ALLISON BOLAH

She must be white. And she must not be an immigrant. Her perspective on education, on employment, on debt, not to say anything of her opinion on the role of art for individuals or communities, all belie a sense of entitlement to being – just being – in the world.

She represents none of the things that I or my students of color, many of whom are also immigrants, know: an education, if it’s available to you in any form, no matter the cost, is priceless; big box discount retail work is there when pretty much every other door is closed to you or you need a second job to make ends meet; you take on debt to maintain a working level of dignity in a society that will consistently treat you like shit without certain markers but will treat you marginally less shittily (not better, less shittily) if you can acquire the right somethings – should you happen to figure out what those ‘right somethings’ are and where they might exist.

A friend and former professor of mine who is Puerto Rican and Afro-Latina adheres with perfect devotion to a program of self-love. Her clothes, her hair, the framework of her thinking and doing in the world, all remember her origins. Every opportunity she has she takes to use every resource available to recover and reclaim every aspect of her history, a legacy that this society has methodically endeavored to erase or forget. That is education. Furthermore, when it comes to research in her field, command of her subject, and the presentation of information, her rigor is unsurpassed. Her professional excellence isn’t the result of her passion for the subject; as a scholar and as an educator, she refuses to be complicit in any program of elision. Besides, if she was less than perfect as an academic, if she bullshat her way through, she wouldn’t be chuckled at or called “irreverent”, she’d be shamed.

And debt. Beyond the financial costs associated with post-secondary education of any kind, what is the debt in time and attention for active parents/partners/family and/or community members who perfect their crafts, polish performances, and memorize and produce instantly the names, theories, and accomplishments of relevant practitioners in their fields only to have to fight for the professional footing and recognition that goes so easily to ‘edgy’ white contemporaries? Time and attention are debts that cannot be repaid in minimum monthly amounts only to be forgiven after 20 years (240 consecutive payments). Time passes.

When I was 17, I passionately loved literature and was falling hard for photography. I was an adequate high school student; except for my English and theatre classes and the occasional history course, I was bored out of my mind. So, I, too, made the leap to a private college I could not afford where I also putzed around academically. I had a disastrous sophomore year. I dabbled in art history rather than take in a timely fashion the courses required for my English major. However, instead of flubbing the finale, in my senior year I took on more expenses and registered for and passed (more than adequately) all of the courses necessary to complete my degree. And I used loans to pay the last bill. My mother, my sister, my father, my professors, my ancestors, and any person for whom I’ve done any good since my undergraduate graduation were and are – always – more than enough reason for me finish what I start.

White people should duke it out over the cost of an education or whether the quality or cogency of that education is worth the price – they set the prices and the curricula (and, lately, in that order to predictable ends). But because she’s entitled to bitch about her fancy, expensive, unofficial BFA (which, let’s be honest, all she has to do is say the name of her school, she doesn’t actually need the diploma or transcript to get on with it), the rest of us have to cobble together the means to be in this world from available materials no matter the cost.

It isn’t that Moonlight is perfect or that Bobby Rogers is wrong: Moonlight, as far as I remember, doesn’t pass the Bechdel test; thinking through Rogers’ statement makes me wonder if all the times I’ve credited myself with being a ‘good’ photographer of Black skin, I was simply unconsciously bending myself around the medium’s bias.

The corrections are subtle. They’re like doing five minutes of yoga everyday for three months and suddenly realizing that your feet are strong on the ground (arches active, weight distributed evenly from big toes through to baby toes and back to the heels).

So I ask myself, at what point is it unnecessary for two women to appear in a movie together and have a conversation that’s not about a man? At what point is it important for two women to appear in a movie together and explicitly have a conversation about a man? And, what, in fact, do I think of the two women featured in Moonlight?

People don’t mind when I take their picture. I’ve rarely had complaints about the end results. I’ve always tried to see people as they’d like to be seen and work with my tools to portray a sort of joint vision of my subjects. But even that language, ‘my subjects’, is problematic, and I am conscious of that before, during, and after image making. It is hard to be looked at, watched, studied, adjusted, and so I try to reassure and remain trustworthy.

Paula, Chiron’s mother, nags at me; I’ve seen her before, with particular reference to Halle Berry’s Vivian in Jungle Fever. I wrestle with Paula. I know she existed, exists. The moment when she lashes out at Juan rings true to me, as does Juan’s reaction when he’s questioned by Chiron about Paula. Even the way Chiron is later able to reconcile with Paula feels honest. But Paula as a construct in the movie feels like a plot device. Teresa feels better, more human than Paula’s wraith, still… There’s an archetypal hollowness in both female characters that isn’t a result of the way the actors portray them.

In the beginning, as soon as I could, I worked in black and white. On the rare occasion that I did work in color, I hated Kodak’s mass market film – it was too rose gold no matter who processed my negatives and printed my images.¹ I preferred Fuji’s products as their film, to my eye, printed neutral or slightly cool. In those early days, I never photographed using a flash or artificial light; hot pops of light flattened, and both Kodak and Fuji’s color negative reversal film’s white balance were totally unforgiving when it came to color temperature. In both black and white and color, I always used the slowest film available; I like smooth grain and subtle shifts in tone. I hate high gloss, so I always printed on matte paper. Could it be that all of these ‘preferences’, these habits of my photographer’s mind, these steps that made me a careful, patient practitioner of my art were really only my way of subconsciously working against an inherently racist system?

