Exhibition Type: Solo Exhibition
Artist: Sean Wilson
Venue: BIJOU PROJECT SPACE
Address: 178 Lower Main Road, Observatory
This body of work comprises four sets of twelve photographs of perhaps Africa’s most photographed natural wonder: Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.
The first set consists of commercially produced tourist photographs from the 1950s, found in an envelope amongst my maternal Grandmother’s possessions. The second set are photographs made by myself in June 2024 whilst on a journey to introduce my son to the land of my mother’s birth. Faced with the futile task of photographing the Falls themselves, I instead found myself photographing representations of the Falls in the town of Victoria Falls. The third set are water-damaged transparencies taken by my paternal grandfather on a family holiday in 1969. The final set features photographs made by colonial-era photographers from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Each set reframes the Falls in different ways — from the constructed gaze of the tourist industry, to the familial, the contemporary and reflexive, to the historical and colonial. This temporal and stylistic diversity nudges the viewer to move beyond the clichés that so often govern our visual encounters of the world. By juxtaposing four similar views of the Falls from different eras, I hope to disrupt the tyranny of any singular way of looking at the world and bring into question photography’s stubborn – albeit tenuous – claims towards truth. Ultimately, this project explores how photography both expands and limits our ways of seeing.
