Luther Konadu’s Figure as Index at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, March 18-April 30, 2022.
Portraits and Repetition
“There can be no repetition,” wrote Gertrude Stein, “because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.”[1] Here, in Figure as Index, images repeat. A photograph of four people sitting around a table is framed next to another photograph of hands holding another photograph of the same four sitting around the same table. In both, one person sits on the table and they alone look straight at the camera. Nearly identical, the two images inspire a game of Spot the Difference; the angles have slightly changed, one face has turned, a tan line remains where a bracelet is now missing. The color of the second print is softened, washed out. Its surface is shiny and crinkled by the hands that cradle it. The composition, which at first appears to simply repeat, has been altered in reproduction by chance and by design. The corner of the print in the second frame has been dog-eared. Stein’s emphasis slides from the figures represented to the tactile nature of photography itself.
Stein was writing about language: “No matter how often you tell the same story if there is anything alive in the telling the emphasis is different,”[2] she insists. Luther Konadu photographs people casually and repeatedly. His portraits are of young black friends and loved ones. Some appear again and again, in frames taken seconds apart or over the six years he has been working on this ongoing project. Rather than the pursuit of an ideal portrait, this study in redundancy results in a heightened awareness that no photograph can pin down its subject, ever. Photographer Elle Pérez has said of their own portraits that a photograph is “a perfect container because it is not actually, ever, definitive.”[3] As in Konadu’s repeating frames and scattered collages, subjects are recorded as they transform, sometimes perform, and evade our grasp. Konadu describes his use of multiples as key to his practice that is both “continuous and without a specific destination.”[4] His repetitions emphasize both the inadequacy of photography to capture its subjects and the materiality of the photographs. He wants us to remember we are looking at framed pieces of paper, made documents, not through windows onto people’s lives.
Full essay available on The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art website: https://www.alternatorcentre.com/about