Capture Photography Festival 2023 wraps up with a Speaker Series, April 29

As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic to be discussed at the closing celebration

Dawit L. Petros, *Hadenbes*, 2005, From As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021). Courtesy of the artist/Bradley Ertaskiran

The Polygon Gallery and Capture Photography Festival present Speaker Series/Capture Photography Festival Closing Celebration on April 29 at 4 pm at The Polygon Gallery

THE CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY Festival is winding up for 2023 with a Speaker Series related to As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic.

Curator and cultural historian Mark Sealy—executive director of Autograph and a professor of photography, rights and representation at University Arts London—will share in a conversation with Kenneth Montague. The Toronto-based dentist is the founder and owner of the Wedge Collection, Canada’s largest privately owned collection dedicated to African diasporic culture and contemporary Black life, and is the source from which the exhibition’s 100 works are drawn.

Curated by The Polygon Gallery’s curator Elliott Ramsey, As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic is the touring counterpart to Aperture’s book of the same name.

“The work in this collection is championing the careers of Black artists and also looking at representations of Black lives and Black experiences in visual arts,” Ramsey said in a media tour for the exhibitoin’s launch, as reported by Stir. “By looking at Black photographers capturing and commemorating and celebrating Black life and Black experience, we also tap into a really important moment in photographic history broadly. As you had the African independence movements on one side of the Atlantic, you also had, of course, the civil-rights movement happening in the United States on the other side of the Atlantic. And in these same decades, the ’50s and ’60s, you also have the camera becoming a more prolific tool, something that is becoming more accessible that people are using both in imaginative ways as well as documentary ways.”

Sealy and Montague will discuss the origins and histories behind select works. Admission is by donation, and RSVP is required. More information is here.

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