These are the remarks I offered at our finale to my incredible Exposed DC team, to the DC Public Library for archiving our entire collection, and to everyone who has been a part of this wonderful community for 19 years. You can watch the remarks here; they are slightly edited for reposting.
Good evening everybody. I’m so pleased to have you all here tonight for this celebration. My name is Heather Goss, and I kicked off this little venture called Exposed DC back in 2006.
We are here to celebrate two milestones tonight. We are inducting our entire photography collection into The People’s Archives here at the DC Public Library. And we’re celebrating the finale of Exposed DC after nearly two decades of featuring local photography.
Every year, as you all know, we host an exhibition that showcases life and culture in the District, through the eyes of the people who live, work, and love here. Over the last 18 years, many hundreds of photographers have shown us their vision of the city in one of our shows. Over that time, more than 10,000 people have joined us at celebrations just like this one to see your work.
We have been fortunate to have had many words written about Exposed over the years. But when people ask me what Exposed DC is, I often think about the words written by one of our own photographers, our friend Joe Flood. He wrote, “If I wanted to explain to someone what happened in DC in the last year, I would take them to the Exposed DC Photography Show. Full of feeling, the photos show what it was like to be alive during this time in Washington.”
When I think about why the photos in Exposed are so special, I often think about one of my favorite books on photography. It’s called The Ongoing Moment, by Geoff Dyer. In it, Dyer looks at the canon of American photography and he sees all these recurring, simple motifs—benches, street musicians, solitary woman or men in overcoats. He sees these scenes repeated over and over again, by Stieglitz and Evans, by Lange and Arbus. Each one lending their own vision to the scene. He says that together these photographers have created an “ongoing moment,” where these images and themes are continuously resonating and evolving through the eyes of each new photographer.
So you might see why I think about this when I think about Exposed. Our photographers find all the familiar scenes that make up our lives here in the District. From our daily metro rides and walks to the local bar, to the crowds at the cherry blossoms and protests on the Mall. Year after year, our photographers reshape these scenes into our ongoing moment, in beautiful and strange and sometimes absolutely stunning new ways.
I can’t think of a more natural place to capture that moment than at the DC Public Library, an institution that stewards our collective, cultural memory, and ensures it stays a living one. I could not be more proud that the Exposed DC Photography Collection will be a small part of the memory that they care for.
Thank you so much to Laura Farley, the assistant manager for digital initiatives at The People’s Archive, who has been so instrumental in helping us make this collection a reality. Thank you as well to Maya, and Ayahna and everyone here at the Library that helped us create this collection and our celebration event.
Before we toast, we have one more thing to celebrate—which is that this celebration is the finale for us at Exposed DC after nearly two decades. So if you’ll bear with me just a few more minutes, there are several people I need to thank for getting us here.
Many of you joined back when this was called the DCist Exposed Photography Show. That’s where this whole thing began, back at what was then a start-up local news venture. We had a small army of DCist staffers who volunteered their time to learn how to perfectly hang a photo, or pour thousands of draft beers at a makeshift bar in the middle of a gallery. Our team at DCist made those first few years of Exposed possible, and also extremely fun.
After DCist, we became Exposed DC, a nonprofit organization that has grown and thrived through a staggeringly long list of partnerships with local businesses and community organizations. That includes the ones who have helped us throw our celebratory event—our friends at Aperturent and Capital Photography Center.
We’re also thrilled to partner with Robin Bell, an incredible DC-based multimedia artist who created a custom projection that’s showed throughout the event featuring our entire collection. I also want to give a shout out to DJ Sequoia and v:shal. They have played the soundtrack for many years of Exposed events, and I’m so happy to have them at our finale.
When it comes to support, I especially need to thank the DC Commission on Arts and Humanities. Their generosity has made our finale celebration possible, as well as so much of our work over the years.
Through all these partnerships, we have been able to stretch so far beyond the annual show, with community events and happy hours, classes and workshops, our Friday newsletter of all things photography, and so many special exhibits. We have been fortunate to have had our show hosted by what I think are some iconic DC venues, from our very first year at Warehouse—where Molly and Paul Ruppert trusted us with that first show—to our 10th anniversary at the Carnegie Library with the DC History Center, and all the way to tonight, on this incredible roof deck.
Nevertheless, Exposed has always remained a small organization. And many of our teammates have been with us since the very beginning. I do not have enough gratitude for my friend, James Calder. He was a photographer in the show, and asked to volunteer, and then quickly became my co-executive director for many years. He created so much of the infrastructure that allowed us to go from that first year into something we could recreate, year after year. And he’s a damn fine photographer that helped shape the early curation of this collection.
Jennifer Wade is another great photographer who was also in the show, joined as a volunteer and is now one of our board members. She has brought the very important theater director role to Exposed, helping us keep the experience of the show as good as the images that are in it.
Leigh Bailey has brought her non-profit business expertise to us—and she’s also led and coordinated all of our volunteers who ran our celebration event. A huge thank you to those volunteers, as well as all the many, many volunteers over the years who have helped us pull all this off for so long.
And a thank you to Board members Yonas Hassan, Sriram Gopal, Kim Keller, and Satya Ponnaluri. They have all generously volunteered their time and expertise to ensure Exposed DC’s success.
And then there is Noe Todorovich. Noe has led Exposed as the executive director ever since James and I basically ambushed her with the job offer many years ago. I cannot think of anybody who could have led Exposed through its second decade any better. She did it through the good times when we were juggling almost too many opportunities to handle, and she did it all the way through the pandemic, finding creative ways for us to continue to gather to keep celebrating photography and celebrating our community. She helmed us all the way to this launch, and I am both so proud and so grateful for her leadership.
And finally, a last remark for all of the photographers who have been part of our community for so many years. Our team at Exposed DC—we feel so fortunate to know you and to have been part of what you all created. This collection is our thank you to all of you.
I offer a toast: To everyone who is here because you love photography, or maybe you love a photographer, or you just love this city. The collection we’ve created here is ours, but it is also now the People’s, so instead of the end, let us toast to our ongoing moment.
