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Rania Matar grapples with issues of personal and collective identity in her work. Born in Lebanon, Matar has lived in the United States since 1984. Drawing on her cultural background, cross-cultural experiences, and personal narrative, she has produced photographic series focused on womanhood, adolescence, and periods of individual evolution.

Orly and Ruth comes from the series Across Windows: Portraits during COVID-19, photographic portraits Matar began taking in April 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 stay-at-home advisories. Matar initiated the project with a post on Instagram, calling for interested people to sit for photographs taken through a ground floor window in their homes: “Physical distancing but not social distancing.” Hundreds of people responded, and the photographs (numbering 135 images at the time of this writing) offer an incredible account of human affection and interaction during lockdown. Orly and Ruth captures a moment of intimacy as Orly embraces her sister Ruth in their Brookline home. The reflective surface of the window glass visually merges inside and outside spaces—an effect of shooting through glass that Matar creatively uses in many photographs in the series. “Despite the fact that we only communicated across a physical barrier,” shares Matar, “we really and truly made a connection.” Inspired by the artist’s own changed experiences of time, family, and human interaction, Across Windows: Portraits during COVID-19 documents this unparalleled time and underlines the vitality of human connection.

Nokuthula Dhladhla, Berea, Johannesburg, 2007
Dee Mashoko, Harare, Zimbabwe, 2011
Hlomela Msesele, Makhaza, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, 2011
Lynette Mokhooa, KwaThema Community Hall, Springs, Johannesburg, 2011
Collen Mfazwe, August House, Johannesburg, 2012
Charmain Carrol, Parktown, Johannesburg, 2013
Debora Dlamini, KwaThema Community Hall, Springs, Johannesburg, 2013
Ricki Kgositau, Melville, Johannesburg, 2013
Karabo Sebetoane I, Parktown, 2016

As a photographer and filmmaker, Zanele Muholi considers themselves to be a visual activist dedicated to creating an archive of Black queer life in South Africa, where legal and social biases affect the livelihoods of LGBTQI+ individuals.

Muholi’s Faces and Phases, an ongoing gelatin silver print portraiture series begun in 2006, reflects the artist’s mission to uplift Black queer South African communities. The series—including over three hundred individual gelatin silver prints to date—archives new horizons in queer self-representation, as the sitters choose their posture, setting, and dress. “The viewer,” Muholi writes, “is invited to contemplate questions such as: What does an African lesbian look like? Is there a lesbian aesthetic or do we express our gendered, racialized, and classed selves in rich and diverse ways?” Additionally, the artist maintains relationships with many of their sitters, often photographing interested participants over multiple years. By portraying queer subjects in an ongoing, positive relationship to their own agency and visibility over time, Faces and Phases records resilience amid the violence and oppression experienced by many Black queer individuals in South Africa, and offers a testament to the rich diversity of Black queer life.

2020.03.01–09

Ingrid Mwangi Hutter is Kenyan-born and based in Germany, and her work in photography, video, installation, and performance centers on the body. In 2005, the artist and her husband, Robert Hutter, combined their names (Mwangi Hutter) to form an “artistic duo with one persona,” envisioning their creative work as formed by dual bodies, minds, and histories that merge aspects of male and female, African and European, to interrogate a univocal position. To create Static Drift, Ingrid Mwangi Hutter applied stencils to her own abdomen and allowed the sun to burn the skin, leaving parts under and overexposed on her body. In one photograph, a map of Germany is outlined in darker brown with words reading “burn out country”; and in the other, a map of the continent of Africa in lighter brown is stenciled with the words “bright dark continent.” Relating to those two places, as a biracial woman with an African father and a European mother, Ingrid Mwangi Hutter spent the first fifteen years of her life in Kenya before moving to Germany, where she lives and works to this day. The artist once mentioned that when living in Africa, she is seen as white; but in Germany, she is seen as Black. She manifests this personal experience by using color, geographical shapes, and language on her own body. Her choice of texts points to photographic processes such as burn out and to the loaded phrase “dark continent,” which was used by European colonizers to rationalize their exploitation of African people and their resources. Through this literal mapping on her own body, Ingrid Mwangi Hutter explores the ways these histories are inscribed and potentially reclaimed.

New York-based artist Taryn Simon works with photography, sculpture, installation, and performance to interrogate and examine the idea of the archive. Her work is concerned with how the organization of information is intimately connected to the holding of power, particularly through the construction, collection, and preservation of the photographic image. For more than a decade, Simon has worked with the New York Public Library’s the Picture Collection, which since 1915 has amassed over 1.5 million images in a circulating archive, allowing researchers to borrow image folders. Simon has been interested in the collection since childhood, specifically its classification system, which groups photographs, prints, clippings, and film stills under 12,000 subject headings that include such categories as “Waiting Rooms,” “Wind,” “Air Raids,” and “Autumn.” Researchers can borrow entire folders (of up to sixty images at a time), and thus the sequence of the images changes as the image folders circulate. In 2012, Simon began a series of photographic works to visualize this circulation and the archive’s unique system. Folder: Rear Views (referencing “Rear Views,” a humorous and unusual subject heading), compiles portraits of people and animals from behind in various environments and states of dress (and undress) from a wide range of sources, including illustrations, media clippings, views of sculptures, and photographs by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Simon arranges and then photographs the contents of a folder across four rows of layered groupings, creating loose associations between the pictured materials. Presented in three components to show the full expanse of the folder’s contents, Folder: Rear Views both comments on the power relationships within portrait photography, and reflects on the visual relationships we make through the pictures we collect.

