Tag Archives: representation

Black Americana

Gallery August 1, 2014 @vossbrink

Creative Producer, Brandon Littlejohn, and Photographer, Rod Gailes OBC, are collaborating to create a brilliant four-part photography series that showcases classic American settings through an Afro-Elite lens. The “Black Americana” series encourages African Americans to challenge societal messages about Blackness, while aspiring to higher levels of art and education on their own terms.

—Taylor N. Lewis

When we weren’t marching, dodging fire hoses, and police dogs biting at our brown skin—when we weren’t singing songs of freedom, and training how to peacefully resist in southern sit-ins, we were doing what other Americans did—we went to the beach. “Island in the Sun”, a first installment in the ground-breaking series “Black Americana” re-introduces, and reclaims the image—the representation of free Black women and men living their lives openly and beautifully. The series seeks to offer a broader lens of Black American life not often seen—a restoration of Black bodies on a summer day in 1950’s America.

—Geneva S. Thomas

This came across tumblr with a link to an Indiegogo campaign from 2012. That campaign appears to have failed mightily. Which is kind of depressing since our retrofetish nature* NEEDS images like these. So much of our romantic view of the 1950’s ignores how divided society was at the time.** To that end, these photos serve two purposes.

*It may be interesting to read to my post on Cars. And its followup.

**For example. How many non-blacks know about the Green Books?

First, they force us to confront how much we expect these kinds of images to be only white people.* The photos read retro. And affluent. And black. And all of a sudden we’re in uncharted territory and questioning our assumptions. This is almost always a good place to be.

*Something Kerry James Marshall does a lot.

Second, we then get to think about what kind of retro images we expect to see black people in. My guess is that it’s probably very much like every single Hollywood biopic where the character grows up impoverished in the South. While it was obviously much more difficult to be Black in the 1950s than it was to be White, picturing an entire group of people in such a limited way is dangerous territory.

I’m sad that the rest of this series didn’t get made. There are more images on the Tumblr but it’s been two years since the last update.

history, photo series

Bons baisers des colonies

Image July 25, 2014 @vossbrink

Ici, les femmes n’ont pas de nom, elles ne sont que des «types». Le corps est une marchandise comme une autre, soumise à une exigence d’exotisme.

[Here, women do not have names, they are only “types.” The body is a commodity like any other, subject to the requirement of exoticism.]

—Safia Belmenouar

Sure enough, colonial postcards were often a kind of soft core porn.

—John Edwin Mason

An exhibition of colonial postcards. It’s a shame more of these aren’t online (the featured image seems to change though) but even the three I’ve seen posted serve to remind us of the kind of baggage that comes with the colonial gaze.

It’s very clear what kind of appeal is being sold here. And what it means to be “exotic” and female. And why images of a mixed-race future when centered around whiteness makes a lot of non-white people uncomfortable. And why appropriation of native clothing for fashion photoshoots or sexy photoshoots perpetuates more than just the male gaze.

photographers

RIP Bunny Yeager

Gallery May 27, 2014 @vossbrink

I’m not doing it to titillate anybody’s interests. I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether it’s a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together. That’s more important to me than anything.

—Bunny Yeager, 1929–2014

Yeager always styled her own backdrops, props and costumes—often making objects and bathing suits from materials at hand. Her unique self-portrait techniques certainly foreshadow the work of contemporary artists Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura, known for their own masquerade-based self-portraiture.

—Andy Warhol Museum

Ms. Yeager, who took up her art by accident, was one of the world’s most celebrated photographers of female nudes and near-nudes of the 1950s and ’60s. She is widely credited with helping turn the erotic pinup — long a murky enterprise in every sense of the word — into high photographic art.

—Her Obituary in the New York Times

We lost one of the stars of Tumblr on Monday. It’s interesting to read the obits and think about how things have changed—both in the what counts as art and what counts as titillating departments. And how so much of both areas today reference these photos still.

It’s also a worthwhile reminder that so much of art now wasn’t art when it was first produced and how fluid those borders and classifications are. Especially in photography.

It’s easy to dismiss these as kitschy pin-ups. Because they are. But they’re so much more too. There’s self-representation. There’s the blurring of the line between photographer and model. There’s the idea of a safe space for the models to work away from any male gaze. There’s the fact that so much of her work appears to have harnessed a genuine sense of fun. There’s the fact that so much of this look (much of which is non-studio in daylight) is the kind of thing people are still trying to copy today.

photo series

This is my Africa

Gallery May 19, 2014 @vossbrink

More than any other continent, Africa’s development has been dictated and perverted by foreign greed, and likewise its image has been defined by the foreign lens. That is the cage of stereotype which the best African photographers have fought to escape for the past 60 years: often rejecting the Western obsession with traditional ceremony and costume, rejecting similarly the associations with violence, poverty and mayhem, sometimes rejecting even the notion of Africa itself—insisting instead on the vast array of identities that have germinated in the continent’s soil.

