Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2016 i Aperture

In 1926, my grandfather was expelled in the eleventh grade in New York City for asking where African Americans were in the history books. He refused to accept what the teacher told him, that African Americans had done nothing to merit inclusion. He was expelled for his so-called impertinence. His pride was so wounded that he never went back to high school. Instead, he went on to become a jazz musician and a painter, inserting images of African Americans in scenes where he thought they should—and knew they did—exist. The endeavor to affirm the dignity of human life cannot be waged without pictures, without representational justice. This, he knew. American citizenship has long been a project of vision and justice. When I was asked to guest edit this special issue…

The many lives of a contested exhibition catalog. Harlem on My Mind Bridget R. Cooks On January 18, 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened the exhibition Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968. Mired in controversy from the beginning of the curatorial process, it was organized by exhibition committee director Allon Schoener and consisted primarily of photographs arranged in thirteen galleries by decade and themes such as “ 1920–1929: An Urban Black Culture” and “1950–1959: Frustration and Ambivalence.” Schoener and museum director Thomas Hoving conceptualized the exhibition as a humanistic project that would represent the culturally rich and historically black community of Harlem. However, public frustration with the museum’s selection of objects and depiction of cross-cultural relationships led to boycotts of the exhibition before it even…

Director Ava DuVernay is on a mission. With her films I Will Follow (2010), Middle of Nowhere (2012), and the critically acclaimed Selma (2014), about Martin Luther King, Jr., she has created cinematic worlds distinguished by deft character studies and nuanced subtexts. One of the only African American female directors to helm a major Hollywood picture, DuVernay realized early in her career the importance of telling stories as yet untold. In Selma, she portrayed a King of stirring complexity. “We unencased him from marble,” she remarked when the film was released. “We really made him breathe and live as any man would, in his kitchen, telling his wife he’s about to go on a long trip.” In this conversation with her frequent collaborator Bradford Young, two enterprising filmmakers discuss the…

Lorna Simpson resists what her viewers— all viewers—consider their authority: her work demands that we speculate, investigate. What Simpson withholds is certainty. The certainty of familiar visual tropes and textual sequences; the certainty imposed and incited by race, gender, and class histories. Viewing a photograph or collage, you ask: What am I looking at and for? What am I projecting onto what’s here? What must I let go of? Meaning has everything to do with generative uncertainty. And with play: word play; color at play with our sight and psyches; the play between evidence, interpretation, and invention. In her recent collages Simpson plays—starkly, satirically, exuberantly— with black women whose faces she has cut from old issues of Jet and Ebony. Beneath and beside them, from the same magazines, are civil…

In 1859, the black abolitionist paper Anglo-African Magazine published an essay titled “A Statistical View of the Colored Population.” It focused on the nearly four million slaves in the United States, more than in any other nation at the time. After describing the forced migration of almost one million slaves from Virginia and Maryland into Louisiana and Mississippi, the article quotes from Walt Whitman’s 1856 “Poem of the Body” (which became “I Sing the Body Electric”) to describe a slave auction: A man’s body at auction! […] Whatever the bids of the bidders, they cannot be high enough for it, For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years, without one animal or plant, For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily rolled. […] This is not only one man—this…

For over a decade, Leslie Hewitt has been riffing on photography’s “real” time, layering image and repeating form. Her practice, though rooted in photography, expands beyond any strict or bounded understanding of that medium to include sculpture, moving images, and site-specific installation. In the riffs in question—Riffs on Real Time (2013)— she detaches personal ephemera from original context. Notably, she accomplishes this without making that ephemera impersonal, or herself impartial. Instead, she tenderly creates empathic archaeologists of her viewers, encouraging us to look, sifting and mining the signs left behind in faded snapshots and bentcornered magazines. Procedurally, Hewitt works in strata, placing a photograph of that uniquely recognizable vintage dimension atop a rectangular book or magazine or single piece of paper atop a deliciously textured or colored rectangle of floor.…

If you look down toward the river from the upper section of Braddock Avenue, you see a landscape entirely altered by heavy industry. The Edgar Thomson Steelworks was Andrew Carnegie’s first mill. With the other mills in the area now shut down, it is also his last. The industrial landscape on which it sits is interrupted by plumes of smoke and looks blasted and forlorn, like a medieval battlefield or futuristic dystopia. And right next to the mill, to the west and north, is the town of Braddock proper, a grid of single-family homes and empty plots, only a few miles away from downtown Pittsburgh. Before I went to Braddock, I looked up recent news about the town in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. There was very little, and most of it…

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“P oets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers—and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.” —Frederick Douglass Since he was photographed more than any other American of his time, it shouldn’t surprise us that Frederick Douglass not only used photographic images of himself, like he used his oratory, in the battle to end slavery and to insure for the Negro full citizenship rights, but he also theorized about photography, about its nature and its uses. Douglass was, by all accounts, a master orator on his feet, summoning rhetorical tropes and figures seemingly at will to maximum effect. For someone so urgently concerned with effecting immediate political change,…

Dagmawi Woubshet: I think it’s a fair statement to say that one can think of Haile Gerima’s work as a meditation on love. I am reminded of James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, who says that “love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” I think your films, Haile, actually allow us those kinds of self-revelations. And so I hope we can glean from the questions that we’ve come up with, the different idioms of love, and the different inflections of love that show up in your body of work. Sarah Lewis: Thank you, Dagmawi. I wonder, Haile, if you would speak to us a bit about the courage it took to begin your journey from Ethiopia to Chicago, studying…

Awol Erizku, born in Ethiopia, raised in the Bronx, and based in Los Angeles, effortlessly moves among photography, painting, sculpture, installation, and video. He also has a very active presence on social media, and with little notice one might catch an array of new images on Tumblr or a quick exhibition on Instagram. In 2009, he replaced Johannes Vermeer’s white girl wearing a pearl earring with a black one sporting bamboo. He substituted Leonardo da Vinci’s white lady cradling an ermine with a black woman embracing a pit bull. Exacting in pose and in detail, these images focus on the black body and its relationship to Western painting. These portraits, which force us to look at the work of the Old Masters through a black, diasporic lens, challenge Western art…

Well before there was a Kehinde Wiley, there was Jamel Shabazz and his New York street portraiture of subjects framed by regalia of their own making. Black people dignified, noble, shoulders back but with a slight lean to the side. The top-hatted brother dressed in formal attire. The trappings of a distinguished fraternity of men that evoke the long tradition of Marcus Garvey’s ceremonial processions of officers and Black Star nurses, all part of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, an organization of thousands of America’s poorest, standing side by side against the tyranny of their invisibility. From Garvey to the Nation of Islam to Shabazz and his portraits, we see black America’s royal lineage. And yet these are not timeless images. The backstory of these photographs, and Shabazz’s witnessing, marks…

From the beginning, Lyle Ashton Harris has been his own most reliable, malleable, and arresting subject. But his work is usually more about performance than self-portraiture: Harris is playing a role, often a dramatic and subversive one. He has photographed himself bare chested in whiteface; in full makeup as Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker; in gold-buttoned regalia as Toussaint L’Ouverture; and bloodied and sweating in a jockstrap as a boxer. He has played femme and butch, seductive and aggressive, pretty and potent. “I’ve always been interested in liminality,” Harris told Peter Halley in an interview for a self-titled 2014 catalog, “ of being on the border of multiple crossover points, such as race, sexuality, and gender. And how does one engage that elasticity? … For me it’s always been less…

Dawoud Bey’s The Birmingham Project memorializes one of the most heartwrenching attacks of the American civil rights movement: the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, by four Klansmen on September 15, 1963. The explosion killed four girls preparing for Sunday school: Addie Mae Collins, 14, Denise McNair, 11, Carole Robertson, 14, and Cynthia Wesley, 14. More than twenty others were injured in the church, and two other black youths lost their lives in the immediate aftermath. Birmingham police shot Johnny Robinson, 16, and white teens murdered Virgil Ware, 13, as he rode his bike through the white side of town. Over the course of fifty years, this attack has been commemorated in fiction and poetry, film and visual arts— works that largely intone “never forget.” In…

