as trustee or director of Sarah Lawrence College, the Alley Theatre, Texas Children’s Hospital, St. John’s School, the Harry Ransom Center, Federal Reserve Board of Dallas Small Business Committee, Texas Commission on the Arts, Humanities Texas, the Joseph Campbell Foundation, and Harvard Kennedy School Women’s Leadership Board. She was elected to the American Leadership Forum, the Center for Houston’s Future, and the Philosophical Society of Texas. She graduated Sarah Lawrence College and has two Master of Art degrees, in Education and Communication.
Her years of film-making stimulated her interest in how what we see shapes what we think. We are accustomed to history being told as a story of kings and wars. It can also be seen by looking at the shape of shelters, social systems, and sacred sites.