The Brooklyn Rail

In Houston, the ambitious FotoFest celebrates its fortieth anniversary with the exhibition Global Visions, showcasing the work of more than 450 artists. The exhibition is a reminder of how much photography has been able to tell us, and prompts us to ask how much further it can go.

The exhibition features selections from the past twenty biennials and their key themes, starting in 1986, when the focus was on British photography. Global Visions is installed in three former industrial buildings in Sawyer Yards—buildings which now function as studios for artists and designers. Curated by FotoFest co-founder and former artistic director Wendy Watriss and current executive director Steven Evans, with co-curators Annick Dekiouk and Madi Murphy, the exhibition is eclectic and international. Sometimes past biennials focused on a country or geographic area, sometimes on hot-button themes such as identity, land and ecology, and social change. For this exhibition, images are installed chronologically, according to the year they were first displayed. 

The exhibition is large—very large—and “that was deliberate,” said Watriss during opening night remarks. “We wanted that particularly in the context in which we are living today, I would say the political context.” She continued, 

We wanted people to see the breadth and the scope of FotoFest, from China to Argentina, from Russia to England, from Canada to Africa, and on and on. And we found as we traveled from 1986 on that we encountered extraordinary talent around the world that was not getting to the United States. It was simply not being shown in the big museums and major galleries.

From the start, they also sought the participation of other Houston museums, galleries, and institutions, encouraging them to present photographic exhibitions and programs in the same time frame.

In the early 1980s, Watriss and her husband, Fred Baldwin, were inspired to start FotoFest after a visit to Les Rencontres de la photographie, a festival that takes place annually in Arles, France. Both had been journalists, and together they travelled to record a forgotten America, later collaborating on a book about the rural poor, Coming to Terms: The German Hill Country of Texas, published in 1991. That shared journalistic eye is strong in the early iterations of FotoFest, which often focused on culturally emerging countries, such as Mexico (featured in 1998), China (2008), and Russia (2012).

With such a vast exhibition, I can only mention a few of the sections that especially caught my eye. In fact, if you are in Houston and planning to see the show, I’d suggest going two or three times, or going for a day with lunch in between.

Let’s take the section on China. Having lived in Hong Kong for five years and edited an arts magazine for part of that time, I saw much contemporary photography coming from China. At FotoFest 2008, there was a rather ethnographic section by Zhuang Xueben, including a Tibetan boy with an elaborate metal ornament tied to his head, and a Nakhi woman with hair piled so high it must have stretched out two meters if let down. There are also some vintage photos from the Maoist years that are rarely seen in the US—propaganda to its core. More recently, Zeng Han has photographed contemporary youth dressed as cosplay characters, with a modern Chinese city looming in the background. From the credits, it looks like FotoFest often calls in local or regional curators to help them, which is a good thing.

I was also drawn to the years focused on the environment: “The Earth & Artists Responding to Violence” (2006), “Water” (2004), and “Changing Circumstances: Looking at the Future of the Planet” (2016). There are stunning aerial shots of the Colorado River Delta by Edward Burtynsky, showing how the branches of the river divide like branches of a tree. Another series by Chris Jordan documents albatross he’s been studying on Midway Island in the Pacific: such beautiful, graceful birds in flight—but then he shows how these birds are dying before their time, their carcasses filled with small plastics humans have tossed into the ocean.

In 2022, I attended FotoFest for the first time, when the theme was “If I Had a Hammer”—a wonderful one looking at the politics of images. It’s revisited here, and I’m reminded that these biennials have a penchant for the spectacular, even the exotic, and that year featured some quiet but heart-wrenching photographs from the 1940s.This included Dorothea Lange’s photographs of Japanese American children saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and a Japanese American store with the sign, “I am an American,” on its façade—all on the eve of Japanese Americans being forced to go to War Relocation camps. One incarcerated was Tōyō Miyatake, who had a thriving photo studio in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, which he had to quickly shutter before heading to Manzanar. He managed to get a camera into camp, and his photos of the desolate surroundings are sobering, and of his fellow prisoners trying to carry on life as usual, quite moving.

Steven Evans came to FotoFest twelve years ago. “From my observation, FotoFest has been a great thing for Houston,” he said at the opening, pointing to their contribution to the cultural richness of the city. At a later interview, he says he’s already looking ahead to the next biennial in 2028. He won’t say what theme they’re working on, but he does say, “It's going to be specific to a place and a culture that’s been going through a lot of change in the last ten years. I’m thinking—I really like the 2010 biennial, which had four different American curators looking at different visions.”