French-Senegalese artist and photographer Delphine Diallo does not want to take or capture photographs. She wants to give photographs. In her first solo museum exhibition, the Brooklyn-based Diallo shares how her personal journey to understand her identity has unfolded as she turns the lens on herself and her questions relating to power, autonomy, and connection, particularly as they relate to the representation of Black women’s bodies in photography. Diallo’s quest to reconnect is traced through six series of work that move from photographing women with whom she forms long-term reciprocal relationships, to self-portraits, to her most recent work creating images with Artificial Intelligence (AI). 

For Diallo, the body and its place in history are central to this exhibition. Diallo seeks to reject the exploitative and extractive history of the photography of female bodies and to instead celebrate these bodies as sites of resilience and deep spiritual power. Diallo is inspired by Joseph Campbell’s seminal book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), which outlines the concept of “The Hero’s Journey,” where stories and myths across the world involve a hero who goes on an adventure, overcomes a crisis, and returns home transformed. Delphine Diallo: The Mythic Quest takes viewers on an artist’s journey of discovery, where Diallo has “come home” to a new vision, one centered in establishing a universal female gaze.