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Photos: Toni Hafkenscheid.

Dignity Images

American Artist
March 22 – April 18, 2021
Curated by Fraser McCallum

Part of Burning Glass, Reading Stone, lightbox exhibition at the Blackwood, University of Toronto Mississauga

︎link


[T]he extent to which one becomes conditioned by social media use is not always easy to perceive.
—American Artist1

Employing strategies of refusal and redaction, American Artist’s Dignity Images examine how social media platforms condition our sense of self, identity, and community. Concerned with the vampiric nature of social media—where user content, data, and engagement generate profit—Artist’s practice proposes ways to challenge platform and surveillance capitalism. One such strategy is in Artist’s own legal renaming, which intervenes in the overwhelmingly white and male artistic canon.

Whereas Artist’s renaming simultaneously claims anonymity and hypervisibility, Dignity Images are rooted in omission and intimacy. Artist defines dignity images as photographs sitting idle on one’s smartphone, withheld from social media circulation. A dignity image represents a conscious choice to mediate between one’s online and offline self; for Artist, it is “a means of recovering dignity outside of social media by acknowledging that images outside of these platforms are equally if not more valuable.”2 Like photographs in albums or scrapbooks, dignity images are tangible and personal, contrasting the homogenous interfaces of social media platforms.

For this new iteration of Dignity Images, Artist re-photographed four of their own personal images from the lockdown period. These images—of domestic life; distanced communication with family; voting infrastructure; and navigating city space amid pandemic restrictions—each attest to the distinct conditions of separation and mediation of this moment. These images of one person’s online and offline life, unmoored from the narratives usually accompanying personal images, reckon with the intricacies of posting and sharing. Through the glimpses of intimate daily life seen here, visitors are beckoned to consider: How do I engage with social media? What do I withhold from it, and why?

1)“A Declaration of the Dignity Image,” The New Inquiry, September 13, 2016.
2) Artist, “A Declaration of the Dignity Image.”

See also No Other Findings, a response by Jessica Karuhanga ︎link