What Matters Most

Does exhibition of lost snapshots meet its duty of care?

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What matters most? It depends on who you ask. I have a feeling, though, that many people will say “family” or mention family-proximate things like happiness, health or quality time with those you love. Many of these answers are on display in the participatory element of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s exhibition What Matters Most: Photographs of Black Life, while some surprise me, like the one by a young woman who wrote “the capacity to change.”

The exhibition, on view until Jan. 8, is the first time Fade Resistance, a collection of more than 4,000 lost or abandoned Polaroids and other instant images has been on view since the gallery purchased it in 2018. The collection’s images of African Americans living their lives was assembled by Toronto-based Black artist and educator Zun Lee, who bought many of these images, which he has described as “orphaned ghosts,” at yard sales or online. 

Organized by AGO curator Sophie Hackett, in collaboration with Lee, the exhibition consists of more than 500 photographs showing Black families from the 1960s through the early 2000s. Polaroids fit the curatorial thesis – that showing Black people in everyday scenarios that revolve around family, including rituals like birthdays and weddings, affirms Black identity and agency.

In the exhibition, groups of about 30 Polaroids are assembled on black magnet boards. The photographs are also shown in larger format as a silent slide show. In contrast to fine art photographs typically taken by professionals in a studio, Polaroids were the purview of ‘amateurs’ who could take snapshots when they wanted. Polaroids came to represent a moment frozen in time, but one that is processed almost instantaneously. When images are dispensed from the camera, photographers and subjects can look at them together for the first time. In this way, the taking and viewing of photographs became another family ritual of gathering and togetherness. The images on view communicate this intimacy and spontaneity. Each image is evocative and, with each, I am left asking: what was happening in that person’s life that day? 

While the medium fits the curatorial aim, the approach raises potential issues that contemporary art curators must contend with. What risks does a gallery take when photographs by unnamed and unacknowledged (because their identity is not known to the gallery) Black photographers are removed from very personal contexts and placed, without context, on display as art? That these materials are now in the collection of a colonial institution will also complicate the response.

When I look at the Polaroids, it’s clear there are rich stories behind them and a depth of personal context that matters in order to really understand what one is looking at, and yet the exhibition does not share those stories, most likely because it does not have access to them. Based on the limited information available, most are simply credited to “unnamed photographer.” Instead of titles, we are given a short description like “woman with baby.” The depth of intimacy on display is in startling contrast to the conceptual distance the gallery’s curation encourages. 

As I make my way along the wall of images, I feel like I am peering into the lives of strangers without their permission. “To my son, daddy loves you, Shamar, 2005,” reads text penned on one Polaroid that shows a young Black man holding his child. In a gallery setting, this personal snapshot is framed as an artwork and I, a non-Black viewer, am encouraged to look at it as an art object, even if it was never an art object but an indelibly personal record of a life event.

With some Polaroids, the photographers are named but the curators have taken their own creative license – which makes sense, as Lee is an artist primarily – but risks being seen as not upholding the agency of the original photographer (this was the comment made by my friend with whom I went to see the show). For instance, a photo of a woman standing by a car was shot on a sharp angle, but is displayed on a diagonal, countering the photographer’s original creative expression by restaging it as an art object in this new context. 

Other curatorial decisions heighten the potential problem of intimate moments being decontextualized: mirrored panels at the centre of the exhibition reflect viewers back at themselves. My white image now becomes central in relation to the photographs. Tucked behind the mirrors is the participatory element: visitors are encouraged to write their response to the exhibition’s title, now framed as a question: “What matters most to you?” Where do they write their answers? On the backs of images by the unnamed Black photographers, now printed en masse as postcards. A cynical reading would say that this is the final way that significant moments between Black people are removed from their context and given whatever new meanings gallery visitors might project onto them. A more generous reading of the participatory gesture at the centre of the show might say that this programming decision allows viewers, regardless of their understanding of the work’s context, to more closely and self-reflectively engage with the photographs. And, maybe, that is enough for a project of empathy building.

This is my viewing experience as a white settler, considering What Matters Most in the context of contemporary art photography exhibitions and the historical hangover of conceptualism. There is much I cannot perceive in the work due to my positioning and lived experience. I am curious to know how Black Canadians in and around Toronto feel about the exhibition, and whether, for them, it succeeds in the stated intention of making space for meditation on these photographs and the ways they create and maintain a sense of Black identity. At the very least, this exhibition makes space to think about Black life on its own terms, and I learned a lot from reading the accompanying texts by leading Black writers and thinkers, including American cultural theorist Fred Moten.

Black people have fought to protect Black life, culture and identity amid the incessant violence of slavery, racism, colonialism and white supremacy. And so, these images, simply by showing Black people in everyday situations, are framed by the institution as undeniably positive: likely because, in this Black Lives Matter era, basic moves of humanizing Black Americans are still necessary to counteract ongoing violences against Black individuals and communities. 

Considering these photographs in the context of a curated exhibition raises a range of questions around what it means to frame personal non-art objects as art to view with conceptual distance, and to do so with material wrapped in urgent politics, like the preciousness of Black life. Such questions can be extended to any art exhibition that works with materials by non-artists. What I found compelling to learn is that, if someone were to come forward claiming one of these images, the AGO would consider deaccessioning it, which tells me that we are moving in the right direction when it comes to the ethics of institutions and curatorial care. ■

What Matters Most: Photographs of Black Life at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from Aug. 27, 2022, to Jan. 8, 2023. The exhibition is accompanied by a hardcover publication, (AGO/Delmonico Books/D.A.P.) with texts by Zun Lee, Sophie Hackett, essayist Dawn Lundy Martin, and cultural theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. 

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