Ryerson Gallery's African Women Will Gaze At Toronto Until December 8th

Artur Walther outside the Ryerson Gallery doors - sweirsweir

They photographed African women’s gazes, now those women look at us – new exhibition at Ryerson’s art gallery

By Stephen Weir

Artur Walther is that guy.  A self-made billionaire who in retirement has shucked off his golden handcuffs and dedicated himself to doing good things, including the collection and exhibition of historical and contemporary photographs.

Over the course of the past 26-years, the former co-head of Goldman Sachs’ worldwide capital markets group in 1983 and the founding partner of Goldman Sachs’ operations in Germany has managed to create one of the world’s most important privately held photography collections. His Walther Collection Foundation has opened two photography museums – one in Germany, the other in New York City.

On Tuesday the 70-year old collector was in Toronto to open a photography exhibition of African women. Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture is now on display at the Ryerson Image Centre in downtown Toronto. 

Artur Walther told the Caribbean Camera that after he retired from business he took a four-week round the continent where he purchased contemporary and historic photographs. Those purchases were the genesis of his African collection and many of them are part of the Toronto exhibition.

The Way She Looks provides a rare historical overview of the African female experience in photography. The free exhibition is on view until December 8, 2019.

“ The exhibition of African photography in terms of North America and European galleries is very limited, “Artur Walther told the Caribbean Camera. “The first exhibition of Contemporary African Photography took place only 31 years ago. In New York the first photo exhibition was at the Guggenheim some 25 years ago.”

“What you have here (referring to the new Ryerson exhibition) is very deep into a specific topic – pictures of African women gazing at the camera.”

 The large exhibition is divided chronologically into three parts. The first section showcases nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographic prints, postcards, albums, and books from Southern and Eastern Africa.

Despite the large number of colonial era pictures, many early photographs offer windows into their subjects’ experiences; the exhibition foregrounds photographs from this era in which the female sitters’ confident and forthright gazes rival that of the photographer.

The second section features women’s portraits since the 1950s by notable West African photographers. As portrait studios started to spring up throughout Africa, female consumers became involved in how they were pictured: they styled themselves, chose their outfits, commissioned the photographer, and often performed during studio sessions.

“At the same time,” explains the Ryerson exhibition text, “documentary photographers began to record the African female experience in a period of rapid social, cultural and political change as many nations prepared for and achieved independence.”

The final section highlights a number of significant African female and non-binary artists who have emerged since the 1990s. Exploring a wide array of subjects, from feminist, queer, and gender issues to history, kinship, migration, memory, and loss, many of the works made by these artists challenge conventional understandings of African female “photographic representation”.

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“By privileging women’s perspectives, both in front of and behind the camera, this groundbreaking exhibition confronts the canons of art history and allows for new narratives,” said Ryerson Curator Gaëlle Morel. “We’re thrilled to celebrate the work of so many leading African artists, many of whom are being shown in Canada for the first time.”