Les Rencontres d’Arles Archives

Excluded or Exoticised? The European Gaze in Indigenous Spaces

Across Europe, North America and Latin America, the images of Indigenous photographers are emerging with renewed visibility in exhibitions, biennials and collections, calling us to reconsider, as Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo does, what it means to speak of ‘Indigenous photography’ in both historical and contemporary contexts. Through an interrogation of photographic and curatorial legacies shaped by colonial discourse, and the field of ‘contemporary art’ more broadly, he writes that the recognition of Indigenous artists should not become an excuse to perpetuate exoticisation, nor a pretext for evading responsibility for those who sustain structural relations of power.

Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo | Opinion | 23 Oct 2025
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Faced with the question of whether the art market might be exploiting the trend in which Indigenous voices rearticulate their own discourses and express them in the first person within the art world – or, alternatively, ‘tokenising’ the presence of Indigenous artists – and whether some states might, in turn, attempt to redeem historical guilt, it becomes necessary to broaden our perspective with a brief review of recent and upcoming events in Europe.

Tony Albert (Kuku Yalanji), David Charles Collins and Kieran Lawson, Warakurna Superheroes #1, 2017. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf.

In the programme of Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025, entitled by its director Christoph Wiesner ‘Indocile Images,’ the Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Prize was awarded to Octavio Aguilar (Ayuuk), along with three exhibitions with a strong Indigenous presence: On Country: Photography from Australia, Ancestral Futures and Echoes from a Near Future.

The festival’s official poster features the image of an Indigenous child dressed as Captain America – part of the Warakurna Superheroes series by Indigenous artist and artistic director of the National Indigenous Art Triennial Tony Albert (Girramay, Yidindji and Kuku Yalanji), in collaboration with David Collins and children from a remote Aboriginal community in Australia’s Northern Territory. According to its authors, this work interrogates the way optimism can help overcome adversity and dismantle stereotypes, especially those imposed on the nation’s forgotten populations.

Yet, the reality for many Indigenous children diverges painfully from such heroic representation, as evidenced by the winning photograph of Hoda Afshar, recipient of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia’s Portrait Prize 2025. In these communities, children between the ages of 10 and 17 account for only 6.6% of their age group in the general population, yet they are 29 times more likely to be incarcerated.

Three out of five children deprived of liberty are Indigenous, and two out of three of them suffer from a diagnosed mental illness. From an early age, they carry the burden of structural disadvantages, discrimination and criminalisation. What they need is love, care and a supportive community; instead, they are often met with punishment. Detention centres and police stations, far from being spaces of healing, become sites of trauma, abuse and systemic failure. And yet, this reality is tolerated, as if an implicit hierarchy justifies certain forms of violence as normal – or even inevitable. Although Indigenous culture and identity in Australia may be celebrated as heroic, playful and aspirational, the surrounding society often fails to protect its children.

Beyond the French context, it is significant to look toward Venice, where the Golden Lion was awarded to the Australian Aboriginal multimedia artist Archie Moore at the 2024 Venice Biennale, curated by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, who affirmed that his biennale opened the door to the global art scene, and thus to Indigenous artists. This declaration is paradoxical, evoking the experience of feeling foreign in one’s own land – a consequence of cultural erasure, territorial dispossession, and, in extreme cases, the extermination of entire peoples – all within the framework of a biennale still divided into national pavilions.

Another case is that of Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw/Cherokee), who became the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States by occupying the entire pavilion. Already in 1932, Hopi creators such as Fred Kabotie and Awa Tsireh had participated, yet Pedrosa’s opening and Venice’s influence led Tate Modern in London to launch a dedicated fund to increase the representation of Indigenous works in its collection.

In photography, particular attention must be given to the work of Inuuteq Storch (Kalaallit), who represented Denmark and is scheduled to open a new exhibition at the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg in February 2026. Those photographed, like Storch himself, belong to a postcolonial generation. For some, their artistic, social or political choices express a deliberate will to distance themselves from the Danish gaze, in a critical and decolonial perspective. For others – and this is Storch’s case – it is less about reacting to the past than about creating aesthetics rooted in Inuit culture or in dialogue with the global world, outside the colonial prism. Similarly, we can appreciate the work of Seba Calfuqueo (Mapuche), who presented Nunca Serás un Weye (2015) as part of the Disobedience Archive project, and who exhibited their work in Becoming Ocean curated by Ann-Marie Yemsi at the Villa Arson Art Centre in Nice, and who also participated in Activating Environments: New Ways of Thinking of Land, Sea and Life at Art Basel.

Seba Calfuqueo in Conversations: Activating Environments: New Ways of Thinking of Land, Sea and Life. Art Basel, June 2024.

In this list, which does not claim to be exhaustive, one can clearly perceive the intensity of international activity, and less so the anxiety and pressure of a market eager for novelty and commodification. Inspired by this theme, many countries have chosen to explore the ideas of nationality, belonging and diplomacy from Indigenous perspectives. To ‘discover’ a Maya, Mapuche, Yagán, Shipibo, or Inuit photographer has become both a cultural trophy and a mirror reflecting the tensions and contradictions inherent in cultural funding.

Such is the case with investment policies that condition access to natural resources through private companies (some European), such as the mining giant BHP or the oil company Total – entities that sponsor many exhibitions and cultural programmes in Europe while being among the main perpetrators of ecocide in the Amazon. In this context, one cannot forget the suicide of Jaider Esbell during the São Paulo Biennial. At 41 years old, shortly before his death, he wrote a poem titled For the Day of My Departure:

At this moment, my soul must be seeing everything from above,
just as I always dreamed, absolutely free
with no need for protection, foundation, or material connection of any kind.
Below, only the cold and comforting emptiness of infinity.¹

This raises the question: How long will the art market – with its collections, festivals and biennials – continue to contemplate the ‘superstitious from the transversal valleys at the ends of the earth’² without assuming responsibility for the structural problems afflicting these communities?

Among these issues are the loss of ancestral lands, political marginalisation, economic exploitation, cultural and linguistic discrimination, and the impact of state policies that threaten their ways of life. While the works of these artists are celebrated and commercialised³, many of their communities continue to face poverty, displacement and the erasure of their rights, creating a profound contrast between the aesthetics consumed and the reality ignored. At the heart of the Indigenous art system beats a neoliberal paradox that seems irresolvable.

View of the Danish Pavilion by artist Inuuteq Storch, curated by Louise Wolthers, at the 60th Venice Biennale, Italy, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Venice Biennale.

As mentioned, Octavio Aguilar, an Ayuuk artist, recently received the Discovery Award from the Louis Roederer Foundation, awarded by curator César González-Aguirre at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025. His work is part of a continuum within Latin American visual arts programmes, in which Indigenous voices rework their own discourses and express them in the first person.

In this article, we will focus specifically on Indigenous photographers and Indigenous artists who employ photography, distinguishing them from non-Indigenous artists who may be intellectually ‘committed’ to the defence of Native peoples. The history of Indigenous photographers is less known and finds its seminal figure in Martín Chambi (Quechua), while also traversing the work of collectives and projects: Taller de Historia Oral Andina (1983), Chiapas Photography Project (1992), Aiwin, la imagen de la sombra (2008), Encuentro de las Culturas Indígenas (2016), up to Maxita Yano (2025) and the Colectivo Lakapoy (2025), which recently inaugurated exhibitions at the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo and the Inhotim Museum, respectively.

Aguilar’s work is situated within the tradition of contemporary Indigenous art but from a distinctive perspective: that of an Ayuuk artist representing his own community in the first person. His work avoids the external gaze typical of ‘intellectualised’ or academic indigenismo, which historically has perpetuated stereotypes and simplifications of Native peoples. Instead, Aguilar proposes a direct communal self-representation, where lived experience and the collective memory of his Ayuuk community become the central axis of artistic creation.

Octavio Aguilar receiving the Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award from curator César González-Aguirre, at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025. Photo: Eulalie Pernelet.

In his exhibition Tajëëw its Kontoy, presented at Arles, Aguilar combines silkscreen, drawing, sculpture, sound, and photography within an installation that constructs a contemporary Indigenous imaginary. His images reveal the coexistence of ancestral and modern elements – traditional papier-mâché masks alongside contemporary sportswear, ritual landscapes juxtaposed with everyday objects – thus generating a dialogue between past and present that challenges the idea of Indigenous culture as something ‘frozen in time.’

In this way, his work reinterprets indigenismo not as an external gaze toward the Other, but as an internal narrative, where culture and identity are expressed from within, marked by irony, subtlety and aesthetic freedom. Moreover, Aguilar frames his work within a critical commitment to power structures and historical memory. Each image functions as an act of reactivating ancestral knowledge, showing how photography and other artistic practices can become tools of cultural and political resistance. By placing his own lived experience at the centre, Aguilar demonstrates that language recovery is not merely a nostalgic gesture, but a creative and emancipatory act that redefines contemporary indigenismo.

