Lens on Life: Ananias Léki Dago,
Bayeté Ross Smith and Lewis Watts

Curator, San Francisco Arts Commission: City Hall, Aprl - June 2007

The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, in a programmatic partnership with PhotoAlliance, presents Lens on Life; an exhibition at San Francisco’s City Hall featuring three artists involved in the exploration of place and identity from both African and African American perspectives. This special exhibition is supported by the Museum of the African Diaspora and the San Francisco International Arts Festival.

Ananias Léki Dago: Bamako en Croix

Léki Dago, a photographer from the Ivory Coast, is making his San Francisco debut in Lens on Life.  Leki Dago’s black and white photographs highlight a common object in Bamako, Mali; the "pousse-pousse", a kind of wheelbarrow used to carry a variety of goods. For Léki Dago the cross-shaped handles stand out as a visual curiosity. The cross does not belong to the Malian culture, so this series questions the assimilation of exogenous symbols into everyday life. Bamako en Croixis presented as part of the Museum of the African Diaspora’s exhibition Lens on Life: From Bamako to San Francisco (May 18 – September 23, 2007).

Bayeté Ross Smith: Our Kind of People

San Francisco-based photographer Bayeté Ross Smith exhibits work from two recent portrait series: Our Kind of People and Passing. His images deal with stereotypes and preconceived notions. He is particularly interested in how biases, as well as the role generalizations and the sorting of people into categories, play in our everyday lives. Bayeté says, “I question when stereotypes are true, if ever, and if they have any validity. I am also interested in issues of identity, and who controls the imagery that is used to define us.”

Lewis Watts: Evidence

Lewis Watts, an artist, curator and Associate Professor of Photography at UC Santa Cruz, presents Evidence. This series of black and white photographs center on African American cultural landscapes; where people live, how they occupy and use space, and the traces they leave behind. Specifically, Watts has been “looking for evidence of the effects of the mid 20th century migration of African Americans and their descendants from the rural south to the urban north and west.”