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?

distance running

It’s been some months since I’ve run like a runner, but I still remember certain things about that sequence of behaviors. I remember the early wake ups, the efficient preparation of clothes and balms and water and fruit, the drive in the dark to the track or the beach. And I remember the focus, my mind, moments before the first steps of my last in a series of runs before rest day. I have always planned my last run before rest day as a long run. Seven miles at the beach. Most weeks, that run fell on relentlessly sunny Sundays.

My Saturday runs are always joyful, filled with a sense of liberty (my springy limbs, my spirit abuzz with energy…) If I run seven miles on a Saturday, at the end, I’m exhilarated. That feeling has everything to do with the work week and reclaiming my time, my life. A Sunday long run, however, requires a different state of mind.

By Tuesday, we will know the result of Hurricane Irma in South Florida. I have spent the better part of my life in this part of the world. When I was a child in Grenada, I remember the electricity going out and the hurricane lamps my parents lit to light our home. I remember Gilbert and my family’s reports from Jamaica. I remember evacuating to REDACTED, the psychiatric hospital where my mother worked, for Andrew (and, later, surveying the unholy, unbelievable destruction throughout Miami visible from I95 on the way to visit REDACTED in Kendal). My father still lives with the damage caused by Ivan. I remember Katrina and Kanye’s correct analysis of the government’s response in the aftermath. I remember Wilma and our forced return to community and collaboration during weeks without power.

This storm is nothing like those storms. The only storm remotely like this that I know of is Harvey, and that was, what, two weeks, a week-and-a-half ago?

I love it here. I don’t want to live anywhere else. Hurricanes are a part of the deal. Climate change, however, is not. And in my admittedly unprofessional opinion but from my lifetime of experience, the currently unseasonably warm surface temperature of the Atlantic that feeds Hurricane Irma is a direct result of climate change.

We have to want different things.

Anyway, after I post this, I will set my mind the way I do in the moments before the first steps of the long run before rest day1.

It is a blazing Sunday morning, not a cloud in sight, but this is the run.
And I run the whole thing.

  1. Oh, I’ve decided that, henceforth, the run before rest day will be a simple 5k. So rest day will likely fall on Tuesday, not Monday, and the pressure will be off on Sundays. ↩︎

Los Angeles

There are so many American cities that I love: Pittsburgh has got to be located in the be most fairy tale/textbook ideal spot on the continent; Gallup is a dream I can’t shake; Baltimore and DC are more Janus than the Twin Cities; St. Paul in the late spring (right now) is temptation; New York, much like Miami, is a pain in the ass but for entirely different reasons. And then there’s Los Angeles, Jason’s home town and a city that – for the last 20 years – beguiles me like no other. If I stray from Boca Raton, it’ll be to cheat with LA.

Which, Angelenos don’t say ‘LA’; they say ‘Los Angeles’. I think that’s nifty. The air is dry. What the hell!? People just pick up and hike the the canyons. Everyone seems to be casually eating at some great little spot all the time. The city rolls out of and into bed. And, underneath all that apparently unstudied ease… things get done – without the Midwest’s self-righteousness or the East’s harshness or the South’s weird defiance (or South Florida’s garishness, sheesh).

I muse on American cities in general and Los Angeles in particular because of Dope, a wonderful movie wherein one specific scene caught my attention. Midway through their misadventures, Malcolm, Jib, and Diggy arrive at AJ’s house. AJ’s son, Jaleel, invites them in to wait for his father and raps for them in his home studio. The three friends haze Jaleel a bit for his unique, self-diagnosed dyslexia, and, in so doing, in-joke a line from one of their own band’s songs. Without missing a beat, Jaleel invites them to record a song. That moment is ‘so LA’.

Diggy: Not "base-by-base"? See, you would think this hard "C" would be the issue, but no. That's interesting.
Diggy: Not “base-by-base”? See, you would think this hard “c” would be the issue, but no. That’s interesting.
Jaleel: 'Cause I was in a good mood and shit.
Jaleel: ‘Cause I was in a good mood and shit.
Also Jaleel: Let's record.
Also Jaleel: Let’s record.
"Can't bring me down!"
“Can’t bring me down!”