Octavio Aguilar, Kontoy, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Parallel Oaxaca.

Aguilar’s photographic methodology can be defined, from the standpoint of cultural anthropology, as rooted in participatory observation. It stems from his direct involvement with Ayuuk oral traditions – particularly those of his grandmother, Aurea Romero, who constitutes a key figure in this work (as he notes in his introductory text). She has guided him in understanding his cultural genealogy. Through this relationship, Aguilar has reconstructed the memories of Santiago Zacatepec. His conversations with her and with other community members enabled him to develop a narrative that resists the various processes of symbolic colonisation. In the photographs that comprise the project, Aguilar’s friends embody Tajëëw and Kontoy, the ancestors of the Ayuuk people, drawing on visual codes specific to the communal imaginary.

This visuality is organised in different moments that regenerate a memory diluted by the passage of time and the processes of cultural segregation imposed on Indigenous groups throughout Mexican history. Thus, Aguilar’s work reveals the process of neoculturation: a phenomenon that goes beyond the group of men and women often considered marginal – those who constituted the nucleus of the first exchange between metropolis and colonies, that is, between Europe and the Americas – integrating foreign cultural manifestations into their own lives and, consequently, into their own cultures.

Neoculturation responds, first and foremost, to the conditions of a new mestizo culture. Since the creation of this concept, several related terms have emerged: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s notion of ‘ch’ixi’ (grey), Ticio Escobar’s ‘mestizo methodology’, Viveiros de Castro’s ‘cosmopolitics’, Walter Mignolo’s ‘epistemic disobedience’, Oswald de Andrade’s ‘anthropophagy’, and Édouard Glissant’s ‘créolité’. All these ideas advocate cultural pluralism as a way of denouncing and deactivating various forms of discrimination.

Fernando Ortiz coined the term ‘transculturation’ in his analysis of mestizo culture, and simultaneously proposed implicit concepts: deculturation or excultration for the first historical phase of colonial destruction; inculturation, as a substitute for acculturation, to describe the linear phenomenon of submission to the conqueror’s culture; transculturation, for the complete process that fosters reciprocal exchange; and, finally, neoculturation, to defend the creation of a plural culture resulting from the entire process.

Having recalled these conceptual frameworks, the question that remains is whether, in this context, an authentic Indigenous photography can exist. To approach this question, we may examine a self-portrait titled Self-Portrait with Glass Plate (1925) by the photographer Martín Chambi, recognised historically as the first Indigenous photographer. The image speaks to transculturation by placing the Indigenous subject before his own likeness, created with a European and colonising technique on a glass plate. Jorge Heredia, curator of the exhibition Martín Chambi (1891–1973): Photographer of the Andes at the Museum of Ethnography in Rotterdam (1992), writes:

‘Chambi appears as a rotating double-sided mirror in which different subjects contemplate themselves simultaneously from both sides, separated by the same mirror, which at once is the vehicle projecting each image. By a twist of fate, the reverse of the mirror, by the force of physics, projects the image once more, even if only as a reflection in another mirror, leaving only an imaginary trace of that opposed otherness that was there before, perceived at a distance as an inevitable closeness with that other, who is likewise caught in the same trance. Nothing dissolves; everything is present in the same place with brutal nakedness, and yet nothing seems exactly what it appears to be: there is always something more. No one can exist without the other’.⁴

Like Chambi, other groups also took control of the camera and, consequently, faced the double and the trance of their own representation. Some peoples adopted the photographic medium very early, discreetly capturing images of their own communities. Among them were Jennie Cross Cobb (Cherokee) in Oklahoma and Richard Throssel (Cree) in Montana. From this first generation, Horace Monroe Polar (Kiowa) stands out as one of the few professional Indigenous photographers in North America. In South America, the only comparable figure of the same period is Chambi himself. While little known in the South, two exhibitions of Chambi’s photographs were already held in 1936 – one at the headquarters of the newspaper La Nación and another at the Casino de Viña del Mar, in Chile.

Dorothy Chocolate at VISIONS: The Photographer’s Union conference, Ontario, 1985

In North America, the exhibitions 7 Views of Hopi (1983) and Vision (1985) marked two important, albeit belated, milestones. Vision was both an exhibition and the first conference on Indigenous photography, organised in Canada by a group of Inuit photographers. For its part, 7 Views of Hopi, held at the Northlight Gallery of the University of Arizona, presented the work of Hopi artists Jean Fredericks, Owen Seumptewa, Freddie Honghongva, Merwin Kooyahoema, Georgia Masayesva, and Victor Masayesva. This exhibition revealed a different conception of photography, with one image featuring a wooden figure known as Kwikwilyaqa. Victor Masayesva, filmmaker, video artist and photographer writes:

‘…When I was photographing an elder, he called me Kwikwilyaqa. At that moment, I laughed at how much the comparison fit, at what I was doing with the camera. He likened me to a Katrina, one of those spiritual beings within the Katrina categories devoted to buffoonery, burlesque and social commentary. It appears this way: wearing white man’s clothes, shoes, holding a cane in one hand and a rattle in the other. It has a black mask with protruding cylindrical eyes and a mouth painted black and white. What made me laugh was imagining how much I must have resembled him, leaning over my camera. The cloth surely resembled the juniper bark covering that Kwikwilyaqa wears on his head. Later I realised that perhaps this was the point: when Kwikwilyaqa appears in the central plaza, he casts his shadow on everyone he encounters, imitating each action of his chosen subject, quickly becoming a nuisance’.⁵

This testimony opens reflection onto a new perspective: the nuisance – understood as a factor that affects health, well-being or environment. Photographers, Indigenous or not, record a singular history that transcends mere technical photography to question relationships with knowledge and beliefs, including the superstitions that shaped these cultures⁶. Often, the myth is invoked that Indigenous people refused to be photographed for fear that the camera would ‘steal their soul.’ This idea, widely diffused through colonial accounts, is in fact a Western myth that attributed symbolic value to images captured by explorers. In reality, Indigenous resistance to photography is far more complex: it could refer to the taking of the image itself, to the unauthorised circulation of one’s portrait, to the asymmetry inherent in the photographic act, to misunderstandings of the camera’s mechanism, and above all, to the political and spiritual consequences that the act could entail. An analysis of superstitions generated by photography requires us first to reflect on the role of the camera, both as a technical invention and as a Western model of thought imposed on Indigenous cultures – particularly in their funerary rituals⁷. This raises two important questions: What could be the origin of Indigenous photography? Does there exist an Indigenous technology that approximates the idea of a photographic mechanics based on mimesis?

While the answers to these questions could fill an entire book, it is worth noting that the shutter speed and aperture – the cuts introduced into space-time that generate an image through luminous imprint – are notions entirely foreign to Indigenous conceptions of imitation and vision. One hypothesis would be to establish a parallel between the photographic ‘alteration’ of time, which produces an image from a luminous imprint, and certain visionary shamanic practices that provoke mental images. In this sense, Claude Lévi-Strauss opens a path in La pensée sauvage (1962), reminding us that:

‘Instead of opposing magic and science, it would be preferable to place them in parallel as two modes of knowledge, unequal in their theoretical and practical results (for in this respect, it is true that science achieves greater success than magic, although magic prefigures science insofar as it too sometimes succeeds), but not in terms of the type of mental operations they suppose, which differ less in nature than in the function of the phenomena to which they are applied’.⁸

In considering these different ‘ways of seeing’ that might be set in parallel, it is necessary to address another topic closely linked to colonial history: the idea that, from the United States to Patagonia,

Indigenous art is defined by geometric abstraction, chromatic richness and decorative diversity – from the pre-Columbian period to the present. Yet, as we shall see, such characteristics find little correspondence in the history of contemporary photography by Indigenous creators.

