PHOTO FLUX: LA
UNSHUTTERED At the Getty Center
In a poignant exhibition that features 35 acclaimed artists associated with the lucid and bustling culture and evolution of LA, the J. Paul Getty Museum showcases Photo Flux: Unshuttering LA. Largely centered around race and social justice advocacy, each of the individual pieces of work lay out an inherently unique narrative. The work creates a structural core for Getty Unshuttered, a program and app which uplifts the teenage community and creates a space to share photography and inspire action toward the acceleration of social rights for and by young people.
The exhibition is curated by jill moniz, who possesses a longstanding collaboration with the Getty in which she spotlights marginalized artists and photographers. “My primary focus is to highlight the aesthetics and narratives created by these cultural makers that radically shift photography away from its racist underpinnings that have been used to immortalize Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples as monolithic stereotypes,” comments Ms. moniz. “Photo Flux is a reckoning with the art canon’s exclusivity, but it also is an invitation to extend the visual literacy of Getty visitors to include other impulses, intentions, and imagery.”
Of the artists involved in Photo Flux, one is April Banks whose displayed work is pulled from her project Déjà vu and Other Histrionics, an exploration of slavery, freedom, and transitional dynamics. Defined by Banks as “historical fiction,” the images are a juxtaposition of French colonial photographer Pierre Tacher’s early-1900 Senegalese portraits against the backdrop of Bank’s modern-day images of Senegal’s architecture.
Support Systems, is a mixed-media image by Todd Gray which was created and showcased in direct response to the institutionalized racism against Black men. Within the image, a Black boxer is suspended in the extension of outward movement as he lands a punch against a dark skyscraper, his equal in size. The image was utilized in the protests in LA during the Olympics of summer 1984.
Texas Isaiah is a photographer who does not simply capture portraits, but rather gathers a mountainous, yet understated celebration around the beauty of BIPOC, the LGBTQ+ community, and other marginalized groups of people. As with the stretching, topless captured in Post Requisite/ Eyes Above, standard beauty norms are radically deconstructed and meticulously rebuilt in a memorialization of the beauty of human skin.
The exhibition will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from May 25 through October 10, 2021. To learn more, visit here.