—Peter Popham

Photography invites and facilitates the process of appropriation and re-appropriation of identity, in a continent where post-colonial or post-apartheid identity are major themes for artists. It naturally engages with social and political issues that compel many artists; telling stories that need to be told.

—Ed Cross

Justin Dingwall. Three Marys.

Gideon Mendel. Joseph and Endurance Edem, With Teir Children Godfreedom and Josephine. — Gideon Mendel. Joseph and Endurance Edem, With Their Children Godfreedom and Josephine.

Namsa Leuba. Statuette Sorsone Oumou, Guinee.

I’m such a sucker for self-representation. Definitely, definitely click through and read about everything on the auction site.

And I don’t have much more to add to this except to quote from something I wrote earlier this year.

As much as the “Africa is a country” thing is an annoying Western ignorant viewpoint, I found that it worked in this case. The commonality of having to deal with resolving cultures after Europe messed with things in the continent makes sense to me. The presentation wasn’t about how all Africa was the same but rather how different African artists dealt with the cultural whiplash of being unleashed from colonialism and set loose in the global economy.

This auction/collection totally fits in with this idea of reappropriating culture in the midst of a post-colonial world. It’s why I fall into the creation side of the “what democratized photography” debate.

photo series

Me Too Am

May 6, 2014 @vossbrink

Note: This was originally posted on NJWV.

A photo campaign highlighting the faces and voices of black students at Harvard College. Our voices often go unheard on this campus, our experiences are devalued, our presence is questioned—this project is our way of speaking back, of claiming this campus, of standing up to say: We are here. This place is ours. We, TOO, are Harvard.

—I, Too, Am Harvard

Our project was inspired by the recent ‘I, too, am Harvard’ initiative. The Harvard project resonated with a sense of communal disaffection that students of colour at Oxford have with the University. The sharing of the Buzzfeed article ‘I, too, am Harvard’ on the online Oxford based race forum, ‘Skin Deep’ led to students quickly self organising a photoshoot within the same week. A message that was consistently reaffirmed throughout the day was that students in their daily encounters at Oxford are made to feel different and Othered from the Oxford community.

—I, Too, Am Oxford

We hope to offer the opportunity to build a stage on which men and women of color can be included in the atmosphere of this campus. Most of all, we want to continue the momentum pushed forth by other I Am movements across the nation and the world.

—I, Too, Am Princeton

So this has become a proper meme on college campuses now. I’ve also seen a Johns Hopkins version on Twitter. I’m sure there are others going on as well. Part of me is resistant to this type of “me too” project in that it risks becoming Yet-Another-I-Too-Am project—where the perceived lack of creativity makes it easier to dismiss the concerns the project raises.

Part of me though sees it as being absolutely necessary since an all-too-easy response to seeing I, Too, Am Harvard is to think “that would never happen here.” It’s very easy to dismiss these as someone else’s problem until one shows up on your campus or alma mater.

This assumes that people, say at Princeton, even saw the Harvard or Oxford projects. I’m totally okay with doing a me too project because you think your audience is ignorant of the other projects. A lot of the point of privilege is being completely unaware of this sort of thing until it gets held up in your face.

I also like looking at these as listing microaggressions rather than completely eggregious racism since it’s very easy for us to dismiss and distance ourselves from the obviously-racist stuff and very difficult for us to even be aware of how we’re all committing microaggressions. The more we’re aware of how these little comments hurt—even the intended-compliments about “good english”—and how we all use them, the better off we’ll all be.

And yes, I’m saying “we all” because I fully subscribe to the idea that we’re all a little bit racist and that acknowledging as much is the most-important step to dealing with it.

About the form

The other thing about these projects that interests me is the form itself. This kind of portrait where the subject is holding a sign isn’t anything new. But it’s become an increasingly popular form on the web. I think a lot of this is because of how popular image macros have become; holding your own sign is a very easy way to make your own in-camera image macro.

It’s also representative of how much photography has become the medium of communication these days. It’s no longer text or images. It’s both. And fluency in both is what all the kids are doing now.

Hairy Beast