FOTOFOCUS 2022: Photography & Tenderness

William Camargo, “We Gunna Have To Move Out Soon Fam’", Archival Inkjet Print, 2019

 
 

Wave Pool presented Photography & Tenderness, an exhibition curated by artists Lorena Molina and Eliza Gregory, and featured the visual art of Erina Alejo, Nydia Blas, William Camargo, Rajkamal Kahlon, Stephanie Cuyubamba Kong, Jesse Ly, Gabriel Garcia Roman, Leonard Suryajaya, Gemma-Rose Turnbull, and Carla Williams.

“We can’t deny the ways in which photography has been and continues to be used as a tool of misrepresentation, imperialism, colonization, and racism,” write Molina and Gregory in their curatorial statement. “How can we acknowledge the violence that photography so often exerts, and still use it to make something tender?”

Drawing from influential artists that are confronting, building on, and tackling the historical and contemporary photographic gaze, Gregory and Molina created a dynamic exhibition of questions. 

What does a tender present and future look like? How do we build a society that is different–more loving, more accepting, more responsive–than the one we have now? How do we galvanize ourselves–as artists and audience–toward those acts of radical imagination? In which ways are artists questioning and challenging predominant narratives as an act of love? 

“I’m always asking myself: is it only through non-photographic means that contemporary images harness meaning? When and how is an image sufficiently contextualized to communicate anything, let alone convey tenderness? At this point in the history of photography, is the non-photographic context that surrounds any image more important than the image itself? And how are lens-based artists acknowledging that reality, and working within it?” said Gregory. 

“For me,” said Molina, “to love photography is to question it. I believe in the potential and the political responsibility of photography to shape the way we understand ourselves and others. I am always asking myself who made these photographs? Who is the intended audience and what is the intended purpose? If we want to build something new, photography cannot continue to reference itself. New images, and new ways of seeing have to be created if we’re going to fight against the colonial and imperialist gaze of photography to create something more tender.”

The artists in the show come at these questions through fragments, video, collage, and self portraiture. They offer many ways of refracting the human-ness of vulnerability. Each work demonstrates tenderness differently–whether it’s the act of observing oneself or others with love (Williams, Kong, Roman, Blas), or the act of holding society accountable for its actions (Camargo, Ly, Kahlon), or through the photographer allowing themselves to be changed by the image itself (Alejo, Suryajaya, Turnbull). These are images that push back against the structures that surround us, while also nurturing new relationships and mechanisms for connection. They are pictures that will touch you, and leave a mark. 

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Eliza Gregory is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Sacramento State University. Her work focuses on relationships between people and places; representation and justice; and social practice. 

Lorena Molina is a Salvadoran multidisciplinary artist and educator. She is an Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Media at the University of Houston. She was also the founder and the director of Third Space Gallery, a community space and gallery that supported and highlighted BIPOC artists in Cincinnati.

Photography & Tenderness was on view September 24th - November 5th, 2022

Support for this 2022 FotoFocus Biennial exhibition was provided by FotoFocus.
“Photography & Tenderness” was part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial.

READING LIST

  • In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life by bell hooks

  • Notes on Love and Photography, by Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca