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ALLISON BOLAH

How does a thing like this happen!? Part 2

An artist friend was once stranded in Ukraine because a project translator had been arrested. Back home, when filling me in on what had unfolded, a mutual friend described both our friend’s situation and mood as “miasma”. Seven years in the future, “miasma” has new meaning, and I’m grateful to know well people outside of my family who are 15, 20, 30 years older than I. When our mutual friend said “miasma”, the sound of the word and the accompanying expression said “endure”.

Late in childhood, there was a day over Winter Break maybe that I waited in an office in 1980s Jamaica as the bureaucratic processes behind procuring a Visa unfolded. Nowhere to go, nothing to see. Just wait. Daydream a little. Answer steadily. Sit quietly. (And you still might not get home. I mean, you will, but .001%…) I imagined my friend’s situation as weeks of an exponentially more fraught version of that appointment with the added pressure of securing the translator’s release. (And you still might not get home. I mean, you will, but 30%…)

I’m stuck in 2020. The intensity is somewhere between 1980s Jamaica and Ukraine 2013. (I still might not get home. I mean, I will, but 5%?) And, truthfully, I feel cornered by robber barons and their enablers in government. Recently, another friend and I were talking about what, exactly, is so irksome about the solutions parachuted in to crises small and global by “those guys”. I’ve had a year to think it over.

A tech guy who’s come up with some tech something that makes a mint believes his success is the result of his genius, his insight. To fields outside of his own, he takes his power. He thinks his power is his keen perception, but it’s only fame and money. He expects correlating results — if not more money, then certainly more attention. If he’s more conscientious than arrogant, he’ll give real consideration to the new terrain, but he’ll remain, at best, a serious dilettante. His power improves things in these other spheres, but not really; rather than use his influence to help convene consortia of individuals deeply embedded in these other fields — gatherings of people who have insight and strategies of substance instead of teams of titles and fellow attendees of X institutions — awe of this guy’s name and money facilitates a flurry of showy movement that may or may not actually amount to actual advances.

American culture trains people seek money and recognition as avatars of power and to revere those manifestations. But on reflection, it seems to me that real power is a phenomenon of collectives and that to constantly direct money and attention back to singularly insatiable individuals is pointless.

If someone wanted to, say, improve public schools in some American county, I think it would be cool to begin by canvasing in-depth responses from every single public school student, guardian, teacher, administrator, and staff member about the purpose of school in general and the state of the county’s public schools in particular. A second pass would pose the same questions to ALL county citizens.1 Every perspective would be considered because all community members are affected by what does and doesn’t happen in public schools. There would have to be a willingness on the part of those currently in control of schools to build schools anew from the ground up — and possibly render their control obsolete — if the community suggested that that was necessary. And a tech guy could to totally facilitate this process. But, if every perspective were truly considered, he couldn’t distinguish himself based on his perspective. He and those currently in control would have to work together to honor the power of the collective out of a willingness to help the community function as the whole community sees fit. (And then the community would ask, well, why haven’t our tax dollars been doing this?)

  1. Rather than in a purely legal sense, I use “citizen” to mean community members empowered to act on how the community functions. For me that ought to be everyone in a community. ↩︎
Published: 23 December 2020Author: AllisonCategory: corrections

Day 179: How does a thing like this happen!?

Editor’s Note: After publication of this photo essay, Times Opinion photo editors were alerted to Tonika Lewis Johnson's work, which also addresses segregation and inequality in Chicago. We encourage readers to learn more about Ms. Johnson’s Folded Map project.

Yesterday, my brilliant friend and I were talking about a certain Midwestern photographer, who, in my opinion, while exceedingly good at the thing he does, does that thing in the most entitled way possible. There’s very little critical reflection apparent in his work, and that allows him to go to places and make photographs that, if one were prone to critical reflection, might give one pause for thought. That’s convoluted. His position in the world as a white American man has, for his whole life, allowed him to go anywhere and photograph anything however he likes without any sort of hesitation. I would even guess that he approaches the logistics of working as a photographer as part of the fun of his work rather than legitimate points of sociopolitical tension in the world we share. That’s less convoluted, no?