One of the things that I like best about the whole James Baldwin/Richard Wright dust up is that it happened. Among Black public intellectuals, there is a long history of line-drawing, side-taking, and, ultimately, dukes up verbal and written brawls over theory and practice in politics, public service, and art. A monolithic approach to living cannot/does not/should not exist, and is most certainly not a part of Black diasporic experiences. Thus, our own intellectual assessments of these experiences must encounter and occasionally butt heads with others’ interpretations. It is in that spirit that Mrs. Thomas lodged her one complaint about the novel Sula, it left her cold: ‘there is no redeeming quality to Sula’, even as I raved about the way the novel goes to the mat for the importance of Black women’s friendships. It is in that spirit that I consider the role of women in Moonlight even as it is abundantly evident to me that what it does with its male characters is extraordinary. Often, critiques are seen as a tearing down, as though it is impossible to have a good thing without finding something, something wrong with it. But the thing is still there. Sula and Moonlight are still virtuoso works of art. Sula isn’t the Bible, Moonlight isn’t a novel, but, as a community, we still need full representations of the myriad disparate notions and individuals that make us a ‘we’. The novel and the movie – and the whys and wherefores and hows of both – must face rigorous critical consideration even as they are simultaneously celebrated. Or, put another way, why is it so hard to represent Black women in our fullness rather than requiring us to be saints or deeming us sinners?

To date, my greatest satisfaction in color photography was when I worked with Connie at a Fuji product-based MotoPhoto. We maintained the chemicals and printed the images ourselves. Connie taught me how to balance color image-by-image – no automatic runs for us – because light will change from frame to frame on one roll of film. She emphasized that, in terms of color balance, the people in the images had to look as real as possible. Connie is Black like me, a woman like me, an artist like me. Perhaps her attention to detail stems from the same sources as mine. Perhaps she, like me, knows how bad we can look in a photograph taken and processed by someone who’s uninformed or careless or how satisfying it can be to be rendered by a thoughtful, proficient photographer and printer. Perhaps, however, as seems implicit in Rogers’ statement, white photographers never ever had to have these conversations.

And then, three months later, you start to think about the ground…

You your best thing, Sethe. You are.

Toward the end of film version of The NeverEnding Story, the Childlike Empress tells Atreyu that Bastian “doesn’t realize he’s already a part of the never-ending story…” I just read a young Black artist’s claim that photography is “a medium initially created to not recognize blackness as worthy.” This sort of statement is what happens when we – any ‘we’ – don’t know that we are a part of the never-ending story.

Should I work my way backward or forward through the relevant photographic history? Forward.

Ansel Adams and Fred Archer’s Zone System was designed to ensure that a photographer thinking through the creation of a negative would use the light meter to make the adjustments necessary to record a full range of tones. In black and white photography, correct application of the Zone System prevents ‘muddy’ shadows and ‘blown out’ highlights. Essentially, it encourages the photographer to think about and mirror the way the eye really sees, the pupil constricts or dilates to take in as much detail as possible in bright or low light. That some photographers maybe wanted ‘light’ skin to appear even lighter than reality in prints – potentially at the expense of accurate portrayals darker skinned companions in those images – is indicative of those photographers’ predilections, not the medium’s short comings.

At Howard, Professor Kennedy made sure to point us in the direction of Roy DeCarava’s work for exactly this reason. In his photographs, DeCarava rendered every possible shade of shade. Looking at his images on a computer screen is good, but one of the reasons I will always go to the big art fairs is because every year, something that’s a revelation is on view. In December 2015, Jenkins Johnson Gallery‘s booth in the main fair had on view Selected Works by Roy DeCarava. Imagine seeing the opening image in person. I saw it. Mind blowing.

This is DeCarava’s self-portrait from 1949:

Did DeCarava use the Zone System? Perhaps, but I do know that when I worked in black and white photography, DeCarava’s work and the standard that a good print purposefully represents everything it renders anchored my image making.

Color photography’s is a different story. People working for specific companies actively configured the technology to suit their racist ends; perhaps both Polaroid and Kodak‘s checkered history is the source of Bobby Rogers’ assertion. Looking at photographs of my mother and her siblings in the 60s and 70s or my mom and dad in the 70s, I don’t see evidence of Kodak’s narrow light sensitivity, and that’s likely because they aren’t using Kodak film and paper – they weren’t in the US. And, I do know that I was born in the middle of the decade in question and that mine and my sister’s and our Black peers’ childhood snapshots show us pretty much as we were.

We aren’t the brownest Black people, and that’s important to consider. It’s also important to think about color photographs of Black people made by Black photographers:

Like DeCarava, Parks was a photographic genius, and, as a professional, he had better material (Kodachrome) and processing that the layman. These images are perfection. In them, Black people are regarded with warmth, in them, we are loved.

It hurts me to hear a young someone who’s just starting to work in photography begin with the idea – without nuance – that the medium has always worked against us when, from James VanDerZee to DeCarava to Parks to, from African and Caribbean photographers working in their community-based commercial studios, and from Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems and Adrian Piper, other artists – artists who, on some level, many levels, share his history and experiences – have worked diligently – as he is – to witness our lives beautifully through the medium.

At what point do ‘knowers’, like Rogers who ‘knows’ the racist history of the medium, become seekers? Knowing is only the first step; to think critically, the next step must be methodically, faithfully questioning what is known.