In recent history, we find a 1995 portfolio of photographs published in Aperture magazine: Strong Hearts: Native American Visions and Voices. It included works by Walter Bigbee (Comanche), Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), Jeffrey M. Thomas (Iroquois/Onondaga), N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), and Zig Jackson (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara). This portfolio accompanied the exhibition of the same name at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington in 1996 (it is worth noting that Zig Jackson is the first contemporary Indigenous photographer represented in the collections of the U.S. Library of Congress, after donating twelve large gelatin silver prints in 2015). Among them is the ironic series Indian Photographing Tourist Photographing Indian (1992), where Jackson portrays intrusive tourists pointing their cameras at Indigenous faces in a reservation. What deserves emphasis in this series is a central problem: the notion of the apparatus (dispositif), understood as the constitutive mediation that organises the relationship between photographer and photographed. From the perspective of an Indigenous photographer – or any photographer – it acquires particular epistemological weight, as it structures ways of seeing and representing. The apparatus, as defined by Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser, is:

‘A complex toy (the apparatus), so complex that those who play with it cannot fully understand it. Playing with it consists in combining the symbols contained in its programme – a programme that is itself inscribed in a meta- programme – and the outcome of the play is formed by other programmes still. While fully automated apparatuses can dispense with human intervention, many others require man as both player and functionary.’⁹

Zig Jackson, Camera in face, Taos, New Mexico, 1992. Courtesy the artist and Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

In his essay Ghost in the Machine, published in the same 1995 issue of Aperture, Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) offers an overview of the specific perspective of the ‘Indigenous functionary,’ borrowing Flusser’s language. His text illuminates a particular relationship with the apparatus, one shaped by the history of Indigenous peoples:

‘In 1840, when the war against us was going badly, a visionary Texas Ranger named Sam Walker undertook an extraordinary journey. Walker knew that only a considerably improved firearm could guarantee the success of his Rangers. He therefore went to the Colt factory in Paterson, New Jersey, and worked with Colt himself to develop the world’s first repeating revolver: the ‘Walker Colt’ .44 calibre. The revolver that revolutionised warfare against the Indians and weaponry in general – was a machine designed with a single purpose: to kill Comanches. To underscore this, each weapon bore an engraving of a battle between Comanches and Texas Rangers. We tried desperately to acquire these new weapons, but our success was limited: imagine a member of the Crips attempting to buy a dozen Stinger shotguns during the Los Angeles riots in 1992 – not impossible, but very, very difficult. It would have been necessary to invent a special camera to photograph Indians as well, given the considerable influence of photography on us. If one machine nearly annihilated us – we were little more than a thousand when my grandparents were born at the beginning of the century – another gave us immortality.’¹⁰

From the earliest days of photography, theorists such as Roland Barthes, Siegfried Kracauer and Susan Sontag have identified within it a notion of immortality – as Chaat Smith observes – linked to the trace that bears witness to events and to the photographer’s presence in a given place. Yet the idea that the camera could grant immortality in the spirit of a Comanche transforms our understanding of anthropological photography, as well as colonial and decolonial discourses. While certain historical photographs allow the recovery of forgotten traditions, more recent productions expand the global visibility of Indigenous struggles. They are increasingly accompanied by the participation of Indigenous artists and curators in the contemporary art world, whose repercussions were analysed earlier in this article.

More recent examples include the prize awarded to Octavio Aguilar, as well as the work of Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke), who in 2020 was invited to guest-edit Aperture for a special issue devoted to Indigenous photography and practice. Titled Native America, it was the first time Aperture had been edited by an Indigenous artist, signaling an evolution from the historical invisibility that long affected these creators. In Chile, several artists are now entering the international contemporary art circuit. Such is the case with Sebastián Calfuqueo and Paula Baeza Pailamilla, who work with photography and video, following in the footsteps of Francisco Huichaqueo and Bernardo Oyarzún – the first Mapuche artist to represent Chile at the Venice Biennale in 2007 with the project Werken, an artistic inquiry into his Mapuche roots begun in the late 1990s under the curatorship of Ticio Escobar.

Despite concentrated efforts to increase visibility, specifically Indigenous photographic practice remained largely isolated up to the year 2000; it did not significantly displace the entrenched visual stereotypes that folklorise tribes and communities. Even so, the work of these Indigenous photographers began to influence institutional policies around image acquisition and dissemination. More importantly, photography continued to be central to rebuilding Indigenous personal and collective identity. Yet, at this stage, ‘Indigenous photography’ should not be considered solely through the lens of cultural difference; doing so would obscure the numerous stylistic similarities that characterise our era across cultures. Furthermore, Indigenous photography is directly connected to concerns that are not only identitarian but also global.

In other words, it is necessary to consider it at the level of the individual, independently of ethnic belonging. Although practices are singular, these artists share a common objective: to promote the reappropriation of their various cultures by the communities themselves, rather than by outsiders, as was long the norm. For decades, photographs of Indigenous peoples made by settlers perpetuated unreal symbols or showed only the negative aspects of life. Whereas the humanity of these peoples was absent from thousands of stereotyped images, today the Indigenous photographer, equipped with a camera, produces a productive estrangement in order to return what is captured to the community itself – now functioning as a steward of memory.

My partial conclusion is that the notion of ‘Indigenous photography’ is a myth. To approach a truly Indigenous photography, the artist must unravel, within their own inheritance, the ‘photographic programmes’ that condition their gaze and embrace the enigma of the camera’s darkness as a creative principle. The search for an Indigenous point of view should be undertaken only by someone from the community – underscoring the impossibility for an external observer to define a position vis-à-vis the apparatus’ programmes. Ultimately, however, this issue concerns any photographer or artist who wishes to occupy the photographic medium for creative ends: it compels attention to the apparatus and to the challenges of the global photo industry, placing the ‘black box’ at the centre, simultaneously observed by the photographer and those photographed. It may be worthwhile to explore concepts such as pre-photography, always with the awareness that the artist – freed from the dictates of Mr. Kodak, Canon, or Nikon – can untangle their own heritage and confront the camera’s enigma. Only then can a truly photographic act emerge: not as nostalgia for the authentic, but as a radically new creation founded on cultural genealogy.

Kwikwilyaqa, from the James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection

Octavio Aguilar is not oblivious to this problematic. In his photographic work, he operates a device that inevitably intertwines modern and colonial inheritances. After a close examination of each proposal by the eight artists selected by curator César González-Aguirre, the jury unanimously decided to award the prize to Aguilar for his project Tajëëw its Kontoy.

The decision rested on a shared conviction: in a European context where the inclusion of historically marginalised communities is perceived as an ethical and aesthetic urgency, it is indispensable to expand the visual and artistic spectrum. Recognising aesthetics distant from traditional European canons is not merely a gesture of openness; it is the very condition for introducing new visual codes into contemporary discourse on cultural diversity. This inevitably provokes suspicion, since – as we noted earlier – these new visual codes can be leveraged to capitalise on recent curatorial work by institutions that position themselves critically vis-à-vis their own histories. It is a cultural opportunism we should continue to scrutinise carefully.

The jury emphasised the value of orally transmitted narrative forms, passed down from generation to generation, recognising them as legitimate carriers of knowledge and memory. In this context, Aguilar’s portraits – staged in environments that evoke the Ayuuk imaginary – dialogue with fragments of punk textiles, printed with slogans in favour of Indigenous autonomy, constituting a visual space where tradition and contemporaneity intersect, tension and mutually amplify. His multidisciplinary work thus appears as an act of symbolic resistance: it preserves transcultural memory in the face of vertiginous globalisation and the homogenisation of ways of life, transforming his photographic practice into a terrain of identity affirmation and aesthetic experimentation.

The jury, speaking in French and Spanish, underlined with particular emphasis that this was not a ‘discovery’ – a term heavy with colonial resonances, as when the Americas were ‘discovered’ – but rather an acknowledgement of continuity and visual genealogy, and with it, the assertion of a legitimate place within the contemporary photographic community.

Ultimately, the recognition of Indigenous artists should not become an excuse to perpetuate exoticisation, nor a pretext for evading responsibility for those who sustain structural relations of power. Although these artists contest stereotyped representations and hegemonic discourses by giving voice to their communities and making visible realities too often ignored, it remains insufficient so long as their voices are kept within contemporary art institutions without reaching parliaments – as suggested by Michael Cook (Bidjara) in his photographic series from 2014, Majority Rule.

In this context, we might ask whether a more forceful political gesture is not required. Indigenous artists are well aware of this situation – Michael Cook or Seba Calfuqueo state it clearly. In a conversation in Basel, Calfuqueo says:

‘…the art world has always been an uncomfortable space. I have no point of reference within my community, because no one else occupies the position I have now. Even so, this conflict is part of what it means to exist in the art world. At some point, I think we choose to remain in this space because we accept and even embrace that discomfort. I have come to understand that the uncomfortable zone can be a space for creativity’.¹¹

Perhaps we must transform our perception of the apparatus and, in a metaphorical sense, invert the camera – direct it toward those responsible, not only toward victims. This is a critical stance that seeks to expose structures of power, injustices and responsibilities implicated in each situation. It entails shifting the gaze from representations centred on vulnerable subjects to images that lay bare the actors, institutions and systems that perpetuate inequality. In this way, photography could become a tool for deconstruction and social critique, a strategy of institutional subversion that goes beyond mere documentation.

This perspective inevitably forms part of a broader discussion on political art and the limits of its real eﬃcacy: Why do we trust that contemporary art institutions can influence political decision-making?

Perhaps the true task is not to inscribe oneself in the field of contemporary art, but to explore ‘something else’ that as yet lacks a name. Otherwise, the gesture risks shrinking to a politics of visibility – the capacity to occupy space in museums and institutions – rather than an artistic creation in its own right. This raises new questions: Why seek recognition as a contemporary artist? What does it mean to aspire to participate in an international festival? And why should a curator assume the role of mediating an Indigenous artist’s discourse under the codes of Western museology?

