Images and Text: Questions of Identity and Meaning

I learned in a photography class at Barnard that early photography began to flourish among the masses with the adoption of portraiture by the middle class in the mid-1800s. Disderí, the European photographer who became famous for photographing the masses, created small photos of people called carte de visite that were more accessible to the middle class. He was often contrasted with other photographers who only photographed the rich. The professor argued that the middle class used photography as a statement of their status and as a way of self-fashioning. We, the students in the class, were prompted to inquire as to what the subjects of photographs were trying to say. Most of the photographs we looked at in this class were not created by black Americans nor did they feature people of color.

After our first class at the ICP, I began thinking about what parallels there are between the early “middle class portraiture” I had learned about and black photography. I believe a lot of the same questions still apply. For example: How do black people choose to identify themselves and who does it benefit? Are black people even allowed to self-identify? Is there a difference between how we choose to identify as individuals and how black people are identified as a whole? These are questions are further complicated when they are applied to images that are accompanied by captions or text.

One photo I found particularly intriguing in The Sweet Breath of Life was the photo of the young girl accompanied by the poem entitle “porches.” The composition of the photo is very straightforward. A little girl sits on a porch, accompanied by her doll. The darkness of the porch is contrasted be the lightness of her shirt, shoes, socks and her dolls outfit. There is nothing more childlike than a girl playing with her dolls hair. We can almost imagine a mother, or an aunt, or some other caretaker somewhere nearby. On its own all I could see in this picture is innocence and simplicity. When I studied the image in the context of the poem I began to see the girl as someone older, who knows a bit more about what life really is. The porch stops being an unchanging fixture and begins to represent movement, change and the passing of days. Shange writes that the porch “comes alive with the…wonder of the afternoon’s surprises/lookin’ beyond ourselves and to ourselves,” (25). The image of the little girls is then imbued with a sense of anticipation for the future and an anxiety of what may become of her. With Shange’s poem the girl becomes more mature and her situation slightly more precarious. The audience is forced to wonder how much longer life will allow her the innocence of playing with dolls before more adult matters begin to preoccupy her. Shange’s poetry complicates the identity of the child because it is independent of the photographer’s intentions.

Information about Disderí onWikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/André-Adolphe-Eugène_Disdéri

Disderí carte de visite images: disderi carte de visite