Making Images vs. Taking Photos

Visiting the International Center for Photography last Monday for class was a truly inspirational and motivational experience for me!

It feels appropriate for me as I took Photography 1 last semester with the Visual Arts department at Columbia University. It is cool to contextualize the world of photography and understand the limited accessible spaces for dark rooms and film processing. I am excited to be able to use these facilities for our final project!

The presentation on photography was also interesting and reminded me of the ways in which we talked about art and photography in the art history classes I have taken. In fact, Bradley, with whom we will be working closely, concluded the presentation with works by Brooklyn- based artist, Lorna Simpson, an artist I have written about for the class, Feminism and Postmodernism in Art.

The following is an excerpt from my essay, introducing the works of Lorna Simpson:

Lorna Simpson first became well known along the sides of other feminist post-modern artists, such as Barbara Kruger and Carrie Mae Weems. These artists worked to challenge “…the historical image of woman: as sexually available, as an object of surveillance”.[1] More specifically, Simpson was interested in the representation of black women in the arts and media. Born in 1960 in Brooklyn, Simpson grew up with the “…Black Arts Movement, which…placed a premium on certain formulations of ‘positive’ imagery – black heroes, black queens, black (heterosexual) families, black families”.[2] Many of her works in the 1980’s reflect the opposition she had to the image of black women as “…alternatively pathological, criminal, pornographic and reproductive…” that was being portrayed.[3]

Before contributing to the production of images of black people, she practiced documentary photography while traveling through Europe and Africa. But quickly she became critical of the photography medium; the “…investigation of documentary photographs reflect[ed] a general critical inquiry into the historical formation of photographic representations and the disclosure of public factors that influenced their production”.[4] She, along with several of her contemporary artists, were skeptical of the truth that photography seemed to claim and were more interested in using photography as a tool to point out the powers behind image production. As art historian Okwui Enwezor articulates, “Simpson’s estrangement from documentary realism occurred at that moment in historical recognition when the certainties of the monolithic, hegemonic arrangement of economic and political dominance of Western culture experienced an open revolt”[5], Simpson was one of many artists who was influenced by the nation- wide radicalizing discourse on race, gender, sexuality, authority, etc.

[1] Kellie Jones, Thelma Golden, Iles Chrissie, Lorna Simpson (New York: Phaidon Press Inc, 2002), 31.

[2] Ibid, 32.

[3] Ibid, 31.

[4] Beryl Wright, Saidiya Hartman, Lorna Simpson: For the Sake of the Viewer (New York: Universe Publishing, 1992), 15.

[5] Okwui Enwezor, Lorna Simpson (New York City: American Federation of the Arts, 2006), 111.

Bradley brought up that he prefers to say “making images” over “taking photos” because it is one way to remedy the tension Simpson and other artists (as mentioned above) identify in the photography medium. Reading over this essay has been revealing after taking Photography 1 and studying the Black Arts Movement through the works of Ntozake Shange. Just as Shange challenges, disrupts, and reimagines the English language as a medium to represent black people, Lorna Simpson does the same through photography. This parallel encourages me to think about how I can challenge, disrupt, and reimagine the ways in which a digital archive can represent Third World Women collectives that existed in the 1970s and 80s (the subject of my final project!).

Lorna Simpson, “Guarded Conditions” (1989)

Lorna Simpson, “You’re Fine” (1988)