Capture Photography Festival Showcase

Longing to See: Photography and In-Visibility

Capture x Emily Carr presents Longing to See: Photography and In-Visibility, an exhibition curated by Birthe Piontek that features work of nine emerging Emily Carr University artists as part of the 2024 Capture Photography Festival.

Apr 3 – Apr 28, 2024
Michael O'Brian Exhibition Commons, Level One
Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Opening Reception | April 5, 2024, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Michael O'Brian Exhibition Commons, Level One
Emily Carr University of Art + Design

In an image-saturated world, we keep photographing. Photographs, digital or analogue, give us the illusion of preserving time and often reveal the significance of the captured moment only later, when it has turned into a memory that is revisited in the image.

Asking what can be made visible in a photograph and what stays hidden, the artists in this exhibition investigate the human desires to see, save, and revisit. They explore photography’s close relationship to memory, longing, and belonging by working with personal archives, including photographs, objects, and materials charged with personal histories. Utilizing strategies of documentary photography and staged portraiture, some of the works make visible what is often simply felt or experienced and shine a light on what is overlooked or hidden: fluid identities; invisible mental health issues; desires informed by the subconscious mind as it is shaped by societal pressures; and the complexities of immigration, such as navigating cultural differences. Meanwhile, other works in the exhibition explore these themes from a different perspective, focusing instead on the close relationship between social media and photography. In these pieces, the artists investigate their own desires to see and be seen, challenging the contemporary display and consumption of fleeting digital images on social networks that reinforce the visibility of the desired while often hiding the undesired reality in plain sight.

Longing to See is an inquiry into the potentials and limits of a seemingly boundless and ubiquitous medium by a new generation of lens-based artists who address photography’s unique ability to show things as they are. These artists encourage us to feel, remember, and question what is visible and what is invisible – or unphotographable.

Capture x Emily Carr is a partnership between Capture Photography Festival, the Audain Faculty of Art and Shumka Centre for Creative Entrepreneurship at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.