If Europe continues to look toward the Americas, it must go beyond aesthetic findings and recognise the histories, struggles and resiliencies that undergird these creations, incorporating into exhibitions their contexts of production and the consequences for communities. Only then can it cease to be a showcase of exoticisms and become a space of dialogue, justice and authentic visibility. It is necessary, however, to remember that the system is not innocuous. Even as exhibitions foster alliances with Indigenous peoples, confront extractivism and promote environmental education, Europe remains ensnared in ethical-political paradoxes, where good intentions collide with entrenched structures of power.♦

–
Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo is an artist and researcher whose practice lies at the confluence of artistic research, curatorial work and education. He holds a PhD in photography from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (ENSP, Arles). Valenzuela-Escobedo has curated numerous exhibitions, including Mapuche at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, as well as Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation and Bosques Geométricos, both of which premiered at Les Rencontres d’Arles. Monsanto was the winner of the Paris Photo/Aperture Book Award and shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Foundation Photography Prize 2018. In 2023, he presented the trilogy Mama Coca, Ipáamamu and Oro Verde at Fotofestiwal in Łódź, Poland. In 2025 he curated Lightseekers for Bienal’25 Fotografia do Porto, Portugal. He is Associate Curator of the Guyane Biennale 2027 and serves as Artistic Director of Double Dummy. As an art critic and researcher, Valenzuela-Escobedo regularly contributes to publications such as Inframince, 1000 Words, Mirá, and Letargo.

References:

¹ Jaider Esbell, Para el día de mi partida, in Tardes de Agosto, Manhãs de Setembro, Noites de Outubro, Boa Vista, 2013.

² Eugenio Dittborn, Nous les artistes de provinces lointaines, in ArtPress 62, Paris, 1982.

³ The study of pre-Columbian art collections is a field of great interest in my research, particularly in the case of the collection assembled by Louise and Walter Arensberg, which is currently held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

⁴ Jorge Heredia, La imagen elusiva de Martín Chambi, Espacio Graf (online), Mérida, 1992.

⁵ Victor Masayesva Jr. and Erin Younger, Hopi Photographers / Hopi Images, Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1983.

⁶ Two expressions establish themselves as the princeps notions in my argument in favour of an Aboriginal science, for lack of another way to name it. The first is the popular expression among the Fuegian people, Toumayacha Alakana, which means “to look with one’s head covered by a veil.” The second corresponds to the Yanomami expression Noreshi Toway, which means “to take the double of a person.” These two expressions are at the origin of my thesis on the atavistic fear of image capture.

⁷ For further study on the subject, see: Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo, MÄNK’ÁČEN: Photographic Mechanics, Mysticism, and Superstition among the Indigenous Peoples of South America, dissertation in practice and theory of artistic and literary creation, École Nationale Supérieure de Photographie (ENSP Arles) and Université d’Aix-Marseille, 2021.

⁸ Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage, Paris, Plon, 1962.

⁹ Vilém Flusser, Pour une philosophie de la photographie [Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie, 1983], Paris, Circé, 1996.

¹⁰ Paul Chaat Smith, Ghost in the Machine, in Aperture no. 139 (Strong Hearts: Native American Visions and Voices), New York, Aperture Foundation, 1995.

¹¹ Seba Calfuqueo in Basel Conversations: Activating Environments: New Ways of Thinking of Land, Sea and Life. Art Basel, June 2024.

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Through the heart of the American South

In his new book, Hardtack, Rahim Fortune compiles nearly a decade of work, blending documentary with personal history within the context of post-emancipation America. Through coming-of-age portraits that traverse survivalism and land migration, Fortune illustrates African American and Chickasaw Nation communities. As Taous R. Dahmani observes, the iconography of the American South is drawn between Fortune’s Hardtack and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, released only a few days after — both of which raise questions that serve to redefine ‘Americana’.

Taous R. Dahmani | Book review | 17 Apr 2024

At the end of March, something very odd happened: Loose Joints dropped Rahim Fortune’s second photobook Hardtack, and, a few days later, Beyoncé released her eighth album Cowboy Carter. I can almost hear you – yes, you, reader – wondering, what’s the connection? Well, there are several. Firstly, it serves as the perfect soundtrack to look at Fortune’s photographs. As if sound was taking form. Beyoncé’s extensive 27-track list echoes Fortune’s 72 photographs; her lyrics resonating with his visual language. Both artists delve into the iconography and sound of cowboys, churches, southern mothers and daughters, rodeo, sashes and Fortune even closes his book with a “Queen Coronation”. Besides this serendipitous overlap, both artists also actively reclaim, redefine and adjust the notion of “Americana”. Wrapped in a denim-like cover, Hardtack speaks of a specific geography and moment: Texas today, the USA in the 2020s.

Beyond the anecdote of their shared Texas origins, both explore the history of the American South – one through music, the other through photography – connecting its past with its present. 2024 is a pivotal election year, with the southern states bearing a significant responsibility in shaping the country’s future (and, arguably, the world’s). Therefore, there is an urgent need to disseminate an alternative understanding or narrative of what the US might be. After all, the title of Fortune’s book, Hardtack, refers to an emergency survival food, made from flour, water and salt, signalling that we are in the midst of a critical juncture. At a time when states are banning books to erase chapters of US history, Hardtack feels like a welcomed defiance.

In her proudly made-in-America “country” album, Beyoncé embraces the soundscape of the southern states and her Black musical heritage, blending blues, soul, rock ‘n’ roll and gospel. Similarly, an incredible living encyclopaedia of American photography, Fortune quotes – or samples – his ancestors, from Walker Evans’s depictions of southern architecture to Roy DeCarava’s intimate portraits of Black life. Just as Beyoncé pays homage to Linda Martell, the first commercially successful Black female artist in country music, Fortune channels the social documentary style of Milton Rogovin, his portrayal of African-American communities akin to Earlie Hudnall Jr, and mirrors the political consciousness embodied by Consuelo Kanaga. Furthermore, Fortune examines Arthur Rothstein’s documentation of African-American families in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, originally captured for the Farm Security Administration and later featured in Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941). With Hardtack, Fortune engages in a self-conscious dialogue with photography’s history.

The parallel between music and photography transcends mere coincidence; its potency lies in their shared democratic practice and dissemination, but it also resonates with what Tina M. Campt described in A Black Gaze (2021) as a ‘broader commitment to understanding visual culture through its entanglement with sound, and highlighting the centrality of sonic and visual frequency to the work of Black contemporary artists.’ Already, in 2017, Campt beckoned us to listen to images, and more recently, she revisited the idea employing the concept of frequency to challenge ‘how we see’, adding that ‘the physical and emotional labour required to see these images gives us profound insights into the everyday experiences of Black folks as racialised subjects.’ Listening to Fortune’s Hardtack is to pick up on various stories and histories such as the legacy of Gee’s Bend quilts, crafted by descendants of enslaved individuals who toiled on cotton plantations. These local women united to establish the Freedom Quilting Bee, a worker’s cooperative that enabled crucial economic opportunities and offered political empowerment. As Imani Perry eloquently states in the book’s concluding essay: ‘What we know as Black Texas was birthed through captivity. This land has been a bounty; and also a burden.’ Fortune captures the architecture of past power and oppression – the grand plantation houses alongside the slaves’ huts –and the remnants of this legacy, showcasing what barely survives in the wake of US history. Beyoncé’ sings in “YA YA” (2024): “My family lived and died in America, hm / Whole lotta red in that white and blue, huh / History can’t be erased, oh-oh / Are you lookin’ for a new America? (America).” In “Night Ride Tracks, Archer, Florida” (2020), Fortune kneels down to capture the sunlight beaming on the old train tracks, which bear witness to the 1928 Rosewood massacre during the era of Jim Crow laws. In “AMEN” (2024), Beyoncé’s reminds her listener: “This house was built with blood and bone / And it crumbled, yes, it crumbled.”

On the following page, Fortune presents a captivating portrait of his partner, Miranda, underscoring that his documentation of the American South is as personal as it is political. With roots in both the African-American and Chickasaw Nation communities, Fortune traverses rural towns that are close to his heart, pausing to engage in conversations with friends. Fortune embraces the formal conventions of documentary traditions whilst ushering us into novel sensations and uncharted emotional territories. Opening the book, we can almost grasp the wind, and, as we delve deeper, we feel the humidity of the Mississippi enveloping us, the scorching sun on the road casting its light upon each image. His photographs record what stands proud, what is forced to break, what disappeared but can still be traced. In Fortune’s photographs, people are praying, watching, playing, waiting, celebrating, caring and driving; leading an unremarkable life because ‘attending to the infraordinary and the quotidian reveals why the trivial, the mundane, or the banal are in fact essential to the lives of the dispossessed and the possibility of black futurity.”’ Texas also serves as the backdrop for Fortune’s personal grief – as depicted in his first book I can’t stand to see you Cry (2021) – and serves as a place where remembrance holds paramount importance, as evidenced by the tattooed dates of key life moments on his friend’s skin. Fortune’s Hardtack is a poignant tribute, both a requiem for those lost and a homage to those whose actions altered the course of history. Yet, it is also a celebration, capturing the essence of joy found in everyday moments and special occasions alike. It is this unique and delicate coexistence of remembrance and revelry that imbues Hardtack with its profound resonance, showcasing the depth of Fortune’s artistic maturity.♦

All images courtesy the artist and Loose Joints. © Rahim Fortune

Hardtack is published by Loose Joints.

