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Aaron Turner: "The Archive as Liberation" at Aurora PhotoCenter

January 30, 2026
Cover: The Archive as Liberation

The Archive as Liberation is a publication and series of exhibitions organized by Stamps Assistant Professor Aaron Turner featuring a unique group of artists and writers that engage in dialogue around archival photographic methods. The exhibition, now in its third iteration, will be on view at Aurora PhotoCenter in Indianapolis, Indiana from February 6 — April 17, 2026. The exhibition opens with a public reception from 6 – 9 p.m. on Friday, February 6, during Indianapolis’s February First Friday. Turner, who co-curated the exhibition, will give a public talk about the work on view, followed by a question-and-answer session.

The Archive as Liberation features five artists who incorporate and re-contextualize material from various types of archives in their work. These artists recognize the power of archival photographic methods to connect and collapse tenses of time and experience, leading to important personal and cultural truths. Published as a book and exhibited in earlier iterations at Silver Eye and Light Work in 2025, the 2026 Aurora PhotoCenter installation of The Archive as Liberation, co-curated with Aaron Turner, features photography and video-based work by Andre Bradley, calista lyon, Raymond Thompson Jr., Harrison Walker, and Savannah Wood. Turner, writing in the opening essay of the eponymous book, describes the engagement with and care for other peoples’ materials in an archive as inherently empathetic, an action that implies a deep value and commitment to the lived experience of others. The five artists in The Archive as Liberation lay bare that beautiful empathy through their work.

Andre Bradley, based in Philadelphia, PA, uses curatorial and photobook practices to explore the subject of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and the Black community. Bradley holds degrees from Image Text Ithaca, MICA, and Rhode Island School of Design’s MFA program. In the series Where’s Walter, Bradley depicts a cut-out figure of Walter Lamar Scott, whose murder by policeman Michael Slager in 2015 was recorded by eyewitness Feidin Santana, running through various American National Parks. The work is simultaneously a remembrance of Scott and a critique of violence against unarmed Black men and women in America.

Wildland firefighters in protective gear manage a controlled burn in a dry, grassy field, with a fire engine parked in the background. Smoke rises from the line of fire along the field.
Andre Bradley, Where’s Walter, 2020.

calista lyon, born in Australia and now based in Fayetteville, AR, uses an expanded photographic practice in which she creates installations, performances, and community-engaged works that explore knowledge and memory as a form of critical resistance in our time of colonial capitalism. Lyon is an assistant professor of photography and expanded media at the University of Arkansas. Her work, Remembering Future, features archival images that document destructive gold extraction in the Indigenous Box-Ironbark forest and woodland of Victoria, Australia, in the 19th Century. Collaged over an alarming field of hunter orange-red, these images ask the viewer to consider the ecological price paid when immediate capital gain supersedes stewardship of the land for future generations.

A complex art collage, likely titled 'Remembering Future' by Calista Lyon, on a vibrant red background. The collage is composed of numerous small, rectangular images and sketches, primarily in black and white or muted colors.
calista lyon, Remembering Future (detail), 2023.

Raymond Thompson Jr., based in Austin, TX, is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and visual journalist whose work explores how race, memory, representation, and place combine to shape the Black environmental imagination of the North American landscape. Thompson holds an MFA in photography from West Virginia University, an MA in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and a degree in American Studies from the University of Mary Washington. He is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In this installation of his series it’s hard to stop rebels who time travel, the artist combines an archival 19th Century notice advertising the reward for capturing an escaped slave, his images made in cotton fields, train yards, and roadsides, and close, detailed portraits to evoke hidden histories and connect the Black experience to the American landscape.

A man in a blue shirt and dark pants stands with his back to the camera, looking toward train cars on tracks as the bright, low morning or evening sun forms a large, perfect circle (likely a reflection or lens flare) above the train cars and power lines.
Raymond Thompson Jr., Portal #110.958, Railroad Junction, New Bern, NC, archival inkjet print, 20 x 16 inches, 2023.

Harrison D. Walker, based in Westford, MA, is an artist who uses techniques from printmaking, drawing, and photography to create forms that reference celestial phenomena and the otherworldly. Walker holds an MFA in photography from Temple University. He served as visiting faculty at such institutions as Maine Media Workshops, Wesleyan College, and the University of Alabama, and currently is the Manager of Studio Operations for the Harvard Art Museums. Walker’s experience growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, nicknamed ​“Rocket City” for its history with NASA, installed a lifelong fascination with space exploration and a quest for the unknown. In this installation, Harrison combines images and materials from several bodies of work, including Footnotes, which combines speculative archival materials with the artist’s own images, existing in between the two worlds of discovery and imagination.

A black and white image displaying a grid of several dozen individual frames, possibly from an experiment in fluid dynamics, physics, or computer modeling. Each small frame shows bright, blurry, illuminated or simulated shapes—resembling smoke, flame, or fluid trails—moving horizontally and evolving over time across the grid.
Harrison D. Walker, Transit, 36 x 66.5 inches, 2022.

Savannah Wood, with roots in Baltimore and Los Angeles, primarily works within photography, text, and installation to explore how spirituality, domesticity, and our relationships to place shape our identities. Wood holds a degree from the University of Southern California and currently serves as the executive director of Afro Charities. In the digital video Hard to Get and Dear Paid For, Wood presents archival family photographs, video, and poetry to tell the story of Enoch George Howard, an enslaved man born in 1814 near Unity, Maryland, who came to own the land here he and his family were enslaved, including a piece of land called Hard to Get and Dear Paid For. Howard’s daughter Martha used proceeds from his estate to invest in the influential Afro-American Newspaper. As the Executive Director of Afro Charities, Wood leads the charge to increase access to the 130+-year-old AFRO American Newspapers’ extensive archives.

A black and white, double-exposure photographic portrait of a woman, with delicate, out-of-focus flower stalks overlapping her face in the foreground. Faint archival or architectural images are faintly visible within the contours of her face.
Savannah Wood, Hard to Get and Dear Paid For, digital video, runtime: 4:14, 2020.

The Archive as Liberation
Exhibition Dates: February 6‑April 17, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, February 6, 6 – 9 p.m.; Talk with Aaron Turner, 6 p.m.
Aurora PhotoCenter, 1125 Brookside Avenue, Suite C9, Indianapolis, Indiana. Free and open to the public.

The Archive as Liberation publication is available from Light Work Shop.