3 Photographers Expose Race in America c. 2016

The exhibition Looking Through: Photography, Race, and Identity captures racial realities that are painful and contemporary. Photographers Shikieth, Gareth Smit, and Stacey Tyrell employ photographic approaches that explore blackness in vastly different contexts.

The show at Adelphi University centers on narratives that attempt to unpack what global blackness means to the photographers—Smit is white South African; Tyrell is Canadian of Caribbean descent, and Shikeith is African American— and their own identities in the narratives that run throughout the exhibition.

“For me, the most exciting aspect of the exhibition are the relationships between the different artworks,” explains the exhibition's curator, Hannah Smith-Allen. “Smit’s documentary project on Eric Garner puts the exhibition into a contemporary context and asks viewers to consider racial identity in the wake of recent police abuses. Shikeith’s work almost seems to respond to Smit’s photograph,” she says.