This past summer, Ogden Museum was awarded a $13,800 grant from the Darryl Chappell Foundation to fund a photographer-in-residence program. A call for entries for the residency was open from September 29 through November 23, 2021, and was open to Afrodescendants 21+ who had been practicing photography for the past five years.
Photo courtesy of Gus Aronson
After reviewing all 47 applications submitted in response to the call for entries, Ogden Museum and the Darryl Chappell Foundation are pleased to announce that University of Arkansas’ Aaron Turner has been selected as Darryl Chappell Foundation’s photographer-in-residence at Ogden Museum. Throughout the summer of 2022, Turner will work closely with Ogden Museum’s curatorial department, meeting with Photography Curator Richard McCabe and also with local mentor, photographer L. Kasimu Harris, to grow and foster the resident’s connections and presence within the New Orleans arts community.
Apart from meeting with local mentor L. Kasimu Harris, Turner will also be mentored by Houston Texas’ Earlie Hudnall, Jr. This opportunity, provided by Darryl Chappell Foundation, will give Turner the resources to flourish as he navigates the residency. The residency will include online educational programming and a solo exhibition at Ogden Museum. In addition, two works of Turner’s will be added to the museum’s permanent collection at the conclusion of his residency.
Turner was selected for his project Yesterday Once More, a project he started in 2013. Using photography, Turner began documenting his hometown, from an insider’s perspective, after seeing photographic work by Eugene Richards.
“The community I came from is known as the Arkansas Delta,” explains Turner. “But growing up, I was always told I had to prepare myself to leave, and there was nothing for me in the region—socio-economic and cultural issues backed up this viewpoint. I did move for eight years, but I have recently returned to a more permanent role teaching and making art. Out of all of my immediate family members, I am the only one still living in Arkansas. Since 2013, I have focused on portraits of my family and the Arkansas Delta residents (sometimes the Mississippi Delta).”
In recent pursuits of Yesterday Once More, Turner has focused on the landscape to reflect his relationship and understanding of the transformative process to understand place. His central concern is the passage of time, human life, and how from one image to the next, time passes, life goes on, and the artist re-encounters their altered sense of familiarity through people, place and memory.
About Aaron Turner
Aaron Turner is a photographer and educator currently based in Arkansas. He uses photography as a transformative process to understand the ideas of home and resilience in two main areas of the U.S., the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. Aaron also uses the 4×5 view camera to create still-life studies on identity, history, blackness as material, and abstraction. Aaron received his M.A. from Ohio University and an M.F.A from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He was a 2018 Light Work Artists-in-Residence at Syracuse University, 2019 EnFoco Photography Fellow, a 2020 Visual Studies Workshop Project Space Artists-in-Residence, a 2020 Artist 360 Mid-America Arts Alliance Grant Recipient, the 2021 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship Recipient, and a recipient of the 2021 Creators Lab Photo Fund from Google’s Creator Labs & the Aperture Foundation.