Ambient Photo surveys Luther Konadu’s decade-long documentary project focused on photographic portraiture. Since 2015 the artist has taken images of his community of friends from the African diaspora in Winnipeg. Challenging the finitude of any singular image, the artist uses polyptychs, text, and re-photography as creative strategies to suggest a continuity of photography beyond an isolated event. As such, he emphasizes the medium’s artifice, construction, and material characteristics to engage his viewers in a practice of slow looking —encouraging the reading of photography as a diversion from reality rather than a representation of it. 

The title—and intention—of Ambient Photo is to emphasize the formal and contemplative qualities of Konadu’s images, akin to the genre of slow cinema. This approach contrasts demands for discernible plots, legible characters or linear sequences frequently asked of documentary projects. In place of dynamic momentum or a tangible narrative, slow cinema often features scenes of inaction, meandering shots, long takes, decelerations of time, and still moments. These strategies offer challenges to habituated perceptions or expectations of content while resisting the tendency towards passive interactions with images—methods which inform Konadu’s approach to image-making and display. For the artist, narratives gleaned from photographs are amorphous, weightless, and ambient, which mirror the medium’s ability to produce all-encompassing, or truthful, representations. More specifically, Konadu’s work challenges the way that so-called objective visual documentation informs public perceptions of collective identities and how it is used to profile, survey, speculate, and “understand” racialized subjectivities and communities. As an image-maker, Konadu explores how to contend with the legacies of documentary photography from a position of agency that extends from the present into the future. Expanding his approach to image-making and its circulation, Ambient Photo includes several works that create loose associations amongst the formlessness of atmosphere, light, space, and the universe beyond.

Luther Konadu (b. 1991, North York) is an artist based in Winnipeg, MB. His studio activities are realized through photographic processes that give way to sculptural components. He acknowledges the legacies of the photographic medium as an interpretive site for generating new conventions and expanding fixed narratives. Konadu’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Aperture, and FOAM International Photography Magazine. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Museum of Contemporary Art (Toronto), Remai Modern (Saskatoon), The Polygon Gallery (Vancouver),  SBC Galerie d’art Contemporain (Montreal),  Filter Space (Chicago), the Center for Photography at Woodstock (New York),  Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA) and Saatchi Gallery (London, UK).