The Beyond is a multi-generational collaboration between Anna Friemoth, her mother Penny Gentieu, and Anna’s great-great-great-grandfather Pierre Gentieu, a 19th-century French-born photographer and painter. Featured in the The Writing’s on the Wall at Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art and LagosPhoto, The Beyond, curated by Robin Riskin, is an intergenerational journey through photography that explores the changing role of the camera across shifting social and technological conditions. It is also a spiritual story, a transatlantic story, and a window into ancestry and alternate realities.

Anna Friemoth is the third generation in a family of photographers that spans three centuries: her mother Penny Gentieu, and her great-great-great-grandfather Pierre Gentieu. Pierre came to America from Orthez, France as a man of letters, and he joined a military brigade as much for its fashion as for its action. He stepped out of his Southern brigade in the Civil War and changed sides due to his anti-slavery sentiments—he wrote in a letter to his nephew, “how was it possible that the country boasting of being ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ could legalize such an institution.” Pierre was able to apply his photography skills while employed by the French-American DuPont Powder Company in Delaware, where he quickly rose from labourer to bookkeeper. A century later, his great-great-granddaughter Penny found freedom through the analogue camera, having no idea that her ancestor had also been a photographer. Building on that tradition, Anna wields photography as a portal into new realities.

"Looking at their work over three centuries also provides an incredible opportunity to study the changing role of the camera," Riskin said. "While in Pierre’s time in the late 1800s, the camera was useful as a tool to represent reality, by Penny’s time in the 1970s-90s, the camera was meaningful as a device for social interaction. By Anna’s time in the 2010s and ‘20s, the proliferation of the digital camera and smartphone made her photographic art return closer to abstract painting and assemblage.”

SCCA Tamale is an artist-led institution founded by the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, where the institution itself is an artwork that holds other artworks within it. These works include temporary and permanent exhibitions, forums for discourse and experimentation, on-and-off-site learning, interdisciplinary libraries, civic and cultural collections, and shifting social-ecological formations. SCCA Tamale is linked to sister institutions in Tamale that include Red Clay—a complex of studios with a greenhouse, airplanes, railway cars, archives and forests—and Nkrumah Volini—a reimagination of Kwame Nkrumah’s independence-era silo. Its architectures and agricultures continue to expand whilst the space is in use: an ongoing exhibition of the production of institution-building.

LagosPhoto, launched in 2010, is an international photography festival presented in Nigeria. In a month-long festival, events include exhibitions, workshops, artist presentations, discussions, and large scale outdoor prints displayed throughout the city with the aim of reclaiming public spaces and engaging the general public with multifaceted stories of Africa. LagosPhoto aims to establish a community for contemporary photography which will unite local and international artists through images that encapsulate individual experiences and identities from across all of Africa. LagosPhoto presents and educates about photography as it is embodied in the exploration of historical and contemporary issues, the sharing of cultural practices, and the promotion of social programs.