Who is allowed to document whom?

Exhibition

The thirteenth Vantage Point brings together six newly commissioned photographic projects selected through an international open call. The exhibition’s premise is that documentary photography no longer operates as a transparent record. Images are made through proximity, permission, withholding, material construction and the unequal conditions between photographer and subject.

This is a necessary position, but also a familiar one within contemporary photography. The exhibition must therefore do more than announce that fact and fiction are blurred. Its real test is whether the display lets viewers recognise how differently that instability operates across family collaboration, conflict, displacement and cultural erasure.

To call every photograph “negotiated” is accurate; to leave the terms of each negotiation unnamed would be evasive.

Curatorial approach

Sara Al Mheiri and Osemudiamen Ekore divide the six practices into two loose movements. Luisa Dörr, Latifa AlBokhari and Sathish Kumar work through portraiture, observation and long-term relationships; Adam Rouhana, Guanyu Xu and Maheder Haileselassie address absence, rupture and resistance to visibility. The grouping creates a readable rhythm without demanding one aesthetic.

The curators’ emphasis on “sustained dialogue” is more significant than the open-call format itself. Commissioning can shift an exhibition away from discovering finished work and towards supporting its development. Yet institutional framing remains powerful: land, memory, representation and erasure are broad terms capable of making unlike histories appear comfortably compatible. Critical curation should preserve friction between them, not simply celebrate plurality.

Artists

Dörr’s long-term work with Mexican escaramuza riders places portraiture inside collaboration and embodied tradition. Rouhana’s engagement with Palestinian visibility necessarily carries a different relation to documentary evidence, while Guanyu Xu’s constructed spaces trouble the assumption that a photograph begins with an available external world. Haileselassie, AlBokhari and Kumar further stretch the category across interrupted histories, belonging and community proximity.

Together, the artists make the strongest argument of the exhibition: documentary practice is not defined by a stable look. It is defined by an ethical problem—how an image enters another person’s history. The exhibition will be most consequential if its spatial interventions clarify those specific relationships rather than turning material experimentation into proof of contemporaneity.