ReWritten: Photographers Reshaping the Narrative

ReWritten: Photographers Reshaping the Narrative highlights contemporary photographers who take, make, and collect images in order to reshape the narrative capacities of their medium. The artists in this exhibition strive toward new approaches to imagemaking and storytelling, suggesting a common interest in what could be termed New Genre Narrative photography. With projects that question power, politics, social cruelty, and the agency and complications of self-formation, their work is distinguished by its creative connection to cultural encounters. Working with both a sense of urgency and meditative intelligence, they conjure visual relationships and critique through the deployment of an emotionally disruptive beauty. To this end, these image-makers employ a variety of techniques and materials, including tintypes, non-silver emulsions, vernacular archives, A.I. partnering, and digital output.

With the steady immersion of the public into the massification of photographs that now circulate on social media, there is the potential for events to be recast as mythologies and ideologies, subject to bias and interpretive confusion. These artists understand such interpretive pluralities and respond with attention and direction. They actively identify and rewrite both lost and current stories, which are imperative to maintain in the social consciousness, and reemphasize modalities, events, and their impact on individuals and communities. The artists in ReWritten occupy their diverse subjectivities, grounding their work in personal consciousness, engaged agency, social critique, and historical content. Operating within the intersections of communication and intervention, the works offer pivotal retellings and new negotiations of place, time, and embodiment.

Artists: Jacqueline Arias, Jen Everett, Amber N. Ford, Ellen Garvens, Emily Hanako Momohara, Gina Osterloh, Leonard Suryajaya, Raymond Thompson Jr., Jonathan Vega, Carmen Winant, Jacqueline Woods, Emily Zeller

Curator: Marcella Hackbardt, Professor of Studio Art at Kenyon College

Participating venue in the 2024 FotoFocus Biennial: Backstories www.fotofocus.org

Image credit: Pressing Against Looking, Movement, 2019, by Gina Osterloh

ReWritten: Photographers Reshaping the Narrative is part of the 2024 FotoFocus Biennial: backstories. Now in its seventh iteration, the Biennial activates over 100 projects at museums, galleries, universities, and public spaces throughout Greater Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Northern Kentucky in October 2024.

Support for this 2024 FotoFocus Biennial exhibition was provided in part by FotoFocus.