While my friend and I were talking, I said, several times, that this man’s work is good, very good, but that he comes across as dick to me. It’s a feeling that I can’t shake. I also said that, because he’s established in a very particular way in a very particular city, that it doesn’t really matter that he’s a dick. If confronted with the possibility of his dickishness (he won’t be; he’s too available and amiable), it wouldn’t even register, so unassailable is the fortress of his solid guy rightness. I ran down a list of photographers working in a similar vein to juxtapose his work. The internet is fantastic when you’re looking to put your finger on a thing that irks you. After considering one of his projects, I said, this is like Diane Arbus without the sex. My friend said, like in Manhattan, “Diane Arbus with none of the wit”. That led us to Woody Allen’s Match Point – the movie that made me realize that Woody Allen, like the photographer in question, is only sophisticated to a very particular kind of American guy and those who would characterize that guy as sophisticated.

My friend and I exchange articles and essays. We rove the internet looking for pieces of ourselves. For me, that means hidden Grenadians and Jamaicans and Canadians, Francophone Caribbeans and Africans, Black people with British New Wave fetishes and strong opinions on Joy Division, unapologetically goth Latinos, artists and designers in turmoil over the point of their work, people at war with the things they “do”. At Howard, it dawned on me that there is a whole universe of history, of thinking that one must work diligently to know. It isn’t lesser, it isn’t slim, it isn’t an “alternative”, you don’t do it to be cutting-edge. When I came to that awareness, I decided I would have to do the proverbial “twice-the-work” to engage with things I’d have to work to know and simultaneously handle information that is widely propagated.

There is humility in this kind of working to know. It is a humbling process. But it isn’t humbling in the way that learning a camera is humbling. It isn’t you and the machine, you and the moment wherein you create the image. It humbles you in the face of your forebearers and the people with whom you share the world today. I think that’s the part that’s missing from this photographer’s work; to my eye, he’s clearly in conversation with the “greats” of photographic history, but he doesn’t really give a shit about the people with whom he currently shares the world.

I’m prone to lectures because I’m a teacher. But before I was a teacher I was a photographer at war with my medium. And, after I became a teacher, I became an artist. I am all of these things at once, and wrestle constantly with how each one exists in community. I hesitate to say it’s a better way to be in the world, but it’s a better way to be in the world. (I have a friend who says I’m an asshole; I don’t know how different that is from being a dick, it might not be too far. I do know I’m self-righteous, but only because I’m right.)

I’d had the article open for three days. I waited until the weekend to read it. I didn’t read it yesterday as my friend and I were having so much fun talking shit about our “betters”. I had no idea it was a photo essay until I opened the article today. And I know exactly how that Editor’s Note happened.

  1. I don’t think it matters anymore that “they” see “us” because we see them;
  2. #1 is why there are suddenly (well, not suddenly if you’ve been paying attention) attacks on the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory;
  3. My wonderful friend made a point about that particular city and its art scene: “So much is at stake in being on top of things; if you’re not on the cutting edge, you’ve already lost.”
  4. Imagine thinking that – even after a tour de force like The Case for Reparations – no one in Chicago, Chicago! had come up with a way to visually interrogate that city’s inequalities. The arrogance! How incurious.
  5. (My mother thinks it’s pure plagiarism.)
Published: 7 September 2020Author: AllisonCategory: corrections, shelter-at-home

the corrections: from this position

I often feel like I’m typing into the void (I am, I know it; it’s somewhat by design). But, every once in a while, I’m reassured that my thoughts are reasonably constructed and connected in valid ways to the things on which I reflect.

I’ve been thinking about journalism a lot lately, and the way that some journalists have a very narrow ‘beat’ and others have a general genre and are given free reign to cover a variety of topics in that sphere. For instance, ahead of Basquiat: Boom For Real at the Barbican Centre Art Gallery in London, The Guardian has run a series of articles by their staff writers about Jean-Michel Basquiat covering everything from his personal aesthetic to race/power/money to one-off meetings with the artist to in-depth reflections from some who knew him well. Their writing is erudite, insightful, but, for my tastes, a little too broad given the people who I’ve known to work on contextualizing Basquiat’s work and life within African Diasporic (Afro-Caribbean and Black American) histories and culture rather than as a central-yet-marginal figure in the all-too rarefied and white ‘art world’.1

Jean-Michel Basquiat, To Repel Ghosts, 1986
Jean-Michel Basquiat, To Repel Ghosts, 1986

