Contact Sheet 189: Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s One Wall a Web is an exhibition that gathers together work from two discrete photographic series that he made in the United States: Our Present Invention (2012–2014) and All My Gone Life (2014–2016). Both the series and the exhibition draw their titles from the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser.

One Wall a Web not only explores the mutability of archival images, but the ongoing presence of history in the present day. According to Wolukau-Wanambwa, the exhibition attempts to address “the normalcy of fear, separateness and violence in a moment suffused by them, but also in a culture riven by the habitually limited prescriptions of images.” The exhibition comprises two distinct strands of photographs: the first, a series of appropriated archival 4 × 5 inch negatives; the second, a series of original photographs.

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Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer, and editor of The Great Leap Sideways. He was an artist-in-residence at Light Work in 2015, has contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Vanessa Winship, George Georgiou, and Paul Graham, written for Aperture magazine, guest-edited the Aperture Photobook Review, and is a faculty member in the photography department at Purchase College, SUNY.