Curator Tour of SOUTHERN DEMOCRATIC

The 2024 FotoFocus Biennial theme, backstories, focuses on stories that are not evident at first glance. They offer context for what happened previously or out of view, providing narratives not yet told or presented from a new perspective. Once told, they shed light on current circumstances and events. Backstories fill in where the evidence ends, adding nuance, solving mysteries, or simply telling us something we need to know. To some extent, all histories are backstories. Histories emanating from archives, discovered through reporting, or revealed through gossip provide essential contexts for understanding a given photograph. Similarly, series of photographs have built-in backstories, offering greater context for those singular images we tend to valorize as “telling the whole story.” In all these instances, what is visible on the surface—what is easily photographed—is enlarged and enriched through an understanding of broader histories, by seeing beyond what is evident, by knowing the backstories.