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Taous R. Dahmani is a London-based French, British and Algerian art historian, writer and curator. Her expertise centres around the intricate relationship between photography and politics, a theme that permeates her various projects. Since 2019, she has been the editorial director of The Eyes, an annual publication that explores the links between photography and societal issues. She is an Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Dahmani’s curatorial work was showcased at Les Rencontres d’Arles, France, where she curated the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2022). Dahmani is set to curate two exhibitions at Jaou Tunis, Tunisia (2024).

Images:

1-Rahim Fortune, Windmill House, Hutto, Texas, 2022.

2-Rahim Fortune, Praise Dancers, Edna, Texas, 2022.

3-Rahim Fortune, Willies Chapel, Austin, Texas, 2021.

4-Rahim Fortune, Hardware, Granger, Texas, 2018.

5-Rahim Fortune, Highway I-244 (Greenwood), Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2021.

6-Rahim Fortune, Gas Pump, Selma, Alabama, 2023.

7-Rahim Fortune, Deonte, New Sweden, Texas, 2022.

8-Rahim Fortune, Ace (Miss Juneteenth), Galveston, Texas, 2022.

9-Rahim Fortune, Night Ride Tracks, Archer, Florida, 2020.

10-Rahim Fortune, Tinnie Pettway, Gee’s Bend, Alabama, 2023.

11-Rahim Fortune, VHS Television, Dallas, Texas, 2021.

12-Rahim Fortune, Abandoned Church, Otter Creek, Florida, 2020.

Les Rencontres d’Arles 2022

Top three festival highlights

Selected by Tim Clark

1000 Words Editor in Chief, Tim Clark, reports back from the opening of Les Rencontres d’Arles 2022, the 53^rd edition of the bright, bushy-tailed festival set across the evocative Roman town in the south of France. Among the many exhibitions to salute are Norwegian-Nigerian artist Frida Orapabo’s How Fast Shall We Sing at Mécanique Générale in the dazzling new Parc des Ateliers at LUMA Arles, Rahim Fortune’s I can’t stand to see you cry as part of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award curated by Taous R. Dahmani and Sathish Kumar’s Town Boy, resulting from the first Serendipity Arles Grant in 2020. However, three particularly ambitious thematic exhibitions stand out for their complex visual dialogues and multiple vantage points onto the world and world of images.

1. But Still, It Turns
Musée départemental Arles antique

The wall text that introduces But Still, It Turns, the exhibition Paul Graham has curated at Musée départemental Arles antique – which, among many notable bodies of work, features Emanuele Brutti and Piergiorgio Casotti’s Index-G, Vanessa Winship’s she dances on Jackson and Curran Hatleberg’s Lost Coast – states, brazenly: ‘there is no didactic story here, no theme or artifice. None is asked, none is given.’ Isn’t no story, like when artists claim their work as ‘apolitical’, a story in itself? In this case, the ‘story’ – or rather, quasi-framework or exhibitionary complex – is that of a statement of positions on a mode of photography identified as so-called ‘post-documentary’. Its meta-narrative draws from a shared approach, or attitude, propagated by this judiciously selected group of photographers who, in one way or another, turn their lens on intimacies and small episodes of contemporary social realities in the US. Specifically, working in the observational mode, they opt to summon quiet or unremarkable moments as a means of possessing the weight of the world: a town and its inhabitants gripped by industrial decline, sounds and situations at the fault lines of race, environment and economy and so on. Yet there are no easy narratives – all is posed as fleeting and messy but also empathetic and genuine; what Graham refers to as ‘a consciousness of life, and its song’.

Originally staged at ICP, New York, But Still, It Turns in the context of Les Rencontres d’Arles is ultimately a hymn to traditional yet enduring forms of photography, its serious artistic application allowing ‘a kind of pathway through the cacophony – a way to see and embrace the storm.’ Graham writes: ‘It could guide you through the randomness and grant the simple mercy of recognising life in all its prismatic wonder’. That such complex dialogues emerge across these meaningful articulations from life, demonstrates the artists’ deep levels of understanding of the bonds between looking and caring, perceiving and visualising. And, unsurprisingly, there are echoes of Graham’s own work at every turn, redolent of a mountain towering over a landscape, whose image can only be glimpsed through its reflection in a lake below.

2. Songs of the Sky. Photography & The Cloud
Monoprix

More curatorial (in the sense of thematising a group exhibition around a singular subject) is Songs of the Sky. Photography & The Cloud at Monoprix, the vast and industrial first-floor area above the French supermarket of the same name. As its title suggests, the show takes the motif of the cloud in photography as a starting point as well as the metaphor of ‘the cloud’ as a technological network that enables remote data storage and computing power commonly associated with the Internet. Of course, the empirical mass of photographs, i.e. those that exist on our smartphones and laptops – baby and cat photographs, holiday snaps, selfies, sunsets and pictures of food – or, by a similar token, those which have been generated by surveillance cameras and satellites, exist ‘up there’ in the cloud, finding in cables, screens and hard drives material form as part of the techno-capitalist system. Artists, on the other hand, have attempted to subvert and critique its principles, infrastructure and structures, ergo this exhibition.

Upon entering, one’s eyes don’t know where exactly to look; there are multiple sightlines onto numerous works from different artists but that’s certainly not a bad thing. As such, striking juxtapositions between historical material from the 19^th century, such as Charles Nègre or Louis Vignes’ photographs, and contemporary works by Lisa Oppenheim, Trevor Paglen, Andy Sewell and Simon Roberts come to bear. What emerges is a tension between the sky as something sublime, as something which, for centuries, represented a way of ‘divining the future’ as James Bridle has put it, versus the far-from-romantic means we conceive of it today: a digital phenomenon that transfers and commodifies our data, with dramatic consequences for climate emergency and geo-politics. ‘Will the immense carbon footprint of the technical cloud accelerate global warming to such an extent that in the future it will be rare to see many faced cloud creatures floating by in the sky?’, is just one of the powerful research questions driving the exhibition. Organised with skill and clear focus, Songs of the Sky. Photography & The Cloud has been curated by Kathrin Schönegg of C/O Berlin, who was also the recipient of the 2019 Rencontres d’Arles Curatorial Research Fellowship.

3. Ritual Inhabitual, Geometric Forests: Struggles on Mapuche Land
Chapelle Saint-martin Du Méjan

Native to the temperate rainforests in southern Chile are medicinal plants and a rich biodiversity that have bore witness to endless cycles of construction and destruction. Monocultures of pine and eucalyptus have now come to dominate in service to the hugely lucrative paper pulp industry in the region, Chile being the world’s fourth largest producer from its 2.87 million hectares of plantations after all. The Mapuche (“people of the earth”), meanwhile, have lived on this land long before the country was founded and now find themselves at the heart of an ongoing battle: their spiritual relationship with the environment is at odds with an aggressive, global economy based on the exploitation of natural resources, leading to violence between nationalist organisations, industrialists’ private militia and the army’s specialist anti-terror squad. In response to this conflict, Chilean collective Ritual Inhabitual, created by Florencia Grisanti and Tito Gonzalez García, embarked on a five year photographic and ethnobotanical investigation that encompasses delectable Wet Collodian plates as well as large and medium format colour photographs of members of the Mapuche community, plants, trees and cloning laboratories of a forestry company. That this project encompasses a broad range of cohorts is one of its strongest features, for it offers a multi-vantage point perspective onto the subject at hand. Deftly translated by the exhibition’s curator, Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo, whose careful choreography of the space highlights these competing factions, Geometric Forests: Struggles on Mapuche Land mediates the political desire to open up a debate on the nature of consumption at large.

While aesthetics may write the script in other environmentally-concerned exhibitions, here a form of infrastructural activism that reflects on the actual conditions and implications of its own making is evident. The exhibition is therefore highly commendable for harnessing the possibility of thinking and talking otherwise about making art in a less extractive fashion, allied with the admission that an entirely eco-friendly exhibition of images is an impossibility. One obvious example of mitigating impact has been to reuse existing frames from previous exhibitions. Similarly, printing directly onto material surfaces bypassing the need for paper or gluing the print onto an archival cardboard as opposed to an aluminium substrate in the event the former cannot be achieved. Even some of the temporary exhibition structures are stripped back to show the bare bones utilisation of wood, itself dismountable and reusable. There is also a kind of in-built critique present in the blurb of the accompanying book, published with Actes Sud, with a particularly striking section revealing a consciousness and self-awareness. It reads: ‘3029 kilos of Munken Kristall paper and 814 kilos of Soposeet paper were used for the book, as well as 220 kilos of Munken Kristall paper for the cover. Based on 24 trees for one tonne of paper, 96 trees were needed to transform those 4,063 kg of paper into 2,200 copies of this book.’ Clearly, in Geometric Forests, its participants take up the responsibility to call for new socio-environmental-political forms of collaboration. Maybe, via the propositions and practices contained in this exhibition, there is a way forward together, a sustainable means of co-existence.♦

Les Rencontres d’Arles 2022 runs until 25 September 2022.

