From the Background to the Foreground: the Photo Backdrop and Cultural Expression

This vast exhibition has been curated by James Wyman for the Visual Studies Workshop and is co-presented by the Dalhousie and Mount Saint Vincent University Art Galleries. It incorporates hand-painted backdrops, photographs and props related to commercial portrait photography in Africa, China and India, with additional material focused on Black and First Nations communities in the US, Guatemala and Mexico. Besides generating discussion around photographic portraiture, the project explores relationships among the fields of art, photography, ethnography and vernacular representations. The catalogue gathers new research and commentary by scholars such as Arjun Appadurai and Lucy Lippard. The photo backdrop has been a dominant illusionistic and expressive device since the establishmentof photographic portraiture in the 19th Century. Accordingly, the historical scope of the selection covers the period 1880 to the present. Some of the material demonstrates transitions from colonial visual regimes to post-colonial conditions of self-representation. The juxtaposition of various media suggests how photographic realism is contained and sometimes contested in societies previously dominated by other forms of visual expression. Exhibition visitors are encouraged to bring their cameras and use the backdrops to make their own images.