What We Bring Forward: Women Photographers Influencing the Archive
History unfolds through prevailing cultural, social, and political viewpoints— archives traditionally privileged a singular colonial and patriarchal framework and consequently have limited whose stories are deemed worthy of preservation, study, exhibition and acquisition.
Aldeide Delgado, Susan Meiselas, and Keisha Scarville are artists, academics, and activists that explore approaches to archival practice and visual storytelling and offer the invitation to imagine archives not as static repositories but as living conversations.
These women through their image-making, teaching, writing, curation and scholarship challenge prevailing viewpoints to document overlooked narratives, to amplify diverse lived experiences and to expand what constitutes our visual history and contemporary cultural conversation.
Through their work and witness our understanding of the past expands while simultaneously transforming the possibilities of our future collective visual recording. What constitutes a canon moves beyond a fixed repository into a fluid instrument of possibility.
I love the limitless reach each of these women engages to reshape and reclaim by activating visual narratives. They thrive on collaboration and search for potential. They center transparency and reciprocity. As a result new definitions, methodologies and vocabularies are being revealed as we widen the frame of what constitutes an archive to include our bodies, geographies, materials and elements that hold our personal, political and collective agency.