DeCarava and Hughe’s photographic essay lead the viewer to an uncommon level of engagement for the format. The Sweet Flypaper of Life allows a similar experience as watching a series or reading a novel: the reader can be removed from its own physical space into the world and reality created by the authors. Sister Bradley shows the reader through her world, through her lens and looking into her eyes.
Guided by the narrator’s experience of life, I could experience life in Harlem in the mid 20th century. A portrayal that expanded from the personal realm into the streets, the struggles for survival, relationships, marriage, raising children while going through the specific difficulties of inhabiting a racialized body while waiting to see how society's behavior will unfold as integration becomes a legal fact.
The image of the window, as on page 58, and its sequential point of view on page 59, offers an opportunity for contemplation. The in-between this outer world and the inner world experience. The moment when the female characters can seat, rest from the hustle and just be.
Although the essay follows a documentary aesthetic, the writing creates interesting friction between reality and fiction. When photography was first created, the understanding that the machine would freeze a moment and a piece of a certain reality, led it to be perceived by many, as a representation of truth. Facing DeCarava’s images I asked myself the question: was it intended to be a representation of his truth? Does that even matter? Perhaps one of the strengths of the essay is that Sister Bradley could be any Sister. She personifies it, but as if the character itself was created from a juxtaposition of lives, a vertical axis of many existences and families throughout Harlem.
In the Kitchen Table series,’ Carrie Mae Weems achieves a similar effect of reality amalgamation, although narrowed down from an expanded social and familiar existence to the one lived by a black woman in her own subjectivity and intimate space. The kitchen table stands as a psychological space where the individual being can be alone with its own intimacy as well as private encounters and exchanges with other beings on very a personal level: children, lovers, and close friends. She loves, is a lover, awaits, has her heartbroken, cares, she meets girlfriends, laughs, drinks, educates, studies, plays and has her hair braided. Weem’s character is in the shadows of a man, as in image number 5, but at the same time faces and defies the camera as in the first image.
Different from DeCarava’s characters, where the woman is subject to house chores and absent husbands as in page 57 and 92, Weems character could be a single mother as much as a wife, but throughout her series, there is a sense of a woman claiming her space and ownership of her life and destiny.
In “Diagrammatics of Physiognomy: W.E.B Du Bois’s Graphic Modernities,” Weheliye contrasts the portraiture that Du Bois exhibited at the 1900 Paris Exhibition against the infographics of The Philadelphia Negro. In elaborating the latter, from its ability to diagram the political physiognomies of racialization and elaborate the new reality, per Deleuze, of a “scopic consciousness” (36), he delimits a potentiality of the former vis-à-vis the representational logics or laws that regulate photography. Though Weheliye rightly foregrounds the capacity of The Philadelphia Negro to depict the “rhythm of chance” (36) that attends racialization and grids of abjection, I wonder how we might rethink a logic of the photograph in conversation with Roy DeCarava and Carrie Ann Weems in order to reemphasize the power immanent to their photographic work.
If abstraction maintains a slavery no longer official in name, if corporeal subjection no longer operates as the sole means of violence and instead requires its visualization in a representational field, the photography of scientific racism not only fulfilled this project but also determined in part the rules of a medium still nascent in postbellum America. I repeat Weheliye thus yet suggest differently the idea that photography via Du Bois, DeCarava, and Weems can install black life instead of (social) death as a mode of resistance to that scheme. All three collections of black social life in public and private yield subjects who negotiate these spaces. Seriality enacted across these visions in turn reveals the lines of force that racialize those spaces and dictate the terms of that negotiation, a revelation that Deleuze and Weheliye reserve for diagrams as new truth indicative of and thereby opposed to the ideological apparatus of racialization. Thinking Sweet Flypaper of Life and Kitchen Table Series thus as interventions against the necropolitical confines of photographic theorization divulges instead the “staging ground” that Adrienne Edwards reads in the kitchen table of Weems, a site of contest that runs counter to “the assemblage of anti-black and anti-female limitations the system circulates in actual life as in representations of it” (11). At risk is engaging the logic of a medium that objectifies, but at stake is the need to continually—and serially—reclaim a visual field that we see continually (re)invents itself against racialized bodies and offer rather what Edwards sees as the “eventfulness we feel in encountering the work” (10), the event of black life not as “chance” but possibility.
One of the ways Hughes attaches/sets his annotative narration to DeCarava’s photographs is through colons. It seems that these colons gesture to and present the photographs, asking us to see them through a particular tone, as a pause, a demonstration, a call and response, as well as a clause in its own right. Colons “usually indicat[e] a discontinuity of grammatical construction greater than that marked by the semicolon, but less than that marked by the period” (OED “colon”). That there are degrees of “discontinuity” suggests that there is some continuity of discontinuities. Perhaps colons are intervals between clauses (to continue a thread mentioned a few classes ago). In intervals between annotation and photograph, it seems that Hughes modulates the phonic substance of DeCarava’s images in a way that allows both text and photograph to inflect each other and adhere themselves to one another. I’m thinking particularly about the series of photographs of Jerry, Melinda, and their children. Sister Mary Bradley says:
“Now you take that Jerry. There’s no man living don’t have some faults. Jerry’s got his. But can’t nobody say when he’s home he ain’t a family man. Crazy about his children – and his children are crazy about him: [image] … Come running to meet him at the door: [image]… And that baby had ruther set on his lap than nurse its mama. Never saw a baby so crazy about its daddy: [image]… But of course, its Melinda’s got to be worried with them all day. And Sometimes, old as I is, they tries even my impatience: [image]” (48-51)
There are a few things I want to notice here. First, Sister Bradley returns to the refrain “Now you take” that we first hear when, early on, she introduces Rodney. She also already used this refrain to talk about Jerry and the Saturday night kitchen parties. (As a side note, I think we could also see Carrie Mae Weems’ kitchen table series as modulations on a refrain, which in this case occurs as a particular place.) “Now you take” seems to me a response to and evasion of the messenger’s telegram “Come home,” as this refrain continues to postpone the call to “come home” as well as to gather more and more people and places, intimate and encountered in passing, that make up an expansive and expanding social milieu that involves and exceeds home. Though the “you” is addressed to the messenger, it is also delivered to other seers and listeners, asking us to take some bit of sweetness on the flypaper of life and get entangled in it all, over and over again in the continuous impressions that already pass away – become discontinuous – even in the immediacy of “now” (and I think there’s a resonance between flypaper and DeCarava’s capture of silver gelatin photographs that captivate Hughes and us).
To this refrain, Sister Bradley adds the motif of “crazy” as a pitch of a love so ecstatic that the children prefer to set themselves on their daddy’s lap than set themselves to their mother’s breast. This crazy pitch of love, accompanied by Sister Bradley’s diffusion of his particular faults by relating them to a pervasive brokenness of every living man, momentarily overwhelms the faulty tones attached to Jerry here and several images later. Still, Sister Bradley’s generous attention to this crazy love shared between Jerry and his children modulates at its crescendo, moving us to the profundity of Melinda’s more subdued, troubled, devoted, quotidian, and often thankless love. Then through Sister Bradley’s eyes, resentment and impatience inflect her dedication and love as we are invited to look at her grandchild looking at her/the messenger/us...
(Continued) In pages that follow, Sister Bradley returns to the refrain “Now you take,” this time offering us Little Jerry instead of Jerry. Similarly, the repetition of “crazy” that marked attachment between Jerry and his children modulates to a maddening, persistent, exhaustive repetition of “ands” that enumerate Melinda’s responsibilities to her children around bedtime before she maybe has an interstice (contingent on whether Jerry comes home, meaning that even his absence doubly conditions her duties and her free time) to “read her paper.” We see her looking at a newspaper, which is another flypaper of sorts attaching her to gathered events of the world outside the home. At the same time, I imagine “paper” doubled as the flypaper of her life, this respite for reflecting on its stickiness. The convergence of flypaper and newspaper in this interstice seems to modulate into the window of the next page, where “Every so often, ever so once in a while, somedays a woman gets a chance to set in her window for a minute and look out” (58). The newspaper and flypaper of Melinda’s life are windows to other discontinuous patches of a continuous roll of life’s sweet flypaper. Set in the window, through her eyes, glimpses of stuckness and sweetness adhere here and there.
This weeks’ readings, or should I say sightings, or viewings, made me think about the relationship of text and image and how this relationship itself relates to something like the ‘interval’, or, as Fred Moten puts it in one of the texts we already discussed, “this interstitial no-space […] where photography lives.”
Looking at both photo-books, I was wandering about similarities and differences between The Sweet Flypaper of Life and The Kitchen Table Series. How does the written text interact with the images in both of these projects; these projected “quiet visions” that “emerged into a public life?” (DeCarava, 102) What kind of intimacy is created through these collaborations between pictures and words? In what ways are questions concerning certain techniques of assemblage and montage applicable here? How do we account for registers like the power of language, the force of inscription, and the photographic imprint; and the ways they interact with each other as modes and processes of signification and visibility?
Despite the intimate beauty and the “uncommon level of engagement,” that Júlia mentions in her post, I have to admit, that in reading Hughes text, and therefore following Sister Bradley’s vivid and insistent portrayal of black life in the 1950s Harlem—her "perception of the senses and the soul” (DeCarava, 102)—, I personally had trouble to focus my attention on–, or to allow sufficient space for the images. They somehow disappeared in my readings, almost like the text took up all the space of their quiet singularity. At some point, they seemed to be mere illustrations for Sister Bradley’s narrative; therefore, the images were making visible what was already visible, if that makes sense. Looking at the design of the book, it becomes apparent how literally tightly interwoven text and images are—there is almost no space in-between them.
(In regard to this, I would love to discuss the ways a text, or a picture caption, captures the image; in the sense of seizing and arresting it. Also, how the mentioned illustrative use of images, relates to room for the viewers own imagination.)