Zineb Sedira is a London-based, Franco-Algerian artist who for more than twenty years has explored universal themes of identity, mobility, memory, and humans’ relation to geography. Informed by her personal experience and background, Sedira uses photography, video, and installation to evoke questions about collective and individual memories and to shed light on past and present struggles of liberation and postcolonial movements. Interested in the sugar trade, its geographies, and the larger economic and political landscape behind this commodity, Sedira produced a series of photographs titled Sugar Routes tracing the global journey of sugar from locations throughout the world to the sugar silos of Saint Louis Sucre in France. From this series, Sugar Silo I & II is a diptych showing, on the left, an enormous mountain of cane sugar in a warehouse, and on the right, that same warehouse empty of sugar. The two photographs chart the collection and movement of sugar as a global commodity today. Algeria, a former French colony, is the largest sugar refiner in North Africa and its production has deep ties to French corporations. Drawing on the silenced past of Algeria, Sedira’s work visualizes the ongoing extraction of resources from the Global South for consumption by countries and economies of the North. This documentation of the global sugar trade in Sugar Silo I & II offers a poetic meditation on presence and absence as these are rooted in history and shape larger issues of migration, identity, and geography.

Deana Lawson’s highly staged photographic works depict Black sitters, who she meets locally or during her travels, in a variety of everyday interiors and domestic settings. Inspired by the family album, Lawson’s intimate and powerful images envision an extended family encompassing the full spectrum of Black diasporas. Her work questions and expounds upon the fraught tradition of portraiture and the history of photography, addressing ideas of representation, notions of beauty, and the multifaceted depictions of Black life.

As a photographer, Lawson meticulously crafts compositions to share a familiar and resonant portrait of Black life. Her large-format photographs are known for their technical richness, elevating the many details and intentional arrangements that compose the final image. The scale of her more recent pictures heightens the presence of her subjects, who often return the viewer’s gaze with an uncanny self-possession. Daenare, a portrait of a young Black woman in Salvador, Brazil, speaks to such a presence. In 2019, Lawson traveled to Bahia in northeast Brazil in preparation for the thirty-fourth São Paulo Art Biennial, where she made a series of images depicting the South Atlantic Black diaspora. The nude woman in this image poses languidly across a worn, pink and white staircase that offsets a tiled tiled floor. A framed, decorative still life print and the closed curtains suggest a private moment within a domestic space, while the woman’s posture recalls the canonical femme nude portrait. Closer viewing reveals further details: the woman’s nudity draws attention to her pregnancy, while the ankle monitor she wears on her left foot appears as her only visible adornment. Lawson shares that it was only after she made this photograph that she noticed the ankle monitor, gesturing to ideas of surveillance, visibility, movement, and vulnerability for not only the subject, but also for the population at large, and especially so when under a minoritarian regime. “In my photographs, regardless of where they’re taken, whether it’s Haiti, Alabama, Brooklyn, the Congo, Ethiopia, I want people to come across like an expanded family,” explains the artist. “Whoever I photograph I start from the premise that they are a magnificent human being and that my experience as a human being interacting with theirs makes all that that much more complex.”

Since the 1970s, James Welling has pursued a wide-ranging artistic practice, exploring themes from personal and cultural memory, the material and chemical nature of photography, to the relationships between representation and abstraction. A self-taught photographer, Welling has experimented with numerous techniques of analog and digital photography, pushing the medium into new directions. While the subjects of Welling’s work have varied, light, color, and their permutations have been central to his practice for decades.

In 1997, Welling began a series of tricolor photographs, which are color images made through his use of tricolor filters, black-and-white film, and Photoshop. Inlet (which is part of this body of work), pictures Jarvis Creek, a curved tributary running through a reed-filled salt marsh in Guilford, Connecticut. It appears like a straight photograph of an idyllic landscape, and yet, when looked at more closely, subtle distortions appear. To create such images, the artist exposed separate sheets of black-and-white film through red, green, and blue filters, and then scanned these negatives and recombined them in Photoshop to create the final print. The ramifications of this process are most clear in areas of bright light, such as the sun’s reflection in the water, which appear to fracture into colored bands of pink, yellow, and blue. The tones reflect the four colors used to create all shades in digital inkjet printing—the process used to print this photograph. These visual artifacts of the process heighten a tension central to photography, between the reality of the subject and the acts of representation and reproduction, here called out specifically through the effects of light and color in the creation of the photograph.