Shange, DeCarava, and the mundane

I was very excited by our class visit to the ICP. I have practically no experience with either the technical or historical practices of photography, and it was incredibly special to be taught by someone who was clearly a passionate expert, and who integrated so much of his personal relationship to the medium into his instruction. I’ve never looked at an image with such love and intensity as I did this past Monday, and I am looking forward to getting to do so more often, and with more developed tools.

Sweet Breath and Sweet Flypaper, then, are the perfect photo-introductions for me, and I really appreciated the addition of text not as something explanatory but suggestive. In the context of the larger narrative of each piece, the photos are still-frames rather than photos, the poems breaths and fragments rather than poems. There’s always been talk about the photographer as predatory, the image being “taken” or “captured,” and other colonizing metaphors –and on Monday it became clear to me that that relationship is not only inherent to photography as a medium but also the act of image-making. Who has the right to create images of what/whom? When am I documenting a subject and when am I “seeing” them? How do we get others to “give” us their images? How do we know when they do?

DeCarava was clearly aware of these questions, and eventually became well-known for deviating from the tradition of black photography as social-documentary that was standard at the time. Peter Galassi, the chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who organized a retrospective of Mr. DeCarava’s work there in 1996, spoke of him to the New York Times:

“He was looking at everyday life in Harlem from the inside, not as a sociological or political vehicle. No photographer black or white before him had really shown ordinary domestic life so perceptively and tenderly, so persuasively.”

This approach reminds me of Shange’s writing. Neither Shange nor DeCarava deny that their subjects are inherently political bodies (the affirmation of which is obviously critical for structurally marginalized peoples) but by ignoring the formalism of “human rights” so intensely preached by other contemporary lenses, get at something arguably more human: the sweet buzz of an emptying kitchen on a Saturday night, a small dark body planted in a sea of white sheets, the black woman who for a moment is not woman or black but simply a pair of eyes, gazing out a window.

from The Sweet Flypaper of Life