Turning over to Carrie Mae Weems project, and with reference to the already mentioned, I was thinking a lot about the table, and what kind of different spaces can be associated or linked to it. In a video interview, in which Weems was speaking about the importance of the participation of “African-American artists in the field” of photography and art in general, she is mentioning the table in a quite interesting way. “And that’s important,” Weems says, “because once you’re at the table, something else happens, something else shifts, something else becomes more possible, something else becomes more dynamic, more meaningful, more engaging for the entire mix of people.”
In resonance with what Weems is alluding to here, I am particularly interested in the table as a fixed, determined, secured, and rigid relation which is standing between us. Something that brings us together, in that it assigns a certain place and therefore also splits and distances us in a certain way, like Hannah Arendt mentions it somewhere. The table in Carrie Mae Weems series inscribes a certain distance, and yet there is an intimate familiarity at work in her images. I was also struck by the meticulous arrangement of details in the images–for example the glasses, and when they are filled with alcohol, or what seems to be only water. These arrangements create certain atmospheres, sounds or moods. These phonic substances appear in the strange interval between text and image. And here, coming back to the ‘theme’ of this post, I am interested in the different forms of attachment. (text/image, artist/viewer…)
I have been listening to Moonchild’s :Throwback" and the line “cause I like the attention you’re giving me” keeps resonating with the images we are working with this week. In my conversations with Keli ahead of our presentation, I have been obsessed with the photographic encounter. Does the photograph and, subsequently, the subjects in the image compel that we look? Does our erotic encounter with the image (e.g. looking as gazing, attending to bodily composition, penetrating the image with our glance) draw out a particularly mangled impression of the figures captured in its frame? Here, I am thinking about how Weems’s work “has unfolded under a light of interrogation” (76). I have been reading French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s The Skin-Ego (1995). He writes, “The first global image of the psyche is not formless but based on an embrace of body to body” (265). Anzieu’s text is brilliantly frustrating because he barely talks about race, though notes that skin is a porous enclosure. Can the image account for not only the porous nature of skin (and we can extend that to gaps in representation, history, time, and place—“a rightful place or voice”) but also the question of touch (Weems 69)? I cannot help but think of Marlon Riggs’s repetition of Joseph Beam’s “Brother to Brother: Words from the Heart” (1986). He writes, “I dare myself to dream of us moving from survival to potential, from merely getting by to a positive getting over” (Beam 215). For Beam, along with Essex Hemphill, touch and race go hand in hand; it is life affirming but also dynamically, in part, psychically and affectively rejecting. An image of touch—or an encounter with an image that makes you feel like you existing with a photographic touch—that articulates “the beginning and the end of things” (Weems 6.15). DeCarava and Weem’s images evince a figural presence of the everyday, and the flesh that flows throughout, that gets over the shuttered capture. That resistance of the image to be simply a portrait or a candid capture is part of the photographic presence, and subsequent pre-sense, of quotidian black life. That is, thinking with Hughes, “He was always the first to turn on the hydrant in the street in the summer…” in such a way that, after Farrah Griffin, the hydrant’s blast of water is still flowin’ in our reiterative encounter with the image (19). These images do a lot of performance work. Weems turns a dining room into a gallery space. DeCarava takes the breeze caught in the windowsill as welcomed shift to his everyday-set. Weems also brings song into the accompanying materials of her images: “No More,” “I Love You Porgy,” and “A Night in Tunisia” (6.23, 6.15). But there is also the sonorous performance of look, too. In many ways, the encounter with the vernacular image demands a particular kind of flowin’ in that I want to see more of these images, “and hold their hands” as they hold their own (70). It is a desire that demands too much of the image, and of the life captured/freed by its technology, but the thought of such an intimacy persists. These images, the words, coupled by the beauty of the publication, say: “I hear tell you’s down—but with no intentions of going out” (Hughes 92).
Works Consulted Anzieu, Didier. The Skin Ego. Paris: Dunod, 1995.
Beam, Joseph. Editor. In the Life. Washington: Redbone Press, 1986.
I keep circling back to the set of definitions for frequency that Professor Campt laid out for us during her visit to Columbia each time I begin these posts. These definitions have functioned as something always “out on the table,” so to say, for me to consider. For this week, frequency as a way of describing temporality (repetition over time in an interval), I see, as describing the question of what is left on the table from day to day, week to week, photograph to photograph.
Carrie Mae Weems sets up the camera for her “Kitchen Table Series” on one end of the table. It feels as if we, as the viewer, sit opposite the head of the table as a constant guest in her home or even an invisible and distant second host to the social scenes. The viewer remains present, the camera fixed in place as the people and objects in the image move through time. The other fixed things are the occasional objects that get left out on the table: half-full/half-empty glasses, opened newspapers, cards, books, notepads, homework, pens, and the three chairs. This stuff produces continuity across time between the intervals of people shifting and moving. They keep time in a sense, helping us notice what has shifted through their ever-presence and occasional absences. The things get touched, touched at, touched again, and eventually put away. The scenes resemble each other, and they don’t resemble each other. Sister Mary creates the same set of rifts on resemblance for her grandchildren who sometimes are the “spitting image” of their parents (6). From the spit, the salvia or drool, of the parent comes the perfect likeness. The child is more than a replication but an actual part, a body fluid, of the parent. The moving glasses, touched by mouths and sipped from, and the lipstick that mother and daughter share show a mouth-to-mouth intimacy, a spit-to-spit intimacy as one such moving constant across time, one such thing kept out.
Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life ends with another domestic scene where things are kept in place. “Our janitor,” “that man,” or simply “him” looks out from the left page towards the right where the photo on the adjoining page is spilling over the gap made by the binding (92, 94, 96). He looks out over an oven, with pots and pans left out after cooking but not yet cleaned, near a rainy window. He takes a similar place to the viewer in the “Kitchen Table Series,” out of frame but almost sat at the table in the kitchen. As Imani has already beautifully suggested, this placement is part of the “entangled poetics” that sets up a black viewer and, occasionally, enjambs what they see. Here, he looks out of the photo to look inward at the kitchen as it is in use/just been in use. These left out objects, these pots and pans, are the image of what keeps Sister Mary tethered to the world, stuck to the flypaper. “When I get through with my pots and pans…” trails off the page as a promise of a future that will only come once the kitchen is cleared of the objects that usually are kept out on it (97). The ellipses, which more than any other pause, encourage us to turn the page, lead to an image of her outside the house when, “ever so once in a while,” she wears her best clothes (98). “Ever so once in a while” promises a rhythmic regularity but an unpredictable one. There is a constant and an inconstant.
I wonder what is “sticky” about left out objects, particularly the left-out objects of cooking and eating. In some senses, the dirty pots and pans are literally sticky. I also wonder if there is a labor to leaving things out as there seems an element of work to cleaning things up?
I’ve purposefully moved between “kept out” and “left out” throughout my post. I wonder what the difference is or if there is a difference at all. For example, the cards that float across the table end up in Weems’s hands by the end. The thing left out seemingly by accident comes into use in order to play what looks like solitaire. It seems to suggest there are things left out by others that can then be kept for oneself.
I am fascinated by the design of Hughes and DeCarava’s text. To talk about the cover of a book usually requires some kind of preface, a gesture that says “before I get to the text I must talk about X.” But here, X is the text; the cover is the beginning of the narrative, both DeCarava’s photograph and Hughes’ text getting relatively equal space on the cover. Or maybe this cover is split into thirds: the title with DeCarava’s photo in the background is combinatory while the eyes that confront the reader and the text display the separate character of the contributors’ work. Either way, I think the graphic choice, to begin the narrative of this text on the cover, demands us to ask certain questions about how we engage with the text.
What changes when information like copyright dates, edition number, the Library of Congress Control Number, and the important “All Rights Reserved,” is presented not before but after the narrative of the text begins? The beginning of the narrative on the cover of the text might imply that in fact not all rights are reserved, that some rights extend beyond the boundaries of the text, and that the boundaries of the text are far more porous that we might (want to) think. The design of the interior pages continues this affect through the layout of the photographs in the text. On the third page of the text we have a simple layout: text first, image at the bottom, with a generous margin that allows the reader to place their thumb on the page without requiring them to touch the photograph. On the fifth page, however, the margin is removed; the image extends all the way to the right side and bottom of the page. If I continue to hold the book in the same manner that I did on the previous page, I am going to leave my fingerprint on DeCarava’s photography, the oils of my skin lingering on the glossy pages of the book (something that I did not think about when reading the almost-newspapery pages of Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices). There is a moment of hesitation where I wonder what effect I will have on this photograph, what my contact with it will do to the page over time. But I touch it, and my thumbprint is left behind, nearly imperceptible amidst the dark tonalities of DeCarava’s photograph, but there all the same.
The design of this text compels this exchange between reader and image. It is signaled immediately by the choice of image on the cover, the eyes of a black person centered and staring out at the holder of the material object. The stare emanates (perhaps it undulates too) and enters the reader, just as the reader enters the texts and leaves their own mark—and it doesn’t seem accidental that the mark I leave behind in my copy of the text is one mobilized as evidence by forensic science to record, catalogue, and criminalize. This text takes something of us with it, as we take part of it with us.
I also think that what Imani described in their post as “the vector of interiority” might compel or facilitate this exchange between reader and text. The reader accepts an invitation to enter into the interior world of Sister Mary and through that acceptance the reader invites the text into their interior as well. But I also think this interiority compels exteriority—the drive I felt to annotate the text with connections to Wright, Ellison, and other work by Hughes is one example. Another is, again, the cover of the book. The narrative, so focused on the interiority of Sister Mary, is also laid bare on the exterior of book.
