We are pleased to launch a free digital publication on Luther Konadu’s art practice, featuring a critical essay by Nasrin Himada and an interview between the artist and Aaron Moore. Camerawork, Konadu’s planned solo exhibition at Hamilton Artists Inc., was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This publication unpacks his continuous and prolific body of work—exhibited or not.  

Konadu positions his work as one continuous documentary project centering on the way objective visual documentation ostensibly formulates public perception surrounding collective identities and historic record. Photography, with its attendant history, continues to be an evidential entity used to profile, classify, surveil, speculate, and “understand” various subjectivities and communities. Though this is not exclusive to black subjectivities, this is where Konadu’s work departs. As an image-maker, Konadu is interested in working around the legacies of documentary photography to create an alternate past that imagines a different future of self. The photographic works in Camerawork give language to and emphasize the very making of the photographic medium's illusory surfaces. That is, how the photograph, a seamless affect as a perfect match with reality, comes to be. Camerawork is on one end self-referential in that it makes explicit the materiality of the photograph, process, structure, and apparatus. It insists on a different reality outside the artifice of the image. On the other end, the exhibition brings into focus how the mere presence of the camera incites performance and controls a visual narrative that either underplays, accentuates, or frames out a larger reality. 

Click here to access the publication