Facing Photographs Opens at Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre

After months of renovations and public closure, Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity reopens with an exhibition presented in partnership with Exposure Photography Festival. Facing Photographs, organized by Jacqueline Bell, Curator of Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre, runs from February 14 to May 4, 2025 with an opening reception on Thursday, February 13 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Central to the works that comprise Facing Photographs is the series Facing the Camera by Rosalie Favell, celebrated Winnipeg-born artist of Métis heritage. The series was initiated by Favell while on residence at Banff Centre in 2008 where, in the company other Indigenous artists, she sought to create a document of this group. Facing the Camera later grew to include over five hundred individual portraits of Indigenous artists and arts workers in Canada, Australia and the United States. Facing Photographs presents 13 works from the series in Banff Centre’s permanent collection, depicting the residency cohort and visiting artists at Banff Centre.

Building upon the ideas present in Favell’s series, Facing Photographs brings together works in photography, video and other media that take up questions of agency in relation to self-representation, or representations of those who share with the artist’s forms of identification or social world. The presented works engage with photography’s entanglement with colonialism, refuse fixed understandings of identity, or reflect modes of self-representation.

Alongside portraits from Favell’s series, Facing the Camera, the exhibition includes works by Lori Blondeau, Cassils, Allyson Clay, Anna Binta Diallo, John Edmonds, Evergon, Logan MacDonald, Nadia Myre, Shelley Niro, Barbara Spohr, and Jin-me Yoon.

Audiences of Facing Photographs may also be interested in an upcoming artist talk with Filipino Canadian photo-based artist Karen Zalamea, winner of the 2025 Barbara Spohr Memorial Award for Photography, on Friday, February 28 at 4 p.m. Zalamea will speak to her broader practice and the series Herbarium (after Flora de Filipinas) (2024-ongoing) that she will continue while on residency at Banff Centre.