The conterminous interiority/exteriority of the book demonstrates a practice of polytonality. The supposedly contradictory movement of the in/ex cross over and combine, performing both at once and hinting at that movement that lies between, the undulation between two extremes. We can see this polytonality in the misnomer of “black and white” photography that DeCarava subtly undermines while using the technologies of black and white photography. The two extremes of the color spectrum do not adequately capture the gradient of black and white that DeCarava captures, particularly in the photographs on pages 28 and 29, of the interior and the exterior of the subway. In these two photographs we see how lighting affects the tonalities of the photograph. The artificial lighting seems to allow for lighter shades in the person’s coat and the support beams of the subway station. The exterior photo (taken from the interior) displays a much starker contrast between light and dark, as the bright sunlight allows for the interior of the stairwell to sink into darker shades of black, particularly in the top right of the photo.
Finally, I want to return to the inside cover and the statement familiar to books containing fiction:
THE TEXT OF THIS BOOK IS ENTIRELY FICTIONAL. ALL NAMES USED IN THE BOOK ARE FICTITIOUS AND ANY RELATION TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL. (2)
But do we believe this statement here? Is this statement, printed after the beginning of the narrative, a legal wink at the reader? This is a narrative that cannot be contained by the framing of the text that houses it, and certainly cannot be contained by a single genre such as fiction (as wide as that genre is). It is and is not fiction; there are and are not relations to persons living and dead woven into the fabric of this text. And, in placing this statement after the narrative begins, Hughes and DeCarava close the gap between the para//text.
At the book salon for Hazel Carby’s 'Imperial Intimacies' at Brown last week, Carby said that the ambition for the work, which moves through transnational histories of empire and family, was to “disrupt the question of memoir.” The memoir as typically conceived, she explained, is dependent on “imaginary, coherent subjects,” whereas the aim here was to pull apart a sense of stable or linear motion—in time, geography, and visibility.
These ideas resonated in reading Hughes and DeCarava’s Sweet Flypaper of Life and Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series in succession with Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices. Particularly with regards to the the notion of imagined subjects belonging to the memoiristic mode rather than the fictional, and the question of self-representation’s relationship to frequency. Both Flypaper, Kitchen Table, and 12 Million Black Voices share similar structural forms: essayistic vignettes, a distinct, observational narrative voice, and a simultaneous though not necessarily congruent photographic dialogue. While the three works share a desire to portray the “texture of [black] life” in Wright’s terms, and enact a purposeful disjuncture between image and text, they diverge in some critical ways. Black Voices, true to its title, attempts to vocalize a multitudinous “we” where capitalist histories seem to shape black communities in a fashion whereby they are defined by peripatetic flight, contingency, and trajectories of movement. Hughes and DeCarava’s work, on the other hand, occupy a different tonal register. Less sweeping in its scale, Flypaper, like Weems's project, dwells in intimate, domestic spaces as opposed to Wright’s, where the private sphere is a platform for his framing of observations of the public, systematic pressures on black life. Hughes’s scale also manifests itself in the singular narrator-figure of Sister Mary Bradley at the end of her life, emphatically refusing death’s beckoning because she is so “tangled up in living” (3). Bradley draws out this entanglement to beautiful, poetic effect in her portrayal of familial networks enmeshed within black life as one of joy, tenderness, and care.
Another point at which the works differ is their photographs. Black Voices deploys public documentation from the Great Depression. The majority of these images, though undoubtedly powerful for their specific purposes, link bodies to the social environments in which they’re depicted—labour conditions, industry, housing. These photographs bear an outward-facing directionality, a concern for sociality as manifested in public life. DeCarava’s and Weems’s pictures, by contrast, offer an entirely different—and stunning—sensibility: subjects are in motion, mid-sentence, and in the deep solitude of an unknowable inner life. In other words, these photographs, though positioned in direct conversation with the text, resist any easy readings. They invert the illustrative tendencies of photographs, asking instead to be reckoned with in ambivalent, effusive, and gestural moments.
To return to Carby’s effort of disruption, I wonder how we might hold these works in thinking about the possibilities of memoir. Given that none of them claim to be explicitly (or at all) autobiographical, what is the process of self-representation at work? How does Hughes and DeCarava’s metonymic project differ in its claims to truth from Weems’s and from Wright’s, which reads more like documentary narrative? Where does the personal fit in here? These forms bring me back to our discussion around DuBois’s sociological inquiry a couple of weeks ago. Specifically, the problematic of the individual and group as methodology, and how scale and form of representative methodologies alter the relationship to voice and consequently, frequency.
Hartman’s objective—to “jeopardize the status of the event,” the event being the disaster of transatlantic slavery—is a project that calls into question the mechanics of narrative: “the stuff of subjects and plots and ends” (Hartman 10). The experience of the enslaved subject is, according to Hartman, incommensurable with the fictions of history. The past, present, and future are a function of Man’s Universal Time and Progression—both systems of measurement that do not, as a rule, fathom black subjectivity.
As I study Carrie Mae Weems’s “Kitchen Table Series,” I wonder how these black subject(s), who are not enslaved but are instead living in slavery’s aftermath, engage the lineaments of narrative. At first glance, the project seems to move easily along a somewhat predictable path, with a cast of characters that meet, fight, make love, make babies, drink, and split. A drama of the quotidian.
The objects that decorate the walls and table of the kitchen, however, make me think otherwise. There are birdcages, mirrors, decks of cards, glasses of water, glasses of wine, glasses of liquor, packs of cigarettes, tapestries, knives, notepads, newspapers… Some objects only appear once (the portrait of Malcom X, for instance) while others appear and re-appear in different hands, in new relationships, recalling instances of care, loss, despair, play. It’s worth asking: does this narrative actually progress or does it instead de-compose and re-compose? An offering of atemporailty (“past not yet past”) under the guise of plots and ends.
I also want to very briefly note the air vent and recall Christina Sharpe’s questions regarding aspiration and the atmosphere of antiblackness: “Who has access to freedom? Who can breathe free?” (Sharpe 112). In these photos, the air vent “[keeps] and [puts] breath back in the Black body in hostile weather” affording a micro, atemporal atmosphere in which black bodies do not “simply or only live in subjugation and as the subjected” (Sharpe 112, 4).
Reflecting on this week’s material and going back to the question of “how do rhythms are echoed in artistic practices?”, I couldn’t help but wonder how Carrie Mae Weems’ and Roy DeCarava’s photographs define, if not the texture of Blackness, certainly its rhythm. Both texture and rhythm give body to a black temporality, the temporality of black lives that we gain access to through the photographs.
Thinking again with Fanon, and reflecting on the epidermic phenomenological experience of Blackness while captured by the white (capital) gaze, I can’t help but feel captured and fixated while looking at Carrie Mae Weems’ photographs. Placed at the end of the table, not a participant, but a spectator, watching all the movement that lives within these scenes of everyday life. I’m dragged by each one of the photographs, but I’m not the one that moves. The embody character of frequency and experience of Weem’s series dislodges the white gaze so that the black life can come into view. This visual operation renders black life possible, as I see and feel a succession of moments within frames that detail a wide range of emotions, a sonata or a play that discharges my view with the kinetic energy that passes through black bodies.
If frequency measurers the scale of perception, can the experience brought to the fore by Weems’ piece be thought as a radical black framing? If the photographs position me in space, they do it to open my senses to the black visual intonation (Arthur Jafa) of the passing-scene, a tableau-vivant where rhythm produces an emotional response. Frequency here is expressed as a reoccurring register within black life, a kinetic force that brushes against “the impossible odds” surrounding that what the image so intensely holds: the everyday possibility of life to flourish, to bloom.
There's also a question of positionality when it comes to the bodies portrayed by Weems’ photographs. Always at center, but in the depth of the image and enclosed by the wall, intensifying the perception of infinite space in front of it. The kitchen ends at the wall, but the extension of the room if undefined. Meaning that the gaze of the woman sitting on the table – first at the head of the table, then on side, and finally back at the head, and center of the image - is a gaze that extends beyond the reach of the scene, pointing at an elsewhere, out of the frame and imbued with possibility.
The readings this week made me think the formation of an identity, and the implications of a lack of an identity. In music and sound studies, a sonic identity is defined by “timbre”: when two instruments play the same note, we go to timbre to tell us which instruments they are. Timbre is the thing differentiates one sound from another and creates a class of sounds. However, the ways in which it does the differentiation work against the consideration of a sonic identity, because timbre almost always belongs to the listener, the perceiver of a sound. I find it interesting to consider timbre alongside Ellison’s work. In his writing on Wright in the article Richard Wright’s Blues, Ellison claims that the formation of identity or individuality is always a process: Man cannot express that which does not exist – either in the form of dreams, ideas, or realities- in his environment. Neither his thoughts nor his feelings, his sensibility nor his intellect are fixed, innate qualities. They are processes that arise out of the interpretation of human instinct with environment, through the process called experience; each changing and being changed by others. (Ellison, 270-271) Ellison’s consideration of experience and the formation of an identity as a process, echoes Judith Butler’s understanding of identity as performative, as opposed to a fixed quality. The expression of these processes depends on their existence in reality. Going back to timbre, if the perceiver defines the timbre of Black American identity, what reality does it express? Does this reality actually exist in the person’s environment? Or does it only exist in the eyes of the perceiver? What does the ability dictate someone else’s identity impose on the subject of this identity? In Harlem Is Nowhere, Ellison’s ‘nowhere man’ who is “in a constant search of an identity” (Ellison and Parks, 4) has to always fight against the social factors that are supposed to shape the black American identity (Ellison and Parks, 1). Is it possible to think of the search after the black American identity as a search for self-definition that is not dictated by perception? In the opening paragraph of “12 Million Black Voices”, Wright writes: “you usually take us for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem” (Wright, 10). The timbre of Black American identities is a result of processes that took (and are still taking) place throughout history, that managed to morph and change it, while still maintaining the same core sonic identity, which becomes inaudible through the saturation of perception. The discussion about knowledge as power, and the use of language as resistance in part two of “12 Million Black Voices”, “Inheritors of Slavery”, speaks to the role of the voice and language in the formation of an identity, it’s ability to appear, and the required conditions of heardness that are necessary in order to participate in any sort of resistance. Wright describes situations in which the slaves’ ability to “steal” the language of the Lords of the Land, and to learn ways to use it as if it was their own has created a sense of victory and freedom: We stole words from the guarding lips of the Lords of the Land, who didn’t want us to know too many of them and their meaning. […] We proceeded to build a language in inflections of voice, through tonal variety, by hurried speech, in honeyed drawls, by rolling our eyes, by flourishing our hands, by assigning common, simple words new meanings, meanings which enabled us to speak of revolt in the actual presence of the Lords of the Land without their being aware! (Wright, 40) In this description we learn a lot on a formation of a sonic identity through voice contours and language. The instrumentalization of language that is expressed in this passage creates a mask through two conditions of heardness: the one the Lords of the Land hear, and the one that the slaves hear in their own reality, which allows them to resist and claim their sonic identity as their own.