There’s a way in Los Angeles that people can seem to ride out minor humiliation because a more attuned portion of their consciousness continuously scans for ‘that thing’. In New York and DC, people always on the make come across as smarmy but are typically tolerated. In the Midwest (and Canada, interestingly enough), such behavior is undignified and its perpetrators can wind up pariahs. In South Florida, it’s how anything, everything gets done. But in Los Angeles, it is a Zen art guided by a spirit of possibility.

That scene reminded me immediately of a parallel moment in American Dreamz, another fantastic – although far less well-regarded – movie. American Dreamz is a satire where Dope is a fable packed with some of the painful and amazing things that can happen in that part of the world. American Dreamz handles adjacent themes with cutting humor rather than Dope’s absurdities. But both films are gimlet-eyed and do not insult the reality of their characters’ or their audiences’ lives.

In American Dreamz, Omer surreptitiously goofs around on his cousin Iqbal’s home stage as disco lights and Casio beats roll only to be ‘discovered’ by the movie’s eponymous TV show’s scouts. Omer – rather than Iqbal who’d initially submitted an audition tape – is selected for the star-making singing contest. When Omer delivers the news to Iqbal at dinner, Iqbal shouts, “Do you know how hard I’ve worked to get on this show!? You’ve stolen my dream!!!” and flounces out. In their next scene together, however, like Jameel in Dope, Iqbal, with happy self-satisfaction and confidence, decides to coach his cousin to prepare him to win American Dreamz.

"Luck be a lady tonight! Ah!"
“Luck be a lady tonight! Ah!”

Iqbal: Congratulations, Omer!
Iqbal: Congratulations, Omer!
Also Iqbal: As of today, I'm your manager.
Also Iqbal: As of today, I’m your manager.

Now, Iqbal (portrayed by Tony Yalda) lives in Orange County, not Los Angeles proper, and, unlike Jameel (played by Quincy Brown), he is wiry and shrill. But proximity matters, and Iqbal has keenly internalized the neighboring Angeleno’s sharp eye for possibility and ability to instantaneously overcome slights in service of bigger things.

Jameel is Black and Iqbal is Arab, and this matters. The actual and stereotyped-perception of violence that shape and mark both of their communities serve as interesting juxtapositions to their willingness to move past humiliation toward the possibility of success in the entertainment industry. Jaleel is clearly pulled between Ladera where he lives and “doesn’t have a set” and Inglewood where “my heart is… even though my body’s right here.” He’s hard to a fault, but clearly has a talent for music that is as true to him as his father and uncle’s roots in the Bottoms. In opposition, Iqbal who appears to simply tolerate his family is in reality very comfortable with himself and in his environs – and is very welcomed and supported by his loved-ones.

I imagine that in Chicago and Atlanta people similar to Jameel and Iqbal are checking the lower frequencies for possibilities. But, the nonchalant, dare I say, grace with which these two characters handle it is a faithful representation of how things get done in Los Angeles, a testament to both actors’ and sets of filmmakers’ attention to detail when it comes to that city. The American Dream, like the American Condition, is founded, as Fitzgerald put it, on “an infinite capacity for hope.” In Los Angeles, that hope is realized and monetized and capitalized with elegant, matter-of-fact company town industry.

get out

My favorite thing about Get Out is the way that it taints the “Good ThingsTM“. It questions – as we should – the provenance, purpose, maintenance, and significance of leafy suburbs, interest in Black lives, and everything (milk and cereal, tea services, slacks, basements, hats, TV sets, law enforcement, the UNCF slogan… What signifies a poppet?) in between.

I’ve seen the film twice. Thankfully, it wasn’t spoiled for me the first time, so I went in pre-terrified; although I am my mother’s daughter and she is “more afraid of the living than the dead”, the paranormal can still keep me up at night. From the trailers I’d seen, I expected the supernatural consequences of the Americas’ Original Sins to provide the movie’s thrills and chills. I wasn’t disappointed.

