If you’re not making a mistake, it’s a mistake. - Miles Davis
Everything can’t work out exactly how I want it to, and that’s fine.
Making images in working-class black communities has been incredibly fulfilling, and has been so, in large part due to the accompanying side of the image-making coin — missed shots, uneasy stares as I feel my way through a new block, loaded questions that hint at my lack of safety as folks adjudicate whether I’m a police officer or not…(fuck the police). Regardless of how I feel about it at any given time, Black folks have every right to be uneasy about me, about anyone in our spaces. Yes, I’m Black too. My value set is categorically Pan-Africanist. I’m great with people. I’m friendly and mean well. I’m many things.
Most of the time, what I am not, however, is local... and that’s okay. Walk with me.
Given the very real history of hyper-surveillance, of cameras being leveraged as a technology specifically used to produce visual testimony that pathologizes black communities, as well as collaboration by individual actors, folks be mad guarded. Concealment here functions as a survival strategy. To not show (implied here is learned false notion that emotion=weakness) is to survive, even if poorly. Colloquially, people don’t just trust photographers. This tension and memory always exists just beneath the surface of a ‘hood’, ‘block’, ‘ corner', neighborhood, etc.
I remember when I was young in my shooting. I was in Cleveland, Texas documenting a trail ride. I’d lived in Cleveland for 6 or 7 months when at the time. I was looking forward to three straight days of Black cowboy and cowgirl culture, horses, and fried fish dinners. Folks were dressed in their best. Kids… 6 and 7 years old, commanding horses 4 times their size. It was like nothing I had ever seen. I —
“What you doin round here with that thang in yo hand?”
“You bet-not take no pictures of me boy. I don’t know what you’ll do with them.”
“No. Just… no.”
“Don’t you take no pictures”
“Boy, why are you here?”
I was jarred back to the real world. To the rural world of Cleveland, Texas — 43 miles up U.S. Route 59 from Houston. I was learning a unique Blackness that Southern California, Georgia, the south side of Minneapolis nor Baltimore could not have prepped me for.
“What are you doing here?” I was asked it no less than 15 times a day over those three days.
“Why are you here?”
There were two white anthropologists who were also in Cleveland that day. From Florida, I believe? I remember that they possessed all the critiques Malcolm and Martin (and plenty of others) had (have?) of White liberals. Aloof, arrogant, condescending, presumptuous — they moved like they had nothing to learn. At the time it baffled me how much access they got tho. Black folks who admonished me literally moments before were prostrating themselves before those uncaring, non-value seeing eyes and lenses. I was young then. I didn’t know that it wasn’t about me at all.
At least not directly.
Pus spewed from the unhealed wounds of an otherwise very proud, confident, and beautiful collective cultural armor. These, after all, are Juneteenth people. We weren’t even 100 miles from Galveston.
I learned, in time, that without reckoning with our personal and collective wounds… With what Wekesa Madzimoyo calls ‘Injected Oppression’ The personal and collective losses… The personal and collective fears, the personal and collective anger, the personal and collective adaptations could continue and white folks time — and comfort — could continue (and we by extension could function within it, on their terms), but we couldn’t. Not that way. Time moved, but we didn’t. Not really. I
was confronted by conditions that had been laid on the land and people there for centuries. Conditions that were still active.
The work of SNCC organizer, Brown University Professor and author Charles E. Cobb, Jr. is particularly useful here. His work certainly informs my photography making. Cobb offers in his 2014 work, ‘“This Non-Violence Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement,’:
People would judge our [movement organizers] commitment as much as they judged the weather or crops or the danger they faced from the Klan... and they would judge at their own pace, using skills that the necessities of survival had forced black communities to develop.
Organizers needed to fit into the local culture while at the same time challenging oppressive and restrictive parts of it. And since they were, after all asking people to put their lives at risk, they had to earn the right to organize.
— For my work, above and below, I substitute “organize” with “photograph”, “document” or “archive”.
"It's all dangerous. You are carrying danger with you [and the local people] have to figure out whether or not you're for real. You have to earn that. You don't earn that [by engaging in] some kind of charade about being violent - they know better - or by being boastful about what you're going to do to whoever messes with you. They already been through too much to think that that kind of talk means anything. Their very lives have depended on the ability to read people as distinct from reading books. And that ability is what allows you to earn their respect.” — Bob Moses
For me, to not study and engage this context as I archive my people would be categorically disingenuine; not to the exposure, f-stop, camera manufacturer, or ‘audience’, but to what’s most important to me — the people I’m striving to make community with; even if only for a click. I’m interested in movement work and creating dope black and white photographs of Black people. This knowledge lets me know when to push, how to push, and when to let go. It’s a skill that whispers to me to ‘stay the course, to ‘try again’ to improvise or fall back. Most useful, this context helps me know when to connect for a story, and when to leave it where I found it.
Everyday Black folks are smart.
Despite the hyper-visibility of the most curated, limited and corporate expressions of ‘Blackness’ in the US (and, next to bombs is America’s chief material and cultural export), this ‘everyday Blackness’ also functions as a filter — as Bob Moses referenced earlier, lives have depended on the ability to read people as distinct from reading books — that mediates encounters. My ‘goodness’ and my ‘Pan-Africanist sensibilities’ (which I do believe are good) ain’t got shit to do with that moment. As a practice, I don’t teach when I photograph. I make no claims of grandeur; I photograph when I photograph. I’ll gladly and happily share, but I’m present as a participant in conversation first. Trust-building is what leads every encounter. Beyond winning, losing, or ‘getting the shot’, I’m seeking connection with the person. Before I picked up a camera, I was (and am!) a human being. I was and am Black. I love being Black. I love Black people, and my photography work is a joyous and serious expression of that love.
I’m not always successful with getting the photograph I saw and hoped I’d get. Since Cleveland, I have been considerably more successful at making connection, even through rejection; and, I’m glad for that.
Now, what you’re actually here for.
Rejection Letters:
This is a new thang I’m trying out(!). I’ll be posting audio conversations only from people who have told me no when I approached them to make an image. A couple of important notes:
I am recording anonymously.
I will never reveal the identities of the folks you hear here. So don’t ask. If you find yourself. It’s our secret. Here’s why
Thin description as articulated by anthropologist John L. Jackson — [Thin description] “is about how we travel… through the thicket of time and space, about the way… both of those trajectories might be constructively thinned, theorized, concretized, or dislodged in service to questions about how we relate to one another…[Thick description] “tries to pass itself off as more than it is, as embodying an expertise that simulates (and maybe even surpasses) any of the ways in which the people being [photographed] might know themselves… one that would pretend to see everything and, therefore, sometimes see less than it could. If thick description imagines itself able to amass more and more factual information in service to stories about cultural difference, “thin description” doesn’t fall into the trap of conceptualizing its task as providing complete and total knowledge. So, there are secrets you keep. That you treat very previously. Names of research subjects you share but many more you do not. There is information veiled for the sake of story. For the sake of much more.
Some conversations may be edited for length. If so, you’ll know.
This is much more than taking pictures.
And, this is only taking pictures.
Enjoy.