Thinking in relation to the readings for next week, which I mistakenly read thinking they were included in this week’s discussion, I was struck by how the aesthetic and affective vision of The Sweet Flypaper of Life is a very different representation of Harlem than the one presented in Ellison’s “Harlem is Nowhere.” When I look at the The Sweet Flypaper of Life, I know that every single photo is somewhere, coming together to form a spatial collage of all the different possible somewheres one can be while Black in Harlem. Weems’ similarly positions "The Kitchen Table Series" as taking place on/near/around the location of the kitchen table. While Adrienne Edwards’ preface essay discusses the kitchen table as a symbol and the legacy of domestic spaces in Black women’s art, I think it is also important to foreground the specific, physical position of the kitchen table—its surface, its edges—as represented in the photos themselves. Like Harlem, the kitchen table is somewhere.
Being somewhere for Weems and DeCarava and Hughes involves navigating different levels of interiority and exteriority. DeCarava and Hughes include both interior photos taken inside apartments and exterior photos of the streets of Harlem, as well as potentially boundary-disrupting liminal spaces such as the subway, the windowsill, and the doorway. Similarly, though all her photos take place inside the interior space of the kitchen, Weems’ project also imagines interiority and exteriority, with the text forming the interior thoughts and feelings of the image’s seen and unseen subjects, rendered at times almost like a stream of consciousness, in addition to referring to events that occur on the “streets” beyond the kitchen table that are not visually represented. Taken together, Weems and DeCarava and Hughes create a visual archive of the multi-dimensionality of Black life; its interiorities, its environments both social and physical, its private and public spaces.
This week I am thinking with a question that has surfaced at various points over the course of the seminar: Can a “black gaze” exist? Or are there other ways of looking and sensing that can emerge from within the enclosure?
Thinking along these lines, I am particularly moved by a short text-image sequence in DeCarava and Hughes’ The Sweet Fly Paper of Life. Sister Mary, Hughes’ fictional narrator, recounts:
Yes, you can set in your window anywhere in Harlem and see plenty. Of course, some windows is better to set in than others mainly because it’s better inside, not that you can necessarily see any more. But back windows ain’t much good for looking out. I never did like looking backwards nohow. I always did believe in looking out front—looking ahead—which is why I’s worried about Rodney: What do you reckon’s out there in them streets for that boy? (84-86).
This text is accompanied by three photographs: first, an image from outside of a child sitting indoors at an open window reading comics; next, a dimly-lit indoors image of the young man referred to as Rodney, standing against the wall in his characteristic trenchcoat and brimmed hat, half in the light and half in shadow, with the hint of a smile on his face; finally, a street image featuring imposing columns and building facades that seem to swallow up the two pedestrians caught in the frame. This passage condenses many of the themes that surface throughout the narrative. Class allows some Harlem residents, like Chickasaw’s girlfriend, to inhabit “better” domestic interiors than others, though this does not afford them any special view on the neighborhood and world around them. Even those who must work the longest hours, women in particular, are able occasionally to savor some fleeting leisure time—“every so often, ever so once in a while, somedays a woman gets a chance to set in her window for a minute and look out,” Sister Mary explains earlier—though they might spend some of this time worrying, as Mary does, about the well-being of the men who depend upon their labor (58).
What interests me most about this passage, however, is the complex series of contrasts that Sister Mary poses between interiority and exteriority, past and future, stillness and movement—all activated by the experiences of seeing and reflecting. We see in this moment of meditative looking how Sister Mary’s forward-thinking attitude and hopes for societal progress are troubled by uncertainty and the specter of danger, but also counterbalanced by an embrace of the present and its small, meaningful pleasures. Indeed, throughout the narrative Sister Mary seems to look ahead, behind, and around, often in no particular order. Her sense of futurity is grounded as strongly in her everyday present as it is in a horizon of expectation. Sister Mary’s looking is not a “gaze” in the sense that she does not fix the objects of her attention within an ordering frame. Rather, she senses the movements of ordinary black life across the thresholds of imagination and actualization, giving and withholding, endurance and celebration. In this respect, Sister Mary’s looking parallels DeCarava’s photographic eye, which mimes the humming energy of Harlem’s people and urban milieus without staging scenes of either respectability or pathology.
The encounter between image and text is an important one and historically for the medium of photography has been largely capitalized on by disciplinary projects whose terms were prescribed, and in many ways continue to be, by racialization, the prison-industrial complex, orientalism, voyeurism and their associated archives. The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes and Carrie Mae Weem’s Kitchen Table Series demonstrates an alternative trajectory or relationship that can take place between photographs and texts based on a poetics of relation. Borrowing from Edouard Glissant’s writings on opacity, I will focus on the ways in which the artistic projects we look at this week engage in different ways with shadows and opacity, in dialogue with the texts, but never reducible to them.
DeCarava, Teju Cole tells us in an article called “A True Picture of Black Skin” is concerned with representing the opacity of Black life, and does so by staying deep in the textures and the tones of his images, a stylistic choice that also functions in some form of allegorical relationality with the impossibility or incommensurability of capturing the complexity of his subjects. He sits with rather than tries to transcend the insufficient but alluring form of a photograph; a medium endowed with the capacity to capture anything that comes before the lens of the camera but never entirely. And this capacity extends well beyond the initial event of the photograph (see Azoulay Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography). This, Cole refers to as “the power of shadows” referring specifically to the technical choices and chiaroscuro effects of DeCarava’s photographs which he chooses not to “correct” according to the lighting meters and parameters of the medium which was designed to optimize the visibility of white skin.
Carrie Mae Weems plays even more dramatically with shadow effects in her series, drawing explicit attention to the role of shadow and light as the people and objects who revolve around the protagonist at the table recede, return, and disappear into the darkness of the scene behind and above the table throughout the series.
In both series I am interested in how the texts narrate the scenes and to what extent this changes what we expect and what we give to the images. The captions, if we can call them that, animate the images, subjects, and stories allowing the subjects to speak; they offer names, affiliations, affects, and associations that elaborate on and alter the frequencies of Black life represented. The right to narrate and the right to opacity are entangled in a web of imperial, anti-imperial, familial, personal, and political conditions that continue to shape and reshape the ways photographers, photographed subjects, and their viewerships engage with images. I will suggest that the text is transformative rather than descriptive and gives more rather than less to interpret and reinterpret, mirroring the repeating intervals and impulses of the modalities or frequencies we’ve explored together so far. In the last section of Walter Benjamin’s “Small History of Photography” he asks: “Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot?”
Delia defiantly stares at the camera. There is no smile in this picture, only tightly pursed lips. Her bodily tension is so visible that we can feel it expanding beyond the image. Her face is slightly blurred, creating a contradictory sense of movement in a picture that pretends to evoke an absolute stillness. She was one of the four South Carolina enslaved people photographed at the request of the naturalist Louis Agassiz. Being blur in face of a gaze that tries to frame and catalog her can be perceived as a fugitivity strategy, a refusal to be completely absorbed by the codes of the scientific white gaze that tries to capture her. I wanted to begin this response evoking Delia’s image because I believe it showcases the ways in which Roy DeCarava’s and Carrie Mae Weems’s photographs can be perceived as the construction of a counter-archive to these eugenics’ scientific photographs. When discussing the “close relationship between photography and the ‘sciences’ of physiognomy and phrenology in the nineteenth century”, Alexander G. Weheliy (2015) argues that “black life was also an integral part of this visual cum technological codification… there cannot exist a contemplation of photography that is not also a consideration of black life” (p.35-36). Thus, counterposing these works brings to stark relief how DeCarava and Weems are deeply engaged with a project of portraying black life and sociability to rearrange the visuality codes that are the foundation and results of the white gaze. And sociability is a central word here since one of the main differences between these pictures is that while the scientific photographs usually portray black people as sole individuals, reemphasizing the project of occluding the possibility of black kinship. It seems crucial, then, that the photographic works with what we have engaged for this week’s meeting – as well as Langston Hughes’ textual intervention – focus on a rich black social life.