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Tim Clark is Editor in Chief of 1000 Words and Artistic Director for Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Italy, together with Walter Guadagnini and Luce Lebart. He also currently serves as a curatorial advisor for Photo London Discovery and teaches at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University.

Images:

1-Vanessa Winship, from the series She dances on Jackson, 2013, part of But Still, It Turns. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

2-Curran Hatleberg, from the series Lost Coast, 2016, part of But Still, It Turns. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

3-Kristine Potter, Drying Out, from the series Manifest, 2018, part of But Still, it Turns. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

4-Trevor Paglen, CLOUD #865 Hough Circle Transform, 2019, part of Songs of the Sky. Photography & The Cloud. Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

5-Andy Sewell, Known and Strange Things Pass, 2020, part of Songs of the Sky. Photography & The Cloud. Courtesy the artist and Robert Morat Gallery.

6-Noa Jansma, Buycloud, 2020-21, part of Songs of the Sky. Photography & The Cloud. Courtesy the artist.

7-Ritual Inhabitual, Paul Filutraru, Rapper in the group Wechekeche ñi Trawün, Santiago de Chile, 2016, part of Geometric Forests: Struggles on Mapuche Land. Courtesy the artists.

8-Ritual Inhabitual, Biotechnology series, Chile, 2019, part of Geometric Forests: Struggles on Mapuche Land. Courtesy the artists.

9-Ritual Inhabitual, Geometric Forests series, Chile, 2018, part of Geometric Forests: Struggles on Mapuche Land. Courtesy the artists.

Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2020

False signals and white regimes: an award in need of decolonisation

Tim Clark on Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize’s reproduction of structural inequality, Mohamed Bourouissa’s ambivalent ‘victory’ and the implications for curatorial responsibility

Algerian-born artist Mohamed Bourouissa has been announced as the winner of the £30,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2020, an award founded in 1996 by The Photographers’ Gallery, London and now in its twenty-fourth year.* Bourouissa was among a shortlist of four artists that included Clare Strand, Anton Kusters and Mark Neville, having been nominated for his mighty impressive exhibition Free Trade first staged within Monoprix at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2019.

Free Trade was a survey showcasing fifteen years of Bourouissa’s creative output. His work examines the value and visibility of marginalised and economically bereft members of society, as well as productions of knowledge, exchange and structures of power. Video, painting, sculpture, installation and, of course, photography are routinely put to powerful use. So too is an impressive range of imagery that encompasses staged scenes, surveillance footage and even stolen smartphones. Ideas come into focus and vibrate against one another, laying bare some of the terrible realities and injustices of late capitalism, all the while questioning the means of an image and politics of representing the ‘other’. It felt sharp, sobering, confounding, mysterious, critical and intelligible on its own political terms. In the context of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize display here in an extended run at The Photographers’ Gallery, Free Trade has been very capably distilled into a satisfying-enough iteration of the work, despite the typical space restrictions and challenges of staging this annual group show.

Nevertheless Bourouissa’s ‘victory’ betrays an alarming fact: he is just one of four artists of colour to win this highly-coveted prize during its twenty-four year history, joining Shirana Shabazi (2002), Walid Raad (2007) and Luke Willis Thompson (2018) who have come before him.** In tandem with this disturbing revelation we must also consider another uncomfortable truth: no black artist has ever won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize as it approaches its first quarter of a century in existence.

What this amounts to is curatorial malpractice on the one hand, and capitalist oppression on the other – a form of reproducing and perpetuating racial inequality, both in material and ideological terms. A quick, top-level calculation of the monies awarded to just the winners alone (these figures exclude the smaller sums given to runners up) shows that a total of £485,000 has been awarded to white artists (82%), in comparison to £105,000 awarded to artists of colour (18%) – a wildly unequal distribution. Not only this, but it subsequently impacts on the discrepancies in levels of press coverage received, as well as interest from galleries, museums and collectors with implications for their markets and price points of artworks. Clearly no honest observer can say that such devaluation, in every sense of the word, isn’t a problem. And it’s a white problem that needs to be urgently addressed going forward.

It may also come as no surprise then, but is still nonetheless shocking, that the five members of the jury for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2020 – including a non-voting chair – are all white.*** However highly-respected and accomplished they may be as artists, editors and curators, this too is shameful and inexcusable. Regardless of this year’s outcome.

Whitewashing on the part of the establishment is obviously harmful to our profession, and therefore to society and culture at large. In effect it’s sending out the message to young artists and curators of colour that ‘there are no opportunities for you and your chance of attaining this level of recognition are slim – there is no space for you, and your work is not valid within the narrow parameters of this prize’. It makes it seem like a rigged system, blocking the development of black and brown excellence, while depriving us all of richness of the contemporary photographic landscape we deserve. Indeed that’s precisely how the whiteness project manifests itself over and over again. For this is a continuum, not an isolated incident. We know that as a ruling principle whiteness is most effective when it is unnamed and unseen, an idea that is consolidated by upholding status privilege while neglecting other non-hegemonic modes of being in the world, thereby reasserting itself and the normalisation of its proponents’ limited worldview. But it’s detected here in the case of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, an award in need of decolonisation despite last night’s seemingly positive result. Only then can we begin to generate the right conditions for a level playing field.

We might think of one of Stedelijk Museum’s newly appointed Curator-at-Large, Yvette Mutumba’s conception of the task of decolonisation and what it entails. In her recent interview on frieze.com she commented: “It means understanding that decolonization is not a matter of ‘us’ and ‘them’, but concerns all of us. It means acknowledging that this is not a current moment or trend. It means recognizing that BIPoC/BAME/POC are not necessarily particularly ‘political’: we simply do not have the choice to not be political. It means admitting that having grown up in a racist structure is no excuse.”

Of course we all need to check ourselves, and what we’re doing in order to be mindful of our own privilege and positionality. It has obviously occurred to me that as a cis white man mine is a voice that certainly doesn’t need liberation but we can’t just sit and wait for change to come. I am also aware many people who look and sound like me don’t speak at all – let alone take action – lest they might ‘fail’. A perennial double bind. This is something the photographer and writer Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa reminded his audience during an ‘in conversation’ with Sunil Shah early on in lockdown, as part of Atelier NŌUA’s Once Upon a Time talks series, in which he summoned Samuel Beckett’s sage words: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” It’s worth noting that Wolukau-Wanambwa also shared his more general observation relating to the false consciousness that somehow, by default, those working in the arts, given that they are creative with a proclivity to ‘openness’, are not thought of – or think of themselves – as adopting racist and discriminatory practices.

At a minimum it would certainly give some meaning to the countless statements of solidarity that accompanied black squares during Instagram’s #BlackOutTuesday, not to mention the performative allyship that ensued, manifesting in platitudes such as “we must fight systemic racism” or “don’t stay silent” only to never hear from such people again on the matter or see any changes in their respective programmes and activities. Now is the time for white people who are genuinely taking on anti-racism work to attend to what we say and do. The comments from Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race (2017) author Reni Eddo-Lodge in an interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Channel 4 continue to orbit my imagination: “those annoying white liberals, who luxuriate in passivity as it’s not directly affecting them. They are like, ‘I support this and want everyone to do well but I’m not going to do anything.’” In short, it is a matter of deciding to use white privilege to end white privilege.

Of course, there exists no absolution. All white people run the risk of “the danger of good intentions” as Barbara Applebaum has articulated it in Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility and Social Justice Pedagogy (2010). We must though “foster an attitude of vigilance”, in the words of bell hooks. Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani reminds us of this in Why Art Workers Must Demand the Impossible on artreview.com: “The bewildering ethical paradoxes of the artworld have become as much part of the artworld as art itself. These paradoxes have been sustained by a façade of equilibrium, of a liberal centrist political position that has been hardwired into the operational models of galleries, museums, institutions, art schools, and art organisations.”

For my part, it would be particularly remiss not to name these issues in light that I led the first Photography and Curation ten-week course at The Photographers’ Gallery in 2018-19 on the invitation of and in collaboration with London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. This public course examined the various ways curating can shape our encounter with and the understanding of the photographic image. Participants were exposed to various key philosophical insights – from defining what an exhibition or curator is to future practices in the era of the networked image – as well as practical insights relating to the constantly evolving display, organisation and public dissemination of photographs. At its core lay the fundamental question of what constitutes curatorial responsibility?, drawing on Maura Reilly’s Curatorial Activism: Towards An Ethics of Curating (2018) as the key reading, in which Reilly encourages us to not only listen to others but ourselves: “What are my biases? Am I excluding large constituencies of people in my selections?; Have I favoured male artists over female, white over black – if so, why?”

