Giulia Paoletti
Intermedium: A Relational History of Photography & Textile Arts in Africa

Photography has since its inception been defined in relation to other media. In 1834, five years before the public announcement of the invention of the daguerreotype, Henry Fox Talbot was experimenting with what he called "photogenic drawings," literally sketches produced by light. From the 19th century onward, photography was regularly compared to painting. In 1981, Peter Galassi famously sought to settle the debate famously arguing that photography was "the legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition." Scholars have discussed photography's affinity to sculpture in their shared desire to visualize three-dimensionality and enable reproducibility. What if photography’s history was instead entangled with that of textile arts? Which artists, techniques, and aesthetics would become visible?

This talk will explore photography’s—historical, material, and theoretical—entanglements with textiles taking the African continent as its nexus. Examples will include the earliest portraits featuring indigo cloths from Senegal in the 1850s; Seydou Keïta’s 1950s hand-tinted vintage prints inspired by abstracted patterns of strip-woven fabrics; and contemporary artists such as Sasha Huber (b.1975) and Aida Silvestri (b.1978), whose intermedial practice is anchored in the mechanics and poetics of textiles. By centering Africa, as a privileged site with exceptional photographic and textile histories, this talk proposes to put aside the Western Modernist preoccupation to define each artistic medium in itself, and instead to explore how they exist in relation to one another. “Intermedium” puts these relationships at the center, not as exceptions, not as incidental details, but as foundational to art history.

Giulia Paoletti is an art historian, curator and art writer focusing on modern and contemporary art in Africa. She has published widely on historical African art and photography from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the author and editor of two books, including Portrait and Place: Photography in Senegal, 1840-1960 (Princeton University Press, 2024), which was awarded the 2024 Photography Network Book Award. Her work has appeared in edited volumes and journals including Art History, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Journal of Visual Culture, Cahiers d'études africaines, the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Journal of African History, and African Arts. Support for her research and writing includes awards and fellowships from American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)/Getty; the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. She has co-curated three exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum, the Wallach Gallery, and Dak’art Biennial OFF, and has taught at the University of Virginia, Harvard University, Columbia University, Pratt Institute, the Barnes Foundation, and the University of Bologna. In 2026, she received the Andy Warhol Foundation Fellowship to support the research of her latest curatorial project on the relational history of photography and textile arts in Africa.