Profound Edges In her 1989 essay “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” bell hooks elaborates upon her previous writing on marginality, addressing the subject in terms of the transformations our social, cultural, and intellectual identities undergo over the course of our lives. Throughout these journeys, we cling to signifiers of a world to which we no longer belong—even as we seek to enter other worlds in which we will never fully arrive. “For me,” she writes, “this space of radical openness is a margin—a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.” For photographic artists, such as the nine whose work is assembled together in Profound Edges, this margin takes on a double resonance, functioning not only socially, perhaps, but also visually: the margin of the photograph, the profound edge between what is seen and unseen, between what is represented and obscured. This fundamental paradox is embedded indelibly within the history of photography itself. No other medium within contemporary art initially emerged as a scientific tool for producing evidence before becoming—over a meandering course throughout the twentieth century—an amateur’s pastime, a pornographer’s plaything, an advertising tool, and then, finally, recognized as an art form. With basically the same technological apparatus, various parties, to various ends, create visions of both truth and fiction—yet we know all of it as photography. What, then, might be the radical openness available at photography’s margins? What sort of resistance does this edge have the potential to incubate? The varied approaches to the medium represented by the work of these nine artists emphasize that photography’s power lies in its multiplicity and ability to push toward new formal possibilities, yet a certain suspicion about the limits of visual representation unifies their distinctive approaches. Instead of relying on direct visual representation, these nine artists suggest there is more richness, more radical possibility, in dwelling and working on the profound edges of what can be revealed and what can be seen. Including works by: Zalika Azim Saskia Baden Amina Cruz Ash Garwood Blake Jacobsen Sam Richardson Kennady Schneider Kyle Tata Chester Vincent Toye psla.xyz