Aaron Turner: The Archive as Liberation

The Archive as Liberation
Edited by Aaron Turner
Light Work, 2025

Hardcover, 175 Pages
ISBN: 979-8-218-57470-3

Current subscribers to Contact Sheet will receive this book with their subscription.

The Archive as Liberation brings together a dynamic group of artists and writers to engage in dialogue around archival photographic methods. This dialogue also includes the participants’ role in documenting, interrogating, and understanding experiences, both individual and collective.

This publication includes work by artists Andre Bradley, Chisato Hughes, Calista Lyon, Raymond Thompson Jr., Harrison Walker, and Savannah Wood, alongside writing by Andrew Martinez, Alec Kaus, Aaron Turner, Amelia Wallen, and Wendel White, and a foreword by the book’s editor, Donasia Tillery. The Archive as Liberation’s elegant structure and design come from the keen eye of Elana Schlenker.

The Archive as Liberation was organized by Aaron Turner, founding director of the Center for Art as Lived Experience (CALE). CALE is a multidisciplinary visual arts research center based in the School of Art at the University of Arkansas. It promotes innovative ideas on the integration of the arts in communities and pedagogy by emphasizing the intersections of art and lived experience. The Archive as Liberation is the center’s first research publication in collaboration with Light Work.

-

Aaron Turner is a photographer, educator, and independent curator, born and raised in the Arkansas Delta. Turner holds an MA from Ohio University and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts. In his studio practice, he uses the 4×5 view camera to create still-life studies on identity, history, abstraction, and archives. He has organized the following selected exhibitions and symposiums: And Let It Remain So: Women of the African Diaspora (Phoenix Art Museum, 2022), Time & Empathy: Arkansas Photographer Geleve Grice (University of Arkansas, 2021–22), and Resounding Sovereign Expressions: Resurgent Indigenuity in Ozark Arts Practice & Scholarship (University of Arkansas, 2025). He most recently joined the University of Michigan’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design as an assistant professor.