Seph Rodney‘s work at Hyperallergic, is, to me, the antithesis of what The Guardian has done with Baquiat. Rodney’s perspective is critical, steeped in research, and shapes his pointed questions about art and community. So, it seems fitting that, as a conscious or unconscious rejoinder to the inclusion of THAT essay in Hyperallergic’s Required Reading for the week ending/beginning September 10, 2017, Rodney re-interviewed an artist and ‘Dreamer’ currently attending art school, THAT art school. The opening of the interview vindicates my ire with THAT essay:2

Seph Rodney: Hi REDACTED. We’re having this conversation because we had talked last year about your immigration status and how that affected your experience as an art student at CCA. Now we want to follow up, given what’s happened in the past week, with the president ending DACA. We had exchanged emails, and you said that you felt very precarious, very anxious about what was happening, and that you might lose the Cal Grant funding you have. Is that still the case?

REDACTED:  I believe so, yes, because previous to having DACA I was not able to actually transfer from community college to California College of the Arts. Without DACA, I had actually applied to California College of the Arts and got accepted, but I wasn’t able to make the transition because I didn’t have the Cal Grant, so the Cal Grant plays a huge role in me being able to continue [my studies].

I should be in the last semester of my junior year, but because I don’t know what’s happening with DACA and these six months are just living in a limbo, I’m actually starting my senior year instead, and I’m forced to put all my classes into a very hectic schedule so that I can graduate Spring of 2018. My DACA expires October of 2018, which I knew was going to happen and so the best I can do is graduate before October, just to guarantee that I will finish here at CCA.

SR: Right. Because the alternative is if you’re not done, then you basically have no degree and you may be deported.

REDACTED: Correct. Exactly. And that is one of my biggest fears right now, I’m actually doing, I think, seven classes, and the normal is five or four, no more than that, but because I can’t lose the scholarship that I have and I can’t go halfway through with my education, I’m going to do whatever it takes to get out of here next spring, just to guarantee that I won’t lose everything I’ve worked for so far.

Emphasis mine.

  1. Off hand: Tosha Grantham did work on Basquiat at the Smithsonian when she was a grad student at Howard; Franklin Sirmans curated Basquiat and the Bayou for Prospect New Orleans; Kevin Young‘s To Repel Ghosts (the double album) and its Remix… hip hop, poetry, biography, musings, elegy…) ↩︎
  2. Rodney’s first interview with the artist is An Undocumented Artist Shares Her Experience of Alienation in the US. ↩︎
Published: 15 September 2017Author: AllisonCategory: corrections, excerpts

the corrections: worth

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’s broken again. Irma, perhaps?
Published: 12 September 2017Author: AllisonCategory: corrections, excerpts, you are the weather

the corrections

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.

Toni Morrison, 2015, Katy Grannan/NYTimes
Toni Morrison, 2015, Katy Grannan/NYTimes

  1. When released, I used Kodak Portra – it lived up to its name and, in my experience, rendered all skin well. ↩︎
Published: 4 March 2017Author: AllisonCategory: corrections, excerpts, you are the weather

the corrections

Roy DeCarava, Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963, Copyright: Sherry Turner DeCarava/RSD Foundation
Roy DeCarava, Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963, Copyright: Sherry Turner DeCarava/RSD Foundation

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:

Roy DeCarava, Self Portrait, Reflection, 1949, Copyright: Sherry Turner DeCarava/RSD Foundation
Roy DeCarava, Self Portrait, Reflection, 1949, Copyright: Sherry Turner DeCarava/RSD Foundation

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.

Mobile phone snapshot of a snapshot of my first birthday (probably taken by my dad)
Mobile phone snapshot of a snapshot of my first birthday (probably taken by my dad)
Color-corrected mobile phone snapshot of a snapshot of my first birthday (probably taken by my dad)
Auto color-corrected in Photoshop

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:

Gordon Parks, Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-shopping, Mobile, Alabama, 1956, Copyright: The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks, Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-shopping, Mobile, Alabama, 1956, Copyright: The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks, Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956, Copyright: The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks, Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956, Copyright: The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks, Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956, Copyright: The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks, Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956, Copyright: The Gordon Parks Foundation

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.

Published: 2 March 2017Author: AllisonCategory: corrections, excerpts, you are the weather
© Copyright 1996-2022 Allison Bolah. All Rights Reserved.
© 2023 ALLISON BOLAH.

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