Turner, Aaron

American, b. 1990

BiographyLayering images from archives with paper cutouts, mirrors, and projections, Aaron Turner creates works based in photography that interrogate social themes of identity, history, and representation by employing visual strategies of illusion, shadow, and light manipulation. Turner is interested in photography as a transformative process. To that end, the images in the MoCP permanent collection are from his series Seen, of Light and Legacy (2022), for which he presents multiple photographic translations of the most photographed man of the nineteenth century: Fredrick Douglass. By taking Douglass’s iconic portrait, fracturing it, and then processing it with photographic techniques from the past and present, Turner engages with quality of light as something as changeable and variant as the collective perception of history.

Aaron Turner grew up in West Memphis, Arkansas. He cites his late father, who was an architect, as an early inspiration for his affinity for light. He received his BA in Journalism from University of Memphis (2012), his MA in Visual Communications from Ohio University (2014), and his MFA in Photography from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University (2016). Turner has been featured in solo exhibitions at Houston Center for Photography; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design; and many others. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; New Orleans Museum of Art; Center for Creative Photography, Arizona; and others.