Introduction By Pamela Edmonds Guest Curator for EXPOSED 2015 Cameras gave black folks, irrespective of class, a means by which we could participate fully in the production of images. Hence it is essential that any theoretical discussions of the relationship of black life to the visual, to art making, make photography central. — bell hooks In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life, 1995.
Writing on the importance of photographs in the documentation of Black life, cultural critic bell hooks, asserts, “when the psychohistory of a people is marked by ongoing loss, when entire histories are denied, hidden, erased, documentation may become an obsession” (hooks 57). For individuals, domestic photographs have helped form pictorial genealogies that prevent cultural losses of the past. For contemporary artists working through postmodernism, photography became recognized as a transformative tool for image-making, a visual form of knowledge related to
frameworks of representation and resistance. In today’s picture driven society, we have grown reliant on the camera’s lens as an ever-present interface between ourselves and the world, utilizing the digitized image to reflect and imagine who we were, who we are, and what we can be. EXPOSED is Nia Centre’s annual visual arts exhibition that showcases the work of emerging Toronto-based artists of African descent and acts as a vehicle to cultivate a wider appreciation these diverse artistic creations. The defining idea of “exposed” as an unmasking and of making (something) visible is what inspired me to focus on artists who explore the subject in their work. In our image-saturated culture, where the camera has become an extension of our very bodies, what does it mean to document the self and others through the photographic lens and how does this relate to a wider sense of place, identity and community in the current moment? I’m excited to work with the Nia Centre as a guest Curator for this year’s exhibition that considers the portrait as image bringing to light the dynamic and compelling visions of these emerging young artists. As a curator, my ongoing focus has been to broaden awareness of the often-overlooked cultural production of contemporary Canadian artists within current dialogues of Afro-Modernity. In its various expressions, Afro-Modern politics and consciousness 7