The Sweet Flypaper of Life constructs the narrative of a black family that lives in Harlem, emphasizing both the public and private sphere. In contrast to the supposed stillness in the scientific photographs, in this book the black bodies are in constant motion: walking around and occupying the streets (“It’s nice to see you folks all dressed up going somewhere” p.65; and “At night the street meetings on the corner – talking about ‘Buy black’, ‘Africa for the Africans’” p.81-82) or celebrating and dancing in their homes (“They put a party every Saturday night. Usually not no big party. Just neighbors and home folks. But they balls back and stomps down” p.42-43). These parties also are also a key element since they do not establish this domestic space as an emulation of a normative private sphere, but one that is open to different relationships beyond the nuclear family, in which the superposition of all these spaces create a multilayered black social life that is not confined to a singular and rigid configuration. This idea is also present in Weems’ The Kitchen Table Series and how it uses the repetition of the same frame to portray a diverse array of situations that takes place around a kitchen table. If the idea of the kitchen table can evoke an imaginary centered around the family and the domestic, the series once again emphasize a rich social life, that also represents a familiar life but that is not circumscribed by it. Finally, I would like to think about how these works also evoke a very sensorial effect. These bodies are constantly touching: a fatherly kiss (Flypaper, p.25), a mom braiding her kid’s hair (ibid, p.56), a man holding his own hands (ibid, p.71), or friends supporting and caressing one another (The Kitchen Table Series). Can the repetition of scenes depicting these other sensorial realms be a way to dislodge the centrality of the gaze in pursue of other ways to relate to these images?
A central question that emerged for me in thinking through The Sweet Flypaper of Life occurred between the opening two pages and the closing afterword, particularly around two central themes of the work: an invocation of fictionality as protective strategy against visual facticity and the resistance to affective truth and registration. To speak to the former, I found myself questioning the organization of the front-cover text alongside the onlooking eyes of what appears to be a guileless child and subsequent warning on the inside cover: “The text of this book is entirely fictional. All names used in the book are fictitious and any relation to persons living or dead is purely coincidental” (2). What are we to do with these elements and how are we to understand this hermeneutic? Within these first two pages, it appears a symbolic employment of externality and internality is marshaled, with the concentration and magnification of the eyes conjuring a twofold sense of invitational intimacy; the appearing eyes of the child seem to both beckon readers to behold and to behold an affective, soulful truth. The deployment of these eyes alongside the fantastical opening “When the bicycle of the Lord bearing / His messenger with a telegram…” (1) proved curious and I wondered whether or not this inclusion of the maybe cliched “soulful eyes” was intended to be playful. And the subsequent preface to the book on the inside cover furthered that curiosity: How might we understand the employment of exteriority and interiority to be at play here in the rendering of these visuals and accompanying texts? What do we do with the seeming invitation to look and the following command to look differently, though not necessarily look away?
The closing afterward places affective registration in conversation with visual facticity, particularly as she writes, “DeCarava seeks traditions of spiritual wisdom from our multiplicity of voices. He considers the experience of joy as a perception of the senses and the soul…Hughes was able to imbue each imagined individual with vivid agency….the cadence of their improvisations in image and word bring an entire audience of people into an intimate, emotional arc of transformation” (Sherry Turner DeCarava). At what point are we able to ascertain affective truths about a photograph? I want to think more about ways of knowing and, though we might turn away from Enlightenment traditions visual primacy for knowledge and evaluation, how a rhetoric of affective perception and registration is mobilized in service of a knowing perceptibility. What the work reveals through fictional narrative caption and, if I might add, in resisting conventions of narrative plot and photographic documentation, is the slippage between perceptibility and visuality. In engaging with the work, I have been left to consider what truths are really to be known.
For the last couple of weeks I have been thinking through the idea of phonic substance, and frequency as something which one is trying to attune to in the engagement with the films, texts, and images we have been discussing. In as much as they are something to attune to I have thought of the frequencies as something which asks almost for misreading. But I am not sure what I mean by misreading. To frame it another way I would ask: What does it mean that Moten’’s articulation of phonic substance is in relation to a photograph? What does it mean that the section we read is in a chapter called “Visible Music”? Something, at least, in the language of the description, is happening by way of crossing the senses. Hearing a photo. Seeing music. In as much as that tension was in play I had thought of the attunement something like a misreading which doesn’t uphold a border to the frequencies which push against it. I say all this because it operated as a framework maybe not necessarily in my mode of engagement—in part, because maybe attunement could never be so formulaic—but at least in the language of the description of frequencies. "The Sweet Flypaper of Love" troubles this articulation because, perhaps, its text and images move this misreading back and forth between themselves. Perhaps, misreading isn’t the best word for it.
I also wanted to write, specifically, about Sister Mary’s refrain of “Now, you take.” The phrase is a kinda hinge which moves the text at moments by altering the focus. (7, 8, 17, 27, 40, 48, 53) It is a certain rhetorical device on which might have no other meaning than a comparative gesture which brings a new subject into narrative focus. But as I follow it it seems to be doing a number of things. In its first iteration “Now, you take Rodney” is there a tension in the phrase when Sister Mary, as narrator, is addressing the “Lord?”(3) I think the tension is raised by the fact that the opening paragraph being one about death but also home—even though the language of the first paragraph is of coming and staying rather than taking. The suggestion is not that Sister Mary is suggesting that Rodney be taken in this moment by the Lord but rather that the valence is there and that it echos through the moments and turns throughout the book. My suggestion is also that a request to take could be more than a negative aspect as well—I’m thinking now of a line from a prayer “if I should die before I wake/I pray the Lord my soul to take.” The thinking of all this is really to gesture toward what I read as the partial valences of praying but this may have all arisen from my reading moving to fast past the messenger boys leaving and it might also take Lord to be more than just a rhetorical refrain. What is perhaps more interesting is that on two pages after the phrase Sister Mary says, “Now, Lord, I don’t know—why did I take Rodney?’” This moves the dynamic of the phrase. It opens even as it was already opening into the kind of vivid description of living. (perhaps it was behind the photos to a degree) and it becomes about Sister Mary’s taking in of Rodney. What does the phrase do after that? Later on page 27 Sister Mary says, “Now, you take the subway” which blends further the ambiguity of the phrase as it becomes a command or a pun in as much as you do take the subway.
Perhaps another valence in ‘now, you take’ might be in the taking of a photograph. But I am not really sure what to do with that other than notice it.
Unlike Carrie Mae Weems’, The Kitchen Table Series, my first encounter with DeCarava’s photographs have been through his collaboration with Langstone Hughes in The Sweet Flypaper of Life. I am intrigued by the synergy of voice and image - the ways in which they come together to create something unique. However, I also wonder how to speak of DeCarava’s images without relying on the text or if this is a necessary task. How, for example, do these photos exist outside of the book? Do they have titles? What role does the fictional narrative, along with the curation of images, play in mediating a type of meaning of DeCarava’s photographs? Is the text annotating the images or are the images annotating the text?
Through Sister Mary Bradley’s narration we are invited to move through (navigate) a family / community that lead full lives and move through the world with agency. In a sense, her voice turns the still photographs into moving images which, as Leslie Hewitt notes, “have life in them that isn’t stopped or arrested” in time. Of DeCarava’s work, Sherry Turner DeCarava explains that, “the photographs express not struggle but a sense of utter stillness” and it is through this stillness that I am forced to slow down (a change of pace from the ways we have become accustomed to viewing and encountering images today) in order to draw out the subtle pronouncements of blackness, which register on a lower frequency giving us, as Tina Campt notes in her Black Visual Frequency: A Glossary, “profound insights into the everyday experiences of black folks as racialized subjects.” This slowing down of time is achieved through his technique of printing images in a narrower range of deep tones, which he called “infinite shades of gray” though, as Sherry notes, “often hover in the ambiguity of the darkest charcoal …” Within the context of art history, the term chiaroscuro is used to reference the use of contrasting light to achieve a sense of volume in figures and objects. The term originated during the renaissance and the effect was employed most notably in paintings depicting nativity scenes which reduced most light sources except the one coming from the infant Jesus, thus emphasizing a kind of divine light emitted from Jesus, conveying a sense of stillness. In DeCarava’s photographs, blackness is given dimensionality through minimal sources of light and through the structuring of space and how that space communicates with its subjects. For example, on page 68, the subjects are pulled forward into the light but there is also light behind giving them volume and articulation in low registers. Rather than existing outside of or in the periphery of the frame, this older woman and boy are framed by door frame - a structural shaping that allows the subjects to be read outside of the modes representation of black bodies (within the history of representation).
Like Kerry James Marshall’s painting, DeCarava’s photographs debunk the notion that black is the absence of colour and light (and therefore not a colour) by favouring the colour black in a chromatic space. For Marshall this is achieved by never using the colour black in other parts of his paintings other that in his figures thus making them stand out and for DeCarava it is in the tonal range of blackness in his subjects thereby portraying the colour black vis a vis blackness as complex subjects. For example, the images of page 58 and 59 we are not just invited to view the subject in her interior space but are also offered a glimpse of what she is witnessing thus creating an additional dimension or layer of the subject. It is easy to fall within the tropes of documentation due to his relentless capture of the everyday ‘sculpting’, to borrow from Leslie Hewitt, a space for a community and the subjects in the photographs but here exists poetic articulation and expression of black sociality. Among the many images that stand out, I am particularly struck by the images in 78 and 79 (or perhaps the montage of these images with text) which depict picketing as everyday action. In these images I am confronted with the ways that I have become accustomed to viewing black bodies in space protesting often as spectacle but never as “Coming and going. Picketing lines picketing:”
Finally, I am intrigued by the use of the colon in Hughe’s writing and wonder what sort of shift it signifies within the text. If, in the english language, colons are used to connect or add emphasis between clauses, I wonder if the colon here acts like a cut, connecting image to text and text to text? I am drawn back to Christina Sharpe’s, In the Wake, in which she explains, “I am thinking here, ushering here, into the gap, Black annotation together with Black redaction not as opposites, but as trans*verse and coextensive ways to imagine otherwise.” How as Michael ( our classmate from Brown) asked during our session together a few weeks ago can we think about the sonic of an image when we think of the image as the interval - as already something that exceeds its own form?
Leslie Hewitt, “A Radical Vision: Roy DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KEiirMrI2w Tina Campt, Blacc Visual Frequency: A Glossary,” Foto Museum, June 5-July 31, 2018, https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/series/154906_black_visual_frequency_a_glossary Sherry Turner DeCarava, Light Break (New York, First Print Press, 2019), 11. Roy DeCarava and Langstone Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life (New York, First Print Press, 2018), 78-79. Christina Sharp, “Weather” in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, Duke University Press, 2016) 115.