In 1925, Alain Locke wrote, “In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination.” Nowhere is this historical sentiment more evident than in the photographs of James VanDerZee, the best known of a generation of studio photographers chronicling the breadth and depth of black life in the early and mid-twentieth century. VanDerZee’s images, and those of his counterparts in cities and towns across the country, were transformative in creating a new visual narrative of the African American experience. Works such as Christmas Morning (1933), in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem, offered images of what an economically empowered and socially engaged African American community looked like at that time. VanDerZee’s pointed portrayal of a broad range of black culture was made even…

For Hank Willis Thomas—conceptual photographer and multimedia artist—American commerce is a perpetual source of slogans and spectacles. In his series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America, 1968–2008, Thomas excised the logos from post-civil-rightsera advertisements for products marketed to African Americans, unveiling an array of stereotypes. Question Bridge: Black Males, an ongoing transmedia project cocreated by Thomas, Chris Johnson, and other artists, is a forum for black men to ask other black men questions about their lives. In Question Bridge: Black Males in America, published by Aperture in 2015, one participant asks, “What is common to all of us that makes us who we are?” Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present, 2000 This was my mother’s fifteenth book looking at the experiences and…

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s drawings engage, destroy, highlight, and ultimately privilege a new grammar for blackness. Using black ballpoint, graphite, pastel, and charcoal, Odutola subordinates representation and fact telling to mark making and open-ended image construction. Before a face becomes a face, for example, we take in its shapes, tonality, and lines. Whose particular face we are traveling toward rarely is the point. Whether Prince Charles’s portrait or Odutola’s self-portrait, what matters is not the specific identity of the subject but the cumulative buildup of line that brings weight, complexity, and mobility to her images. It is here—in the line— that Odutola’s genius lives. In Odutola’s work, the materials and the marks they make become primary. In her hands, portraits hand over their individuality and negate racial specificity. The marks themselves…

A candelabra, a beach scene, a beauty shop, a weathered façade, a classic female silhouette, a self-portrait. What do these images have in common? The historian and photographer Deborah Willis might tell you that they initiate a dialogue about beauty in its many forms. For several years now, her ongoing Framing Beauty series (begun in 2013) has done just that. Without the gimmickry of darkroom or digital manipulation, she relies on the raw materials of the images she composes—mirrors, windows, contours, reflective surfaces, shadows, water, the body—to render compositions with an uncompromising depth that bends two dimensions into three. A virtual world of history, memory, emotion, power, play, and, of course, beauty are revealed. Not just on the surface, hers is a beauty of purpose, promise, and pride. Willis was…

On Sunday, April 19, 2015, Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old Baltimore man, died from injuries suffered during his arrest made seven days earlier by Baltimore police. The peaceful protests that followed Gray’s initial encounter with six officers quickly turned to violent confrontations following the news of his death that Sunday. By April 25, fires and rebellion spread throughout the city. Devin Allen had been shooting photographs for only two years when, that April, his images of protests in Baltimore went viral on the Internet and the self-taught photographer became an overnight sensation. Within weeks, one of Allen’s potent images— of a man, masked by a cap and bandana, running away from a charging army of police clad in riot gear—made the cover of Time. According to Allen, this image, taken on…

When President Barack Obama delivered the eulogy in the wake of Reverend Clementa Pinckney’s assassination in June 2015, I couldn’t help but feel that his voice was echoing, as if coming to me from some other time. In his remarks for the assassinated Democratic state senator and senior pastor at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Obama was careful to narrate the church’s history, from slavery to freedom and the long journey between, as a hush harbor, praise house, rest stop, and community center. In Obama’s sermon, he didn’t hesitate to put the church shooting in unequivocally biblical terms: “The Bible calls us to hope,” he began, “to persevere, and have faith in things not seen.” Photographer Deana Lawson, in a recent portfolio for Time magazine, captures the paradoxical power…