I’m therefore duty bound, since evidently black and brown colleagues have bore this burden for too long, which by all accounts is exhausting and dispiriting. Halting this long-standing pattern of suppression should be all of our project. I’m aligned with Holland Cotter’s piece Museums Are Finally Taking A Stand. But Can They Find Their Footing? written on nytimes.com this June: “…which raises the question of why is it left to a black-identified institution to address the matter? Because race consciousness is widely assumed to be somehow a black issue, not a white one? Even people who once believed this can see, just from watching police violence and protests on recent news, that they’re wrong.”

The collective task then, is one that partly extends beyond the reach of and even precedes The Photographers’ Gallery and Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation’s work. To a certain extent it falls to the academy of 150 nominators of which I am part – who are proffering their two selections to The Photographers’ Gallery on an annual basis every September in order to create the long-list – to properly interrogate ourselves and consider any ‘unintentional’ biases before submitting. It’s a matter of individual responsibility and institutional accountability – a single voice that must advocate for and pursue change. It therefore also begs the ‘controversial’ question: should The Photographers’ Gallery be imposing a quota to ensure equality across the genders, sexes and races? Whatever it may be, some mechanisms certainly need to be introduced in order to fight the prize’s in-built and long-upheld discrimination given hierarchies and biases are repeating very close to home. So too is a sector-wide paradigm shift required, right through from the reading lists university lecturers set their students to who specifically galleries support and represent; from the type of media coverage allotted in the art press to museums boards, directors and curators diversifying their organisation from within, all with the view to resisting, confronting and challenging these deeply-entrenched problems within our industry.

If the tragic lynching of George Floyd and countless others at the hands of the police – Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Elijah McClain and Ahmaud Arbery in the US alone – has taught us anything, it is the following: “You can feel that this is different. These [Black Lives Matter] protests are not driven by empathy but by implication – ‘I am complicit and responsible therefore I must act’; this is a much more honest relationship to white supremacy and anti-black violence,” as affirmed in an ‘in conversation’ hosted by Lisson Gallery in June with the artist John Akomfrah that was led by Ekow Eshun, together with academics Tina Campt and Sadiya Hartmam.

But it is also going to take some serious soul-searching, vulnerability and ontological insecurity. As Daniel C. Blight has written in his book The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization (2019), this “means white people must work to accept that they are sutured to whiteness and that removing those stitches is a lifelong pursuit rather than a single, narcissistic point of arrival.” Blight also cites a particularly pertinent extract from George Yancy’s Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America (2017), in which the firebrand philosopher notes that this requires “a continuous effort on the part of whites to forge new ways of seeing, knowing and being.”

In wake of this I am compelled to ask: how, in good conscience, is it possible for an Arts Council England-funded organisation of this size and stature, in a city like London which is known for its vast range of cultures, nationalities and ethnicities – those that make up our diverse communities and multiple publics – to achieve such a historically woeful lack of representation in the case of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize? How can this feasibly be considered productive or desirable when it comes to composing a jury for arguably the most prestigious prize within our medium? Is there genuinely that little interest to engage some of the perspectives of non-white artists, writers, publishers, curators, and so on? Did the jury members not stop to question that being part of an all white jury is problematic?****

And, in any event, what sort of meaningful, or realistic, statement do the implicated institutions really expect to make on the state of photography, given that their high-profile prize is predicated on exclusion and erasure, having enabled artists of colour to be largely subjugated and therefore not granted their share of resources and funds? How can it possibly be a viewed as a legitimate history of contemporary photography, or, at the very least, a snapshot of those artists who have made significant impact on the medium during the past three decades? Why is there only, at most, one artist of colour on any given shortlist during the prize’s history? Is that all that is allowable? Is a bare minimum ever really enough? It reeks of tokenism.

The bigger question, of course, is whether The Photographers’ Gallery, under its current direction, is properly equipped to deal with the brave new world into which we have been thrust. We need cultural leaders within contemporary photography and visual culture to step up and lead the way. Those individuals that can offer long-term and enduring strategies of resistance, create solutions that will ensure equal opportunity, exposure and remuneration; and for them to harness art’s potential for change, championing work, ideas and concepts that infuse and enrich the world and the world of images. To tackle difficult issues head on – or at least back their skilled curators to do it – all the while understanding and insisting on the difference between diversity and anti-racism to avoid any institutional hypocrisy and opportunism. “In order to move into a white self-critical space beyond anti-racism,” Blight explains in his book, “whiteness must do more than make liberal gestures in the form of pro-diversity work. We must transform our comfortable denial and unwitting ignorance into something that is, in essence, new.”

Part of that new world could be a publicly funded gallery and a prize not centred on whiteness, one that takes those vitally important, other ways of being, seeing and thinking into a traditionally white institution in order to dismantle processes of marginalisation and instead collectively build an abundant space for difference to thrive. Ultimately, we need new regimes of truth that are more compatible with the present moment, similar to what Novara Media’s Co-Founder Aaron Bastani cites in Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto (2019) as “a strategy for our times while carving out new figureheads for utopia, outlining the world as it could be and where to begin.”

With an eye to the not-too-distant future, I hope this deeply unjust cycle can be disrupted and that the prize makes amends in the forthcoming years. Let Mohamed Bourouissa’s fantastic, albeit somewhat ambivalent, ‘win’ be the start of something new. But whether or not there is an actual appetite for meaningful, positive change remains to be seen. Clearly there is much woke work to be done, curatorial correctives to take place, new support systems to be built, destructive enterprises to be divested from, uneasy conversations to be had, discomfort to sit with, spaces to give up, injustices to be called out (and acted upon), interventions to be made. And it is going to hurt.♦

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Tim Clark is the Editor in Chief at 1000 Words, and a writer, curator and lecturer at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University. He lives and works in London.

Images:

1-Mohamed Bourouissa, NOUS SOMMES HALLES, 2002-2003. In collaboration with Anoushkashoot. © Mohamed Bourouissa, Kamel Mennour, Paris & London and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

2-Mohamed Bourouissa, Installation view. Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2020 The Photographers’ Gallery, London. © Kate Elliott and The Photographers’ Gallery

3-Mohamed Bourouissa, NOUS SOMMES HALLES, 2002-2003. In collaboration with Anoushkashoot. © Mohamed Bourouissa, Kamel Mennour, Paris & London and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

4-Mohamed Bourouissa, Installation view. Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2020 The Photographers’ Gallery, London. © Kate Elliott and The Photographers’ Gallery

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Support

The Photography Prize has been realised with the support of Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation (ongoing), Deutsche Börse Group (2005-2015) and Citigroup (1996-2004).

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Previous winners

1997 Richard Billingham £10,000
1998 Andreas Gursky £10,000
1999 Rineke Dijkstra £10,000
2000 Anna Gaskell £10,000
2001 Boris Mikhailov £15,000
2002 Shirana Shahbazi £15,000
2003 Juergen Teller £20,000
2004 Joel Sternfeld £20,000
2005 Luc Delahaye £30,000
2006 Robert Adams £30,000
2007 Walid Raed £30,000
2008 Esko Männikkö £30,000
2009 Paul Graham £30,000
2010 Sophie Ristelheuber £30,000
2011 Jim Goldberg £30,000
2012 John Stezaker £30,000
2013 Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin £30,000
2014 Richard Mosse £30,000
2015 Mikhael Subotzky & Patrick Waterhouse £30,000
2016 Trevor Paglen £30,000
2017 Dana Lixenberg £30,000
2018 Luke Willis Thompson £30,000
2019 Susan Meiselas £30,000
2020 Mohamed Bourissa £30,000

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The 2020 Jury

The members of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2020 were Martin Barnes, Senior Curator, Photographs, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom; Melanie Manchot, artist and photographer, based in London, United Kingdom; Joachim Naudts, Curator and Editor at FOMU Foto Museum in Antwerp, Belgium; Anne-Marie Beckmann, Director of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Frankfurt a. M., Germany; and Brett Rogers, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery as the non-voting chair.

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I am deeply ashamed to have taken part in my last all-white panel for an award as recently as February 2020. I have since turned down two other similar invitations and will ensure this never happens again.

Curator Conversations #9 | Kathrin Schönegg: “Not every project is necessarily an exhibit; some function better as a book, a magazine, or an online format.”