Our reading this week has made me reconsider frequency as the stuff of life, the background buzzing, shifting, moving, standing, the "coming and going" of everyday life (78). When are things not coming or going? There's an atmospheric nostalgia to Sister Mary Bradley's voice, but also a sense of things being incomplete -- because, as others have pointed out, life is always repeating or riffing on itself, like when she says, "I used to be kind of a sleepyhead myself, so I understands him [Rodney]. And I think my friend, the lady that lives downstairs, she understands:" (37).
*Posting on behalf of Imani* The Poetics and Interiorities of “The Sweet Flypaper of Life”
Encountering this text was a very meaningful, moving, and intimate experience for me. I have a lot to say, but I want to focus my post on the interiority and poetics of the text as well as what they illuminate, say, and argue about the frequency and knots of black life.
The entirety of Hughes’ text is a prayer between a grandmother, Sister Mary, and her God. The words, therefore, reach and strive towards something and occupies an interstitial, between state between the orator and her listener. While God’s ear is her intended destination, the ear it will land upon is uncertain and rife with possibility because the text creates a relationship between whoever encounters the physical book. This is especially apparent from the texts’ covert because the visual and written text begins there. As she speaks (and I mean speaks because the language of the text is black vernacular and therefore incites my personal aural, social black world, forcing readers to hear, rather than just read her), I hear not only an older black woman, a “granny,” or a “gg” (greatest granny) speaking, but my own.We see this even in her narration (and therefore singing and sounding of the blues (45), we become God and the addressee of this tale which is really about asking God to embrace Rodney, her grandson instead of worrying about her. Because vernacular is the language of the text the reader constantly operates in a double/layered temporality with Sister Marty and her family. I refer here to the proverbial “be” and other verbs that place the reader and speaker in multiple frequencies/states of doing/being in the present and future. Double speak also emerges in phrases such as: “Somebody is always passing.” (77), which could mean walking by or passing away/ dying. More, the speaker’s dislike of looking back similarly conveys the temporal logics of the texts’ verbiage and drive into future temporalities: “But back windows ain’t much good for looking out. I never did like looking backwards nohow. I always did believe in looking out front—looking ahead—which is why I’s worried about Rodney (85). Mary’s use of the window here is important and deeply entangled with how she thinks of interiors as well as futurity.
From Imani, continued: Regardless, we hear the tale and a different narrator before Sister Mary begins to narrate how she is “so tangled up in living” that she “ain’t got time to die” cause she “got to look after...” so and so and so and so. (3) While I believe that Sister Mary’s text tells us many things about the frequency of black life (how frequency changes across generations (8-16), how American consumerism deeply impacts the desires of black folk and therefore the frequency of our lives (14-16 i.e. the cars), how different (some) bodies operate on different temporalities and rhythms within a larger frequency (58-64), how physical enclosure, architecture, and class dictate ones frequency (66-70), how frequential and sonic materialism’s such as music can get inside you and ignite/change one’s frequency momentarily and perhaps forever (7), how black aesthetic production emerges from our specific generation’s experience of black life’s frequency (i.e. “off-time” 12), and the way the frequency of black life changes based on geographic location (58)), I am most taking by how she conveys the entanglements of frequency, labor, and care (27). Thus, it is also important to note that black life (and aesthetic production) is—once again!—entangled with the figure of black maternity. (Yet, how does this figure differ or relate to the figure that Fred Moten conjures, imposes, and constructs in In the Break?) Her direct line (or two-way) to God conveys that she does not fear death. She is more “afraid” or perhaps anxious to miss life. She is just so tangled up in it. And this entanglement with life is part and parcel with her tetheredness to her loved ones.
Indeed, she narrates the story of herself and the tangle of her life through her progeny. Rodney, whose personal frequency seems to mirror her own at his age, specifically upnerves her worriations. She understands the something inside of him (7). She has to stay and protect her grandchildren from the “cruelly optimistic” imposed desires that, she believes, will inevitably noose them (8).
Sister Mary conveys the entanglements of frequency, care, and labor through Rodney, herself, and her daughter Melinda. She compares Rodney to her other grandson, Chick. She tells: “He [Chicksaw] always goes to work dressed up. Chick’s as different from Rodney as day from night. Could dress his self when he was three years old. Gets up early in time to take the bus all the way downtown to work, don’t like subways. But Rodney don’t hardly get to work at all no kind of way, says daylight hurts his eyes. Never will be integrated with neither white nor colored, nor work, just won’t.” On pages 16 and 17, Sister Mary sketches the stark contrast between her two eldest grandsons through metaphors (night and day) and movement. Rodney is nocturnal, indolent, and fixed in unfixidity. Chicksaw, on the other hand, works and has a frequency that I read as a kind of flow, style, and swagger through life. Chicksaw also goes steady with a girl and Rodney has at least three girls lined up. While most would read Rodney’s indolence, nonmonogamy, and absentee (non) parenting as laziness, I follow Sister Mary and Cameron Rowland in thinking about the difference in these frequencies as situated around care. Rodney loves music and moves for it. He seems to have divested from the frequencies of the outer white world. Chicksaw loves to dress and primp and he works to do so. It is not clear if he dresses for himself or others. And I do think dressing for oneself and the interior black world is different from adorning oneself for the white world (i.e. respectability politics).
Imani, contd: For me, some of the most poignant moments of the text were pages 20, 21 which feel like a temporal portal because the first little boy is, first, fully clothed then shown either taking off his shirt on putting it on depending on how you read it in relation to the “caption.” The in motion, stuckness, movement of the image of the sign painter on 36 was also moving and seemed to get at Sister Mary’s assertion that “You’re right. I done got my feet caught in the sweet flypaper of life—and I’ll be dogged if I want to get loose.” (92) This stuckness speaks to a sort of sweet stillness ever as life, her loves, and her emotional tetheredness to them propel her onward. The image of the little girl laying on her stomach on the ground on page 64 and its “caption”: “And some ain’t going no place at all,” also feel like a rupture because the words double speak idleness and the totality of the enclosure. However, placing the little girl there gives the words several more meanings as I wonder what she is looking at and why she is chillin’ like grown folk. My favorite images are on page 66 underneath “But it’s sad if you ain’t invited” because they show black people beautiful facades as well as the isolation of enclosure and being kept out by being put inside. They also allow some privacy to the subjects. More, the small child looking outside is a punctum because her white attire sits in contrast against the black facade. Her looking towards the camera alludes to some desire to look and that pulls on something inside of me. I also love the images on page 68 and DeCarava’s reconfiguration of the camera’s gaze through an emphasis on black looking (and inciting the viewers curiosity about black curiosity) through angles.
Yet, the images on 70, 72, and 98 most convey the entangled poetics of the two forms of text. On 72 “and hold their hands” is enjambed and operates as a cut/ zoom that transitions us into the beautiful and heart wrenching closeup of the man’s hands. Still, now, I wonder at the tension of that line—how holding ones hands both describes what Hughes and DeCarava’s works do, but also this simple gesture and act of mundane self-care. Although the man feels more posed in the full body picture of him on the park bench, the close up is intimate and wounding—another punctum. On 72, the sliding plane of the picture from page 73 slips into the bottom half of 72 just as seamlessly as the black man’s timbers on 73 threaten to. But the moment of contradiction between Hughes’ “Yet there is so much to see in Harlem!” And the two men’s willful looking into the wall (or out of the walls) away from the inside of Harlem change the meaning of Hughes’ words. They take on the political lilt of DeCarava’s image and beg us to think about how one sees Harlem: whether one sees Harlem from its walls or if “seeing” Harlem is the affective experience of perpetually looking out. Last, the image of Sister Mary or a possible Sister Mary shocks as we are used to seeing her through her loved ones. The resounding, friendly, and intimate: “Here I am” puts the reader on the receiving end of something profound. I cannot say if it is care or intimacy (or both) but the moment arouses a strong sensation after everything.
One thing I am still very interested in thinking about is the relationship between the figuration of the spider I mention above and the sweet fly paper of life. How is Sister Mary’s entanglement in life connected to the sweet fly paper? And is this stuckness necessarily bad? How does Mary’s story augment, push back on, or perplex notions of fixity, movement, change, temporality, and futurity we have encountered in texts such as Fanon’s Black Skins?
As I encounter the cover of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, I am provoked to return to Christina Sharpe’s engagement with Black annotation and Black redaction. I wonder how to sit with Flypaper and The Kitchen Table Series in conversation with the question Sharpe (2016:115) raises: If we understand portraiture to be both the “art of creating portraits” (image and text) and “graphic and detailed description,” how might we understand a variety of forms of contemporary Black public image-making in and as refusals to accede to the optics, the disciplines, and the deathly demands of the antiblack worlds in which we live, work, and struggle to make visible (to ourselves, if not to others) all kinds of Black pasts, presents, and possible futures? How do these visual/textual ensembles refuse and exceed the “evidentiary thrust” forced upon Black photography, as well as photography’s optical conventions? What opportunities for other types of imaging and imagining do they open up? Beginning with the cover of Flypaper, the cropped image of the presumably Black child’s eyes (the image appears to be a zoomed in and cropped version of the image on page 3) resonates with Sharpe’s use of Black redaction to counter the ethnographic gaze of Agassiz’s images of Delia and Drana. Sharpe focuses on Delia and Drana’s eyes in order to deeply engage their gaze, their looking back at and past the capturing of the white photographer. Providing a set of eyes on the cover of Flypaper attunes us to this way of looking, of thinking through Black interiority as suggested by Sarah Lewis in the Foreword to The Kitchen Table Series. Aside from this cropped set of eyes, DeCarava performs a type of Black redaction across the set of photos, using close-up shots to bring the fullness of the Black face into view. Many of these faces show a type of contemplative or pensive looking, either directly at the camera or off toward the distance. A few full smiles are sprinkled in a few times throughout the text. What is DeCarava trying to convey about the affective register of Black life through this type of looking conveyed in the “deepest black” shades? This deep blackness, this making blackness blacker, refuses photographic conventions of joy residing in “brightness”. The photographs demand to be felt, attended to.
