The show was co-curated by Steven Loft, the National Gallery of Canada’s first Curator-in-Residence, Indigenous Art; and Andrea Kunard, Assistant Curator at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. Both agree that Steeling the Gaze is about using portraiture—a European convention that controls the subject—to explode Aboriginal stereotypes and clichés.

“Some artists in the exhibition, like Arthur Renwick, are deliberately using the camera as a way to confront stereotypes rather aggressively,” Kunard says. “There are the big photographs of faces, where he asked the subjects to think of a stereotype and make a face at it, as a way to confront it and not be a victim of it.”

[…]

Co-curator Stephen Loft, a Mohawk with Jewish ancestry, is now the Trudeau National Visiting Fellow at Ryerson University in Toronto.

“The history of Aboriginal people and photography in general is a very problematic relationship from very early on,” he says. “In the early twentieth century, there was this feeling that the Indian races were going to disappear because of their primitivism and inability to ‘civilize’ . . . of course we don’t go away, we don’t die, and Aboriginal people and artists take the camera into their own hands. Then the gaze shifts.”

– From the National Gallery of Canada’s website