Leah Gordon: The Invisibles

About

Leah Gordon (b.1959 Ellesmere Port) is a photographer, film-maker and curator who has an ongoing interest in and relationship with Haiti. She first visited Haiti in 1991 and was the official photographer for the 1994 Amnesty International Report on that country. She has exhibited widely, her images featuring in numerous public and private collections including that of the National Portrait Gallery, London. Gordon has been involved in a range of projects as both visual artist and curator, including documenting experiences of homophobia in London, crossing-dressing in Vodou, links between the Slave Trade and the River Thames and exhibitions of Haitian art. Her photography book 'Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti' is published in June 2010. The cover image to the Riflemaker exhibition The Invisibles: 'Girl with Bird', Cité Soleil, Haiti 1993, documents a territory - Cité de Soleil - classified by the UN as the most dangerous place on earth, though the image is a portrait of stillness and grace, taken during the military coup years of 1991-1994. Gordon has recently returned to Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake. Her upcoming exhibition and book 'The Invisibles' will include photographs sold to benefit victims of the disaster. In 2006 she commissioned the Grand Rue Sculptors from Haiti to make 'Freedom Sculpture', a permanent exhibit for the International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool. Continuing her relationship with the Grand Rue artists, Gordon organised and co-curated the Ghetto Biennale in December 2009. Gordon also teaches fact-based film at The University for Creative Arts, Surrey. She participated in the Riflemaker exhibition 'Voo-doo' in 2009 I'm drawn to the boundaries between art, religion and anthropology. These borderlands have a historical, and often uncomfortable, relationship with photography. A suspicion that photography has observed and policed, but never taken part. Photography has rarely been embraced as a form of representation by religions. It is as if photography, with it's indelible relationship to the material, could only serve to disprove the divine, Although when one reflects on its alchemical past it seems rooted in magical process.