Skip to Content

Assistant Professor Aaron Turner Receives Fellowship from the Institute for the Humanities

May 27, 2026

Aaron Turner, assistant professor of art and design at the Stamps School, has received a Summer Faculty Fellowship from the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan for his research project Seen, of Light and Legacy.

The project explores a striking historical intersection: Frederick Douglass is widely considered the most photographed American of the 19th century, and yet the most photographed person of the 21st century lives in an entirely different media landscape. Douglass was a pioneering thinker about the power of images. He recognized photography as a tool to reshape how Black people were seen and understood at a time when that representation was urgently contested. Turner’s project draws a line from that deliberate, slow, and politically charged use of photography to today’s world of social media, artificial intelligence, and the near-instant transmission of images across the globe.

Two side-by-side versions of a historical black-and-white portrait of a young Frederick Douglass. Both images are heavily fragmented by sharp, geometric cracks from a broken glass plate negative, with dark tape holding the pieces together. The image on the left shows the portrait in sharp focus, while the image on the right shows the identical scene with a blurry, soft focus.
Aaron Turner, Seen #1 & Seen #1, 2018

As part of the project, Turner will work with Douglass’s likeness within the 160 — 165 images recorded of him during his lifetime, and filtering them through the aesthetic framework of his ongoing project Black Alchemy, while also working through and teaching himself upwards of up to 30 to 35 19th-century photographic processes.

A black-and-white art piece featuring an image of Frederick Douglass printed onto a crumpled, lightweight white fabric or tissue paper sheet. The fabric is draped dynamically over an unseen structure, casting deep shadows against a stark black background. Harsh light illuminates the side profile of the older, bearded Douglass, accentuating his intense gaze and the texture of his white hair.
Aaron Turner, Untitled (augmented legacy), 2021

The University of Michigan holds several Douglass materials in its own collection. The resulting body of work will form the foundation of Turner’s fifth book. The fellowship connects to a Catalyst Grant he received from Stamps, and Turner sees the cohort of fellows as central to the work: workshopping ideas with a diverse group of thinkers and engaging with their projects in return will help shape what he hopes will be a foundational piece of writing.

A black-and-white conceptual photograph featuring a portrait of a young Frederick Douglass. The image is printed on a stiff, diamond-shaped piece of paper that appears folded and suspended in mid-air. Strong studio lighting cuts across the portrait, casting a dark, sharp geometric shadow onto the background, while the surrounding area is enveloped in deep blackness.
Aaron Turner, Observations of Perspective (legacy continued) #2, 2023

Turner is an artist, educator, and curator born and raised in the Arkansas Delta. He uses photography as a transformative process to explore ideas of home and resilience, and works with the 4×5 view camera to create still-life studies on identity, history, blackness as material, abstraction, and the archive. His most recent publication, The Archive as Liberation (Light Work, 2025), brings together artists and writers in dialogue around archival photographic methods. His previous publications include Black Alchemy: if this one thing is true (TIS, 2020), There May Still Be Time Left (VSW, 2022), and Moves from the Archive (Sleeper Studio, 2023). In 2022, he founded the Center for Art as Lived Experience and has organized exhibitions and symposiums at the Phoenix Art Museum, the University of Arkansas, Silver Eye Center for Photography and beyond.

A small, black-and-white historical portrait of a young Frederick Douglass displayed inside an exceptionally wide, dark-stained wooden frame on a plain white wall. The portrait itself is heavily fractured with sharp, geometric cracks running across his face and body, held together by dark tape. The dark frame is square, deeply recessed, and takes up the vast majority of the overall image area, drawing intense focus to the tiny, damaged photograph in the center.
Aaron Turner, Untitled, 2022, Silver clad daguerreotype plate.

Turner is one of eight U‑M faculty members chosen for the prestigious fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities during the Summer 2026. The fellows will form an intellectual community, participating in regular, cross-disciplinary seminars while they pursue original research and work on scholarly and artistic projects.