I feel that the deep blackness that DeCarava is representing is in conversation with the affective space of the visits to town Du Bois engages with in “Of the Black Belt.” The quotidian nature of what is represented exceeds an evidencing of Black capabilities of participation in the American project. DeCarava conveys the beauty of the Black ordinary on its own terms. Paired with Hughes’s Black annotations, the visual/textual ensemble shows a type of joy in everyday life that does not always register through a smile, but sometimes through a quiet holding of hands (page 70-71) or through the movement of coming and going. The pensive and contemplative photographs are the imaginative content for Hughes’s narration of “how good [life] is.” Flypaper is possible because of “what the authors have seen and known and felt deeply about their people,” what Sharpe refers to as the “knowledge from and of the everyday.” Teju Cole, in writing about DeCarava in “A True Picture of Black Skin,” argues that DeCarava’s photographs employ right to opacity that resonates with the work of Glissant. I see this opacity within the deepest black shades and the facial expressions of the photographed, which make them illegible to a certain type of gaze and simultaneously enable Hughes’s annotations though their entanglements with his knowledge of the everyday.
Thinking with Sweet Flypaper and The Kitchen Table Series in conversation, I am provoked to return to Jafa’s Black visual intonation. While Jafa’s method is preoccupied with the question of film, I’m thinking about how Flypaper and Kitchen might constitute a Black photographic form. Both texts employ a type of Black annotation and redaction, with annotations that exceed the restrictions of fact and fiction, and redactions through focusing, shadows, and deep blackness. Do these methods enable DeCarava and Weems to move beyond the trappings of photography presented by Weheliye? Can the use of shadow subvert the visual logics of the racial epidermal schema? Does the representation of quotidian spaces as facilitating community and becoming move beyond the demands of evidencing Black life? Do the annotations make Black life visible “to ourselves, if not to others?”
DeCarava and Hughe’s photographic essay lead the viewer to an uncommon level of engagement for the format. The Sweet Flypaper of Life allows a similar experience as watching a series or reading a novel: the reader can be removed from its own physical space into the world and reality created by the authors. Sister Bradley shows the reader through her world, through her lens and looking into her eyes.
ReplyDeleteGuided by the narrator’s experience of life, I could experience life in Harlem in the mid 20th century. A portrayal that expanded from the personal realm into the streets, the struggles for survival, relationships, marriage, raising children while going through the specific difficulties of inhabiting a racialized body while waiting to see how society's behavior will unfold as integration becomes a legal fact.
The image of the window, as on page 58, and its sequential point of view on page 59, offers an opportunity for contemplation. The in-between this outer world and the inner world experience. The moment when the female characters can seat, rest from the hustle and just be.
Although the essay follows a documentary aesthetic, the writing creates interesting friction between reality and fiction. When photography was first created, the understanding that the machine would freeze a moment and a piece of a certain reality, led it to be perceived by many, as a representation of truth. Facing DeCarava’s images I asked myself the question: was it intended to be a representation of his truth? Does that even matter?
Perhaps one of the strengths of the essay is that Sister Bradley could be any Sister. She personifies it, but as if the character itself was created from a juxtaposition of lives, a vertical axis of many existences and families throughout Harlem.
In the Kitchen Table series,’ Carrie Mae Weems achieves a similar effect of reality amalgamation, although narrowed down from an expanded social and familiar existence to the one lived by a black woman in her own subjectivity and intimate space. The kitchen table stands as a psychological space where the individual being can be alone with its own intimacy as well as private encounters and exchanges with other beings on very a personal level: children, lovers, and close friends. She loves, is a lover, awaits, has her heartbroken, cares, she meets girlfriends, laughs, drinks, educates, studies, plays and has her hair braided. Weem’s character is in the shadows of a man, as in image number 5, but at the same time faces and defies the camera as in the first image.
Different from DeCarava’s characters, where the woman is subject to house chores and absent husbands as in page 57 and 92, Weems character could be a single mother as much as a wife, but throughout her series, there is a sense of a woman claiming her space and ownership of her life and destiny.
In “Diagrammatics of Physiognomy: W.E.B Du Bois’s Graphic Modernities,” Weheliye contrasts the portraiture that Du Bois exhibited at the 1900 Paris Exhibition against the infographics of The Philadelphia Negro. In elaborating the latter, from its ability to diagram the political physiognomies of racialization and elaborate the new reality, per Deleuze, of a “scopic consciousness” (36), he delimits a potentiality of the former vis-à-vis the representational logics or laws that regulate photography. Though Weheliye rightly foregrounds the capacity of The Philadelphia Negro to depict the “rhythm of chance” (36) that attends racialization and grids of abjection, I wonder how we might rethink a logic of the photograph in conversation with Roy DeCarava and Carrie Ann Weems in order to reemphasize the power immanent to their photographic work.
ReplyDeleteIf abstraction maintains a slavery no longer official in name, if corporeal subjection no longer operates as the sole means of violence and instead requires its visualization in a representational field, the photography of scientific racism not only fulfilled this project but also determined in part the rules of a medium still nascent in postbellum America. I repeat Weheliye thus yet suggest differently the idea that photography via Du Bois, DeCarava, and Weems can install black life instead of (social) death as a mode of resistance to that scheme. All three collections of black social life in public and private yield subjects who negotiate these spaces. Seriality enacted across these visions in turn reveals the lines of force that racialize those spaces and dictate the terms of that negotiation, a revelation that Deleuze and Weheliye reserve for diagrams as new truth indicative of and thereby opposed to the ideological apparatus of racialization. Thinking Sweet Flypaper of Life and Kitchen Table Series thus as interventions against the necropolitical confines of photographic theorization divulges instead the “staging ground” that Adrienne Edwards reads in the kitchen table of Weems, a site of contest that runs counter to “the assemblage of anti-black and anti-female limitations the system circulates in actual life as in representations of it” (11). At risk is engaging the logic of a medium that objectifies, but at stake is the need to continually—and serially—reclaim a visual field that we see continually (re)invents itself against racialized bodies and offer rather what Edwards sees as the “eventfulness we feel in encountering the work” (10), the event of black life not as “chance” but possibility.
One of the ways Hughes attaches/sets his annotative narration to DeCarava’s photographs is through colons. It seems that these colons gesture to and present the photographs, asking us to see them through a particular tone, as a pause, a demonstration, a call and response, as well as a clause in its own right. Colons “usually indicat[e] a discontinuity of grammatical construction greater than that marked by the semicolon, but less than that marked by the period” (OED “colon”). That there are degrees of “discontinuity” suggests that there is some continuity of discontinuities. Perhaps colons are intervals between clauses (to continue a thread mentioned a few classes ago). In intervals between annotation and photograph, it seems that Hughes modulates the phonic substance of DeCarava’s images in a way that allows both text and photograph to inflect each other and adhere themselves to one another. I’m thinking particularly about the series of photographs of Jerry, Melinda, and their children. Sister Mary Bradley says:
ReplyDelete“Now you take that Jerry. There’s no man living don’t have some faults. Jerry’s got his. But can’t nobody say when he’s home he ain’t a family man. Crazy about his children – and his children are crazy about him: [image] … Come running to meet him at the door: [image]… And that baby had ruther set on his lap than nurse its mama. Never saw a baby so crazy about its daddy: [image]… But of course, its Melinda’s got to be worried with them all day. And Sometimes, old as I is, they tries even my impatience: [image]” (48-51)
There are a few things I want to notice here. First, Sister Bradley returns to the refrain “Now you take” that we first hear when, early on, she introduces Rodney. She also already used this refrain to talk about Jerry and the Saturday night kitchen parties. (As a side note, I think we could also see Carrie Mae Weems’ kitchen table series as modulations on a refrain, which in this case occurs as a particular place.) “Now you take” seems to me a response to and evasion of the messenger’s telegram “Come home,” as this refrain continues to postpone the call to “come home” as well as to gather more and more people and places, intimate and encountered in passing, that make up an expansive and expanding social milieu that involves and exceeds home. Though the “you” is addressed to the messenger, it is also delivered to other seers and listeners, asking us to take some bit of sweetness on the flypaper of life and get entangled in it all, over and over again in the continuous impressions that already pass away – become discontinuous – even in the immediacy of “now” (and I think there’s a resonance between flypaper and DeCarava’s capture of silver gelatin photographs that captivate Hughes and us).
To this refrain, Sister Bradley adds the motif of “crazy” as a pitch of a love so ecstatic that the children prefer to set themselves on their daddy’s lap than set themselves to their mother’s breast. This crazy pitch of love, accompanied by Sister Bradley’s diffusion of his particular faults by relating them to a pervasive brokenness of every living man, momentarily overwhelms the faulty tones attached to Jerry here and several images later. Still, Sister Bradley’s generous attention to this crazy love shared between Jerry and his children modulates at its crescendo, moving us to the profundity of Melinda’s more subdued, troubled, devoted, quotidian, and often thankless love. Then through Sister Bradley’s eyes, resentment and impatience inflect her dedication and love as we are invited to look at her grandchild looking at her/the messenger/us...
