ABSTRACT
From 2001-5 Virginia Ryan staged several hundred photographs of herself in diverse situations in Accra, Ghana, and surrounding locales in West Africa, where she was living and working as an artist, administrator, and member of a diplomatic mission. The images inquire into and create an artistic conversation about the experience of being white in West Africa, of a European woman being the exposed object of a non-European gaze. The essay blurs voices, mixing analytic and evocative registers, incorporating fragments of recorded conversation with Ryan, and situating the work in perspectives from art/photo/film history, anthropology, African studies, and critical race and gender studies. In resonance with the title 'Exposures,' and the highly ironic subtitle 'A White Woman in West Africa', they ask what has changed, or been left unchanged, about the look or display of whiteness since colonial times, and who and what is exposed, made vulnerable through the gazing of inter-race encounters.