Kathrin Schönegg is a photography historian and Curator at C/O Berlin, Germany. She holds a PhD in Art and Media Studies from the University of Konstanz. She worked on exhibitions at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden, Münchner Stadtmuseum in Munich, and the Folkwang Museum in Essen, including (Mis)Understanding Photography: Works and Manifestos (2014). In 2017 she co-curated Farewell Photography: Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie in Mannheim, Ludwigshafen, and Heidelberg. She is the recipient of the Thomas Friedrich Grant in Photography at the Berlinische Galerie (2017), the DGPh History of Photography Research Award of the German Photographic Association (2018) and the Exhibition Research and Production Fellowship by Les Rencontres d’Arles (2019). At C/O Berlin she leads the funding programme for up-and-coming talents, the C/O Berlin Talent Award, and co-develops C/O Berlin’s exhibition programme. Recent curation for C/O Berlin includes Robert Frank: Unseen (2019); Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques: Sub Rosa – C/O Berlin Talent Award (2019); Christopher Williams: MODEL: Kochgeschirre, Kinder, Viet Nam (Angepasst zum Benutzen) (2019); Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel (2020); and Sophie Thun: Extension (2020). A regular writer on photography, her most recent publications include Heinz von Perckhammer. Eine Fotografenkarriere zwischen Weimarer Republik und Nationalsozialismus (Berlin 2018) and Fotografiegeschichte der Abstraktion (Köln 2019). Schönegg is currently preparing a thematic group show engaging with photography and the cloud.

What is it that attracts you to the exhibition form?

The exhibition is one of various forms that research can take. Not every project is necessarily an exhibit; some function better as a book, a magazine, or an online format. Compared to these forms, I would describe the exhibition as seeing and thinking in space. This also implies that it triggers not only a visual but also a physical experience. Creating narratives that unfold through a combination of images and objects that viewers explore while walking through the space and constantly changing or expanding their perspective is a thrilling and unique activating form of argumentation.

What does it mean to be a curator in an age of image and information excess?

There was a feuilleton discussion in Germany last summer about the status of the curator in the era of social media. It was started by art and media theorist Stefan Heidenreich who polemically claimed that all curators should be done away with, since they represent a nondemocratic, illiberal, corrupt, and obsolete system of power. By contrast he identified social networks as the democratic future for a curational practice by everybody. Just as Joseph Beuys stated decades ago that everyone is an artist (“Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler”), Heidenreich now calls for everyone to be a curator (“Jeder Mensch ist ein Kurator”).

Despite the questionable claim that social media ever was or can be a democratic tool (bear in mind the lack of universal accessibility of digital technologies, the racism underlying our algorithms, or human-content moderation that is executively exercised by leading Internet companies such as Facebook and Google, and the standards and categories they set), I believe that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the tools and tasks of curating in an age of omnipresent images and information. Precisely because we all “curate” our own lives with social media, expert knowledge is needed more than ever to critically mirror those developments inside exhibition halls and elsewhere. As curators of photography we need to shed light on those mechanisms of our everyday use of imagery that are hidden beneath technical infrastructures or intentionally kept invisible to users by capitalist companies.

At C/O Berlin we are collaborating with pictorial specialists to develop an exhibition focusing on our contemporary ways of communicating by means of images (the working title is Send Me an Image: From the Postcard to Social Media, planned for 2021). We aim to explore the utopian dream of global accessibility and, conversely, the boundaries of free image transmission. Being a curator in the age of image and information excess means to deal with this new paradigm of our digitised worlds by, for example, taking it as a topic for an exhibition, working with artists to translate net-based phenomena into the physical space, conquering the institution’s digital space (websites, etc.) with content, and thinking critically about the abundance of images that we are constantly confronted with.

What is the most invaluable skill required for a curator?

The flexibility to be active in various roles and positions at the same time: being a companion for the artist as well as their assistant and adviser, having a curatorial style while being objective and invisible as the selecting subject and author of the show, being an advocate for your medium while also criticising it, being a representative of your institution and also challenging it, being confident and persuasive as an applicant for funding and humble when looking for sponsors, being self-critical of your own role while manoeuvering gingerly through conflicting expectations confronting you every day.

What was your route into curating?

I wrote my dissertation on abstraction in photography, covering a wide historical spectrum from the medium’s early experimental beginnings in the 1830s to contemporary fine-art photography. My sources were scattered all over the globe, and I did a lot of research in museum archives in different countries. This was a starting point, since it gave me an insight to archiving and collecting (and exhibiting) from the user’s perspective. I then switched sides and did several internships, followed by a wonderful scholarship that the Alfried Bohlen von Krupp und Halbach-Foundation runs in Germany. Titled “museum curators for photography,” it teaches photography historians about curating by sending them to various photography collections in Germany and abroad. This experience paved my way into freelance curating, which I did for a couple of years until I joined C/O Berlin as a permanent curator last summer.

What is the most memorable exhibition that you’ve visited?

One that I often think back to is called Großvater: Ein Pionier wie wir (Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us), an exhibition on the famous “exhibition maker” Harald Szeemann in 2018. As part of the acquisition of the Szeemann estate by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2011, two shows were developed and then sent on tour; one of the venues was Bern, Szeeman’s hometown in Switzerland. Großvater: Ein Pionier wie wir was also the title of Szeemann’s first curated show following the monumental documenta 5. The exhibition, which was held in his own apartment, tells the story of Szeemann’s grandfather, a prominent coiffeur. The show included many physical objects from the family’s private archive. While at the venues in Los Angeles and Düsseldorf Szeemann’s show was reconstructed in a white cube, in Bern the exhibit was shown in exactly the same apartment in which Szeemann had originally installed it in 1974: a private room with vintage furniture. This total simulacrum still sticks with me, since it demonstrates, in a very powerful way, that the circumstances of the presentation fundamentally change the perception of the objects. In the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf it was obvious to visitors that they were being confronted with a reconstruction made for an exhibition hall. In contrast, in Bern it was impossible for visitors to know if they were walking through a contemporary presentation or not. It was quite baffling, like a throwback in time.

What constitutes curatorial responsibility in the context within which you work?

I am currently curating for an exhibition house that functions differently than most other German institutions. The cultural landscape of Germany is mainly built on museums, exhibition halls, and Kunstvereine. C/O Berlin doesn’t fit into any of these categories. As a nonprofit foundation financed through admission fees, book sales, sponsorship, donations, project funding, and contributions from C/O Berlin Friends, it has not received any regular funding over the past twenty years. However, starting in the financial year 2020/21, C/O Berlin will receive support from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. Besides balancing finances, visitor numbers, and content more carefully than public-run institutions, it is my responsibility as curator to sharpen my institution’s profile; that is, in comparison to museums. Similar to general exhibition halls, we foster contemporary perspectives and promote a discourse around our medium through talks, panels, and education, that could be adapted by museums. Our content-related orientation, the design of our presentation, and our historical approach to art and photography often differs from this form of institution and I feel we have more freedom to speculate in our exhibition programme. Unlike general exhibition halls, C/O Berlin is dedicated exclusively to photography. This makes us responsible for the medium itself. We do not have our own collection anchoring us in history. Although we regularly present photographers from the canon of the second half of the twentieth century, our focus lies nonetheless on the developments of the last three decades – precisely the period when photography was freed from all restraints. We deal with a medium in transition and we have to constantly ask ourselves what photography was, is, and will be. Today a photograph can be a high-valued vintage print as well as an Instagram snapshot made by a digital device. The medium increasingly disappears somewhere in between the classical museum presentation of the departments of drawing and prints and digitally circulating net art. I believe that our curatorial responsibility toward our medium is to define its future between those two extreme poles. We need to develop a new understanding of the medium and the material we engage with. We need to think about what types of new displays we can develop to mirror photography’s various forms of applications – that have always been diverse and are becoming increasingly so – in order to put us in the position to deal with fine art, science, press, amateurism, social media, and many other aspects.

What is the one myth that you would like to dispel around being a curator?

If there is a myth about being a curator, it is a misunderstanding. The term is used extensively these days for everything connected to combining – from music and food to art. Since the rise of autonomous curators in the 1990s, the term has taken on a notion of glamour and power. However, the reality is quite different. Most curation is done for institutions that involves a lot of bureaucracy: acquiring funding, writing reports, and doing administrative work. It is a hands-on job that has little to do with drinking champagne at nicely made-up representative events and openings.

What advice would you give to aspiring curators?

You should care about and focus on content. Most of the curatorial study programmes that have been popping up in recent years seem to mainly teach the history and theory of curation or they practice display methods. I am convinced that it is more important to know the field and the subject that you aim to work on well. Aspiring curators should be researchers who view the exhibition as one of various forms for conveying content. Don’t curate to curate.♦

Further interviews in the Curator Conversations series can be read here.

Click here to order your copy of the book

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Curator Conversations is part of a collaborative set of activities on photography curation and scholarship initiated by Tim Clark (1000 Words and The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University), Christopher Stewart (London College of Communication, University of the Arts London) and Esther Teichmann (Royal College of Art) that has included the symposium, Encounters: Photography and Curation, in 2018 and a ten week course, Photography and Curation, hosted by The Photographers’ Gallery, London in 2018-19.

Images:

2-Installation view of Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques: Sub Rosa – C/O Berlin Talent Award 2019, C/O Berlin. © David von Becker.

3-Installation view of How Your Camera Works as part of Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie 2017, Wilhelm Hack Museum Ludwigshafen © Andreas Langfeld.