The second time I went to see it, I watched to assess the way the corrections come to bear on the film’s cinematography. Toby Oliver does a fine job, I think, presenting all of the characters in their visual fullness. The movie looks like now, like this moment’s most sophisticated version, in fact, in terms of range of tones, shifting white balance, and depth of field. The way the camera handles Chris, the main character, is especially skilled: in scenes with other characters, there’s just enough distance between Chris and the viewer so that the viewer feels like something of a removed observer, but the camera is close enough for that removed observer to catch Chris’s micro-expressions as he processes his interactions. Thus, when Chris or other characters are in extreme close up, the viewer is sucked into the characters’ emotional vortices. Although close ups of Chris emphasize his red, distressed eyes, his face isn’t freakishly distorted by weird angles or try-too-hard lenses; he remains human, so the viewer remains empathetic.

That, the empathy for Chris the filmmakers engender in the audience, is remarkable. Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris’s reticence, his self-awareness, his vulnerability, and his willingness to ‘give it a try’ with nuance, and, the filmmakers, through camera work and through narrative pacing, support that performance so that the viewer ends up caring for Chris in a way that parallels the viewer’s care for Chiron in Moonlight; we want both Chris and Chiron to be safe and loved. In Moonlight, Juan’s nurturing, protective presence guides the audience through their empathy for Chiron. In Get Out, while Rose might seem to serve the same function because she listens to Chris and appears to defend him throughout the film, there’s something cool and patronizing – and perfect – in Allison Williams’ performance that undercuts the validity of Chris’s sense of dread. The audience has to come to feel with and for Chris some other way, and the filmmakers achieve that with brilliant technical choices.

As with Moonlight, however, as far as I can remember, Get Out doesn’t pass the Bechdel-Wallace Test. Does a movie have to pass the Test? Why is the Test even a thing? It’s a joke from a comic from a specific period of time with specific reference to particular women’s positionality in the culture. But, I’ll be damned if that basic three-part question doesn’t make me challenge my initial read of everything. First, I look for women characters, then I look at their interactions with one another, and, finally I run those interactions through the movie as a whole. What do they call that in art? Gestalt. In movies like Moonlight and Get Out that feature Black women, I am particularly keen to consider how we of varied experiences of this culture are portrayed. Get Out is very, very, very interesting to me in this regard with particular reference to my take on Hidden Figures and Lorna Simpson’s 2003 piece, Corridor:

 

In (a version of) that space, this face in Get Out is distorted:

Which, whoa… Horror movie, indeed.

if the apocalypse comes, beep me

Twenty years ago today, or, rather, tonight, the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired on The WB. Amanda made me start watching Buffy maybe two seasons in. Up until that point, my favorite TV shows were Daria, Aeon Flux, The Simpsons, South Park, and Ren and Stimpy: nothing live action and certainly not anything called ‘Buffy’. But, Amanda assured me in that unassuming, take-it-or-leave it way that she has, “You’ll like it.” It was love at first sight, and I still love Buffy. Funny, sad, morbid, optimistic, there’s a rhythm to the writing that feels like work to me. I think that’s the thing that’s kept me devoted to the show all these years. The mission – even in the face of personal drama, family responsibilities, financial burdens, and social issues – is the thing. I get that. However, the reverse is true, too, which is why I respect Buffy; the mission isn’t a life in and of itself, either.

Buffy has its flaws: race is one; gender, interestingly enough, is another. As when dealing with a family member I love but who refuses to self-reflect, I wince when I think of the portrayal of Blacks and other people of color in the show. I ‘get’ that Buffy and the other female characters’ ‘traditional’ women’s appearances and actual agency in the narrative are intentionally juxtaposed, but all that leather and fluff and pink and lace and hair, eh. As a result, my favorite episodes spoof identity or are reflexively aware of the show itself:

  • Lie to Me 2.7
  • Band Candy 3.6
  • The Wish 3.9
  • Dopplegangland 3.16
  • Pangs 4.8
  • Something Blue 4.9
  • I was Made to Love You 5:15
  • Life Serial 6.5
  • Tabula Rasa 6.8
  • Doublemeat Palace 6.12
  • Him 7.6
  • Storyteller 7.16
  • Lies My Parents Told Me 7.17

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. ↩︎

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.