Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This paper from my current PhD in Sociology explores how through photography exhibitions in Wales displaying photographs showing the people of Wales, photographers, and curators contribute to creating and presenting multiple scales of Welsh identities. For the purpose of this paper, we look at two elements: the use of the notion of ‘communities’ and ‘stereotypes’ in the production of identities in photography exhibitions in Wales and how these notions are articulated by institutions and photographers. To conduct this research, three scales of understanding are studied, the artistic stance of the photographers, the organizational one of the curators and the communicational one of the institutions. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted with photographers and curators. To complete this, the available synopses of the exhibitions were studied with a discourse analysis to uncover the way ‘Wales’ is defined in the discourses around the exhibitions. The study shows that photographers, through their art, construct their own sense of self, in relation to a particular community at a certain place and time. The curation process aims at a larger scale and ‘encode’ the photographs under a broader subject often around the nation, and the communities. The communication process displayed in the synopses reveals the discourse created around these exhibitions as projects that seem to aim at defining ‘Wales’ and its ‘communities’, and at challenging ‘stereotypical’ identities of Wales.