Exposure Photography Festival Celebrates Medium Across Alberta Throughout February
The Exposure Photography Festival has launched its annual celebration of visual storytelling, transforming galleries and spaces across Alberta throughout the month of February. This year's edition features diverse exhibits that bring together international and local perspectives, with particular focus on the complex relationship between Canada and the United States.
NextDoor Exhibit: A Year in the Making
Festival manager Emma Palm and American photographer Will Warsila began planning the NextDoor exhibit more than a year ago, creating what has become one of the festival's centerpiece exhibitions. The timely collaboration places five Canadian and five American photographers side by side as they explore both physical and metaphorical aspects of the Canada-U.S. border.
"It was interesting how the stakes of that exhibition changed or evolved as we were working on it," says Palm. "At the time I put the grant application together, it was already part of the news cycle and conversation."
International Perspectives and Local Connections
The festival includes work from Chinese photographer Tianhu Yuan as part of the International Open Call exhibit at Contemporary Calgary. Meanwhile, the NextDoor exhibition features acclaimed Minneapolis photographer Alec Soth, whose contributions include work from his twenty-year-old project Niagara.
Soth used a large-format 8×10 camera over two years on both sides of Niagara Falls, capturing images that balance romantic notions of the destination with more mundane realities. One striking photograph depicts the Fairway Motor Inn on the Canadian side, showing an empty parking lot with one car and melting snow piles, the motel doors painted a bright red that symbolizes "a place of transit where strangers share the same walls."
Indigenous Perspectives on Borders
The exhibition also features work by Tsuut'ina, Amskapi Pikanii, and Saddle Lake Cree multidisciplinary artist Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse. His contribution presents borders not as walls but as dotted lines on a backlit animal hide held by his mother and grandmother. The hide artwork showcases animals, humans, and industrial machinery, offering a unique perspective on boundary concepts.
Timely Themes in Contemporary Context
As Canada-U.S. relations remain prominent in discussions about tariffs, annexation, and Canadian sovereignty, the NextDoor exhibit has gained particular relevance. Palm notes that during the exhibition's development, various events kept border issues in the public consciousness.
"The Coutts border blockade had happened, and Trump's re-election had reignited asylum seekers coming to Canada," she explains. "Then things quieted down for a bit, but just as we were ramping up to install this exhibition, all of the Greenland talk and Alberta secession was reignited."
Collaboration Across Boundaries
The exhibition ultimately became about the collaborative process itself. Palm describes it as "this human-to-human relationship of Will and I talking and collaborating across the border." In the exhibition text, they explore what they term "the next door condition of being one of proximity and distance"—the simultaneous experience of connection and separation that characterizes border relationships.
Some works in the exhibition focus on literal geographical borders, while others use the border concept metaphorically to examine cultural and economic divisions and connections between the two nations.
The Exposure Photography Festival continues throughout February at various locations across Alberta, offering residents and visitors opportunities to engage with contemporary photography that challenges perceptions and explores timely themes through visual storytelling.
