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« Imaginer les tissus : le textile et l’image photographique »

Résidence de recherche organisé par Sandrine Colard du 19 au 24 mai 2025.

Participants

Sandrine COLARD (Rutgers University – Newark, Belgique), Giulia PAOLETTI (University of Virginia – Charlottesville, États-Unis)

Résumé

Ìyá, Bàbá àti Èmi (Mother, Father, and Me) (2024) © Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński.

Intitulée « Imaginer les tissus : le textile et l’image photographique », l’exposition explore les liens – historiques, matériels et théoriques – entre la photographie et le textile à travers les histoires et les géographies, en prenant le continent africain comme point de convergence. Ce lien omniprésent s’étend des photographies de textiles d’Afrique de l’Ouest des années 1840 à la photographie contemporaine, avec des artistes comme Billie Zangewa, qui insuffle une « esthétique photographique » à ses tissus (Dewan, 2012). Bien qu’ambitieuse par sa portée chronologique et géographique, l’exposition ne proposera pas un panorama exhaustif, mais se concentrera sur des thèmes choisis explorant les aspects critiques de ces relations intermédiales. Dépassant la primauté de l’optique et de la reproductibilité dans la compréhension de la photographie, l’exposition offrira de nouveaux points de vue pour aborder le médium, rendant visibles les dimensions haptiques, genrées, matérielles et décoloniales de la photographie.

Abstract

Entitled, Picturing Fabrics: Textile and the Photographic Image, the exhibition explores photography’s—historical, material and theoretical—entanglements with textile across histories and geographies, taking the African continent as its nexus. This ever-present connection spans from photographs of West African textiles in the 1840s, to the contemporary with artists like Billie Zangewa, who infuses a “photographic aesthetic” into her 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 relationships. Moving beyond the primacy of the optical, and reproducibility in understanding photography, the exhibition will offer new vantage points to approach the medium making visible the haptic, gendered, material and decolonial dimensions of photographs.

Report

The project explores photography’s—historical, material and conceptual—entanglements with textiles across histories and geographies. That intimate connection was present from the very beginning, with Henry Fox Talbot’s lace photographs of the 1830s and the 1852 invention of Jean-Nicolas Truchelut’s pannotype–a collodion process on fabric or leather (Stieglitz, 1977). Scholars have unraveled the extra-ordinary 1898 photograph by Secondo Pia, who captured the Shroud of Turin believed to have made visible Jesus’s likeness (Sontag, 1977; Geimer, 2018; Didi-Huberman, 2022). The use of fabric in women’s albums has been well-documented (Higonnet, 1992; Di Bello, 2007), as well as Andy Warhol’s photographic silkscreen prints (Baudrillard, 1989), a technique that first originated in China in the the first millennium CE beforebeing adopted in the West. These examples demonstrate a longstanding history, one, however, that has been understudied and disconnected, at the opposite of the relation between photography and painting (Galassi, 1981), and photography and sculpture (Wölfflin, 1896; Hamill & Luke, 2017). While ambitious in its conceptual purview, the project does not offer a comprehensive survey tracing a linear development with an encyclopedic scope. It is anchored in and charted from Africa, where textile has an equally long history, one that overlapped with and was renewed through its encounter with photography.

The frequent doubling of tailors as photographers across the African continent has been long noted, as well as the commemoration of newly created outfits as a usual motive for a trip to the studio (Pinther, 2007; Rabine 2010). A “surfacist” aesthetic, insisting on the materialism of the image’s picture plane, in the works of Seydou Keïta and the likes has been recognized as enacting a visual decolonization (Oguibe,1996; Pinney, 2003; Thompson 2009; Agbo 2019). Finally, a “counter-culture” in recent contemporary art practices has hybridized photography with pre-modern handmade processes and gestures (Poivert, 2022). Embroidered prints, or transferred and woven images are found in the works of Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Joanna Choumali, Roméo Mivekannin, Jess Atieno, Shyraz Bayjoo, among others (fig. 3). The exhibition seeks to make an intervention about the overlooked and intersecting history of photography and textile that has the power to transform how we look at and think through the photographic. If European Renaissance painting has long been considered the forerunner of photography and a continuation of Cartesian Perspectivalism (Panofsky, 1927; Jay, 2009), what if textile was included in such lineage? What would that history look like? What new logic and vocabulary would become available? Consider for instance the case of Kuba textiles used as a recording device indexing the traces of missionaries’ motorcycles.

Or, of the Senegalese indigo stitch-resist cloths (pagne), whose geometric patterns and dye rest on the interdependence of positive and negative. Or else again, in the West African region where textiles are valued for their ability to shine, indicating a history of working and writing with light before the invention of photography (Picton, 1995). This project then, through rigorous research and close engagement with objects, takes up Patricia Haye and Gary Minkely’s challenge to excavate Africa’s multiple and ambivalent “archaeologies of seeing” and manipulating light, ones that may include the pre-photographic and the nonphotographic (Hayes and Mikley, 2019). In May 2025, the Fondation les Treilles supported a one-week research residency for the exhibition’s two co-curators, who are both Associate Professors and are specialized in African photography. During the residency, the co-curators focused on the reading of key scholars working on textile studies and African textile more specifically. These readings were essential to establish the historiography of the field, and identify key themes and arguments to be employed in the structuring of the exhibition and catalogue.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
ldiebold (25 juin 2025). « Imaginer les tissus : le textile et l’image photographique ». Les carnets de la Fondation des Treilles. Consulté le 17 juillet 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/147d4