Picturing Fabrics: Textile and the Photographic Image

Picturing Fabrics: Textile and the Photographic Image explores photography’s—intimate, material and theoretical—entanglements with textile across histories and geographies, spanning from Henry Fox Talbot’s lace photographs of the 1830s to contemporary artists such as Billie Zangewa, who infuse a “photographic aesthetic” into their fabrics (Dewan, 2012). While ambitious in its chronological and geographical scope, the show will not offer a comprehensive survey, but will focus on selected themes exploring critical aspects of such intermedial relationship including labor, tactility, gender, and decoloniality. Moving beyond the primacy of the optical, reproducibility and “surfacism” in understanding photography (Pinney, 2003), the exhibition will offer new vantage points to approach the medium making visible the haptic, gendered, material and decolonial dimensions of photographs.