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from the series We Have Made These Lands What They Are

galerie frank elbaz Paris is pleased to announce the first solo show of Keris Salmon in Europe.

Keris Salmon is a journalist and artist. She is currently working on a photography and letterpress series on American and Caribbean ante-bellum plantations. Trained as a journalist and after a career in documentary filmmaking, she recently turned to story telling through the combination of words and still imagery. As an African-American woman married to a white man – descendant of the family that owned the largest American tobacco plantation in the ante-bellum south – her most recent work explores family histories and their complex layers of relationships, unveiling the many significant links between black peoples’ past and present. Salmon examines her connection to her own past, her partnership with her husband and ancestors’ ownership of slaves, and her relationship with her children, and a future generation that will continue to grapple with an identity born from a tragic history.

For her editioned portfolio, We Have Made These Lands What They Are: The Architecture of Slavery, Salmon spent two years photographing ante-bellum Southern plantations and collecting the language and history of the U.S. slave economy. Salmon writes, “A variety of voices – slave-owners and slaves – come together chronologically here to form a solemn chorus to the dirge of American slavery. What results is a complexity of feeling and nuanced understanding of an institution that still defines us.”

Keris Salmon (b. in 1959 in New York, NY, USA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA) graduated from Stanford University in 1981 and completed her graduate studies in Journalism at UC Berkeley in 1985. In 2015, Salmon had a solo exhibition with Josee Bienvenu Gallery (New York, NY, USA). Recent group exhibitions include samsøn, (Boston, MA, USA), Arsenal Gallery (New York, NY, USA), Space Gallery (Portland, ME, USA), and Powerhouse Arena (Brooklyn, NY, USA).