Salon #60 — D’Angelo Lovell Williams, Rachel Papo

Join us for an in-person salon with photographers D’Angelo Lovell Williams and Rachel Papo. Williams will present Contact High (MACK, 2022) and Papo will present It’s Been Pouring (Kehrer Verlag, 2022).

Address will be provided when RSVP confirmed starting September 10.

D’Angelo Lovell Williams’s Contact High (MACK, 2022) offers an expansive engagement with the visualization of desire and depiction of the Black body. Williams’s narrative images reflect the many forms in which Black queer people exist and have existed historically within each other’s lives. The title references the importance of touch and gesture in Williams’s work, and alludes to heightened senses and intuitive movement. Williams’s photographs visualize the Black body in performative scenes that are theatrical, dance-like, and occasionally mundane, pointing towards collective histories and Black ancestral practices. At the heart of these intimate, dialogic images are notions of kinship and spirituality interwoven with quietly political and radical gestures. Williams’s unfaltering gaze insists on visibility and deference and creates scenes in which Black and queer voices are the authority. The dynamics that play out are visualized as a spectrum of care, tenderness, and vulnerability, speaking to the nuances of our complex lives often overlooked by historical depictions.

D’Angelo Lovell Williams is a Black, HIV-positive artist expanding narratives of Black and queer intimacy through photography. They earned their BFA in photography from Memphis College of Art in 2015, an MFA in photography from Syracuse University in 2018, and are a 2018 Skowhegan School of Art alum. They live and work in New York City and are represented by Higher Pictures Generation.

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In It’s Been Pouring (Kehrer Verlag, 2022), Rachel Papo plumbs the depths of her postpartum depression, drawing on a community of mothers whose suffering mirrors her own. Through a combination of photographs, interviews and her own emails and texts, she provides a portal into the unbearable tension that exists between the miracle of birth and the potential horror that follows, leading the viewer through a narrative of despair. Designer Hans Gremmen deftly transforms Papo’s project into a nuanced photobook. The sympathetic, yet unwavering lens this work brings to postpartum depression helps build the case that it is, in part, a social problem, largely due to the narrow definition of what our culture means by “mother.”

Rachel Papo is a Brooklyn-based award-winning photographer whose works have been exhibited and published worldwide. Among her awards are two NYFA Fellowships (2006, 2022) and a Lucie Award (2006). Papo’s works are in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Museum of Contemporary Photography and The Griffin Museum of Photography. Previous publications include Serial No. 3817131 (PowerHouse 2008) and Homeschooled (Kehrer 2016).