Abstract
Over ten years, Eliza Gregory created a series of projects examining the relationship between contemporary visual storytelling and compassion. She photographed and interviewed a broad range of people about their cultural identities and relationships to the places they lived, while also defining a process of collaborative representation that acknowledged the power dynamics inherent in photographic portraiture. Her work asks: What are the limitations of photographic representation to create social understanding and social change? And once we acknowledge those limits, what can a contemporary photographic project accomplish? What began as a traditional fine art photography practice morphed into a fully developed social practice, leveraging additional technologies such as social media, audio recording, marketing strategies and graphic design. This chapter will explore The Testimony Project, a three-year collaboration with the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco that culminated with a solo exhibition in 2018. For the project, Gregory’s approach to the work relied on transparency and relationship-building, infused with a willingness to see traditional photographic conventions as rife with injustice and misrepresentation.