(Continued) In pages that follow, Sister Bradley returns to the refrain “Now you take,” this time offering us Little Jerry instead of Jerry. Similarly, the repetition of “crazy” that marked attachment between Jerry and his children modulates to a maddening, persistent, exhaustive repetition of “ands” that enumerate Melinda’s responsibilities to her children around bedtime before she maybe has an interstice (contingent on whether Jerry comes home, meaning that even his absence doubly conditions her duties and her free time) to “read her paper.” We see her looking at a newspaper, which is another flypaper of sorts attaching her to gathered events of the world outside the home. At the same time, I imagine “paper” doubled as the flypaper of her life, this respite for reflecting on its stickiness. The convergence of flypaper and newspaper in this interstice seems to modulate into the window of the next page, where “Every so often, ever so once in a while, somedays a woman gets a chance to set in her window for a minute and look out” (58). The newspaper and flypaper of Melinda’s life are windows to other discontinuous patches of a continuous roll of life’s sweet flypaper. Set in the window, through her eyes, glimpses of stuckness and sweetness adhere here and there.
DeleteThis weeks’ readings, or should I say sightings, or viewings, made me think about the relationship of text and image and how this relationship itself relates to something like the ‘interval’, or, as Fred Moten puts it in one of the texts we already discussed, “this interstitial no-space […] where photography lives.”
ReplyDeleteLooking at both photo-books, I was wandering about similarities and differences between The Sweet Flypaper of Life and The Kitchen Table Series. How does the written text interact with the images in both of these projects; these projected “quiet visions” that “emerged into a public life?” (DeCarava, 102) What kind of intimacy is created through these collaborations between pictures and words? In what ways are questions concerning certain techniques of assemblage and montage applicable here? How do we account for registers like the power of language, the force of inscription, and the photographic imprint; and the ways they interact with each other as modes and processes of signification and visibility?
Despite the intimate beauty and the “uncommon level of engagement,” that Júlia mentions in her post, I have to admit, that in reading Hughes text, and therefore following Sister Bradley’s vivid and insistent portrayal of black life in the 1950s Harlem—her "perception of the senses and the soul” (DeCarava, 102)—, I personally had trouble to focus my attention on–, or to allow sufficient space for the images. They somehow disappeared in my readings, almost like the text took up all the space of their quiet singularity. At some point, they seemed to be mere illustrations for Sister Bradley’s narrative; therefore, the images were making visible what was already visible, if that makes sense. Looking at the design of the book, it becomes apparent how literally tightly interwoven text and images are—there is almost no space in-between them.
(In regard to this, I would love to discuss the ways a text, or a picture caption, captures the image; in the sense of seizing and arresting it. Also, how the mentioned illustrative use of images, relates to room for the viewers own imagination.)
Turning over to Carrie Mae Weems project, and with reference to the already mentioned, I was thinking a lot about the table, and what kind of different spaces can be associated or linked to it.
In a video interview, in which Weems was speaking about the importance of the participation of “African-American artists in the field” of photography and art in general, she is mentioning the table in a quite interesting way. “And that’s important,” Weems says, “because once you’re at the table, something else happens, something else shifts, something else becomes more possible, something else becomes more dynamic, more meaningful, more engaging for the entire mix of people.”
In resonance with what Weems is alluding to here, I am particularly interested in the table as a fixed, determined, secured, and rigid relation which is standing between us. Something that brings us together, in that it assigns a certain place and therefore also splits and distances us in a certain way, like Hannah Arendt mentions it somewhere. The table in Carrie Mae Weems series inscribes a certain distance, and yet there is an intimate familiarity at work in her images. I was also struck by the meticulous arrangement of details in the images–for example the glasses, and when they are filled with alcohol, or what seems to be only water. These arrangements create certain atmospheres, sounds or moods. These phonic substances appear in the strange interval between text and image. And here, coming back to the ‘theme’ of this post, I am interested in the different forms of attachment. (text/image, artist/viewer…)
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ReplyDeleteI have been listening to Moonchild’s :Throwback" and the line “cause I like the attention you’re giving me” keeps resonating with the images we are working with this week. In my conversations with Keli ahead of our presentation, I have been obsessed with the photographic encounter. Does the photograph and, subsequently, the subjects in the image compel that we look? Does our erotic encounter with the image (e.g. looking as gazing, attending to bodily composition, penetrating the image with our glance) draw out a particularly mangled impression of the figures captured in its frame? Here, I am thinking about how Weems’s work “has unfolded under a light of interrogation” (76). I have been reading French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s The Skin-Ego (1995). He writes, “The first global image of the psyche is not formless but based on an embrace of body to body” (265). Anzieu’s text is brilliantly frustrating because he barely talks about race, though notes that skin is a porous enclosure. Can the image account for not only the porous nature of skin (and we can extend that to gaps in representation, history, time, and place—“a rightful place or voice”) but also the question of touch (Weems 69)? I cannot help but think of Marlon Riggs’s repetition of Joseph Beam’s “Brother to Brother: Words from the Heart” (1986). He writes, “I dare myself to dream of us moving from survival to potential, from merely getting by to a positive getting over” (Beam 215). For Beam, along with Essex Hemphill, touch and race go hand in hand; it is life affirming but also dynamically, in part, psychically and affectively rejecting. An image of touch—or an encounter with an image that makes you feel like you existing with a photographic touch—that articulates “the beginning and the end of things” (Weems 6.15). DeCarava and Weem’s images evince a figural presence of the everyday, and the flesh that flows throughout, that gets over the shuttered capture. That resistance of the image to be simply a portrait or a candid capture is part of the photographic presence, and subsequent pre-sense, of quotidian black life. That is, thinking with Hughes, “He was always the first to turn on the hydrant in the street in the summer…” in such a way that, after Farrah Griffin, the hydrant’s blast of water is still flowin’ in our reiterative encounter with the image (19).
ReplyDeleteThese images do a lot of performance work. Weems turns a dining room into a gallery space. DeCarava takes the breeze caught in the windowsill as welcomed shift to his everyday-set. Weems also brings song into the accompanying materials of her images: “No More,” “I Love You Porgy,” and “A Night in Tunisia” (6.23, 6.15). But there is also the sonorous performance of look, too. In many ways, the encounter with the vernacular image demands a particular kind of flowin’ in that I want to see more of these images, “and hold their hands” as they hold their own (70). It is a desire that demands too much of the image, and of the life captured/freed by its technology, but the thought of such an intimacy persists. These images, the words, coupled by the beauty of the publication, say: “I hear tell you’s down—but with no intentions of going out” (Hughes 92).
Works Consulted
Anzieu, Didier. The Skin Ego. Paris: Dunod, 1995.
Beam, Joseph. Editor. In the Life. Washington: Redbone Press, 1986.
I keep circling back to the set of definitions for frequency that Professor Campt laid out for us during her visit to Columbia each time I begin these posts. These definitions have functioned as something always “out on the table,” so to say, for me to consider. For this week, frequency as a way of describing temporality (repetition over time in an interval), I see, as describing the question of what is left on the table from day to day, week to week, photograph to photograph.
ReplyDeleteCarrie Mae Weems sets up the camera for her “Kitchen Table Series” on one end of the table. It feels as if we, as the viewer, sit opposite the head of the table as a constant guest in her home or even an invisible and distant second host to the social scenes. The viewer remains present, the camera fixed in place as the people and objects in the image move through time. The other fixed things are the occasional objects that get left out on the table: half-full/half-empty glasses, opened newspapers, cards, books, notepads, homework, pens, and the three chairs. This stuff produces continuity across time between the intervals of people shifting and moving. They keep time in a sense, helping us notice what has shifted through their ever-presence and occasional absences. The things get touched, touched at, touched again, and eventually put away. The scenes resemble each other, and they don’t resemble each other. Sister Mary creates the same set of rifts on resemblance for her grandchildren who sometimes are the “spitting image” of their parents (6). From the spit, the salvia or drool, of the parent comes the perfect likeness. The child is more than a replication but an actual part, a body fluid, of the parent. The moving glasses, touched by mouths and sipped from, and the lipstick that mother and daughter share show a mouth-to-mouth intimacy, a spit-to-spit intimacy as one such moving constant across time, one such thing kept out.
Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life ends with another domestic scene where things are kept in place. “Our janitor,” “that man,” or simply “him” looks out from the left page towards the right where the photo on the adjoining page is spilling over the gap made by the binding (92, 94, 96). He looks out over an oven, with pots and pans left out after cooking but not yet cleaned, near a rainy window. He takes a similar place to the viewer in the “Kitchen Table Series,” out of frame but almost sat at the table in the kitchen. As Imani has already beautifully suggested, this placement is part of the “entangled poetics” that sets up a black viewer and, occasionally, enjambs what they see. Here, he looks out of the photo to look inward at the kitchen as it is in use/just been in use. These left out objects, these pots and pans, are the image of what keeps Sister Mary tethered to the world, stuck to the flypaper. “When I get through with my pots and pans…” trails off the page as a promise of a future that will only come once the kitchen is cleared of the objects that usually are kept out on it (97). The ellipses, which more than any other pause, encourage us to turn the page, lead to an image of her outside the house when, “ever so once in a while,” she wears her best clothes (98). “Ever so once in a while” promises a rhythmic regularity but an unpredictable one. There is a constant and an inconstant.
I wonder what is “sticky” about left out objects, particularly the left-out objects of cooking and eating. In some senses, the dirty pots and pans are literally sticky. I also wonder if there is a labor to leaving things out as there seems an element of work to cleaning things up?
I’ve purposefully moved between “kept out” and “left out” throughout my post. I wonder what the difference is or if there is a difference at all. For example, the cards that float across the table end up in Weems’s hands by the end. The thing left out seemingly by accident comes into use in order to play what looks like solitaire. It seems to suggest there are things left out by others that can then be kept for oneself.
I am fascinated by the design of Hughes and DeCarava’s text. To talk about the cover of a book usually requires some kind of preface, a gesture that says “before I get to the text I must talk about X.” But here, X is the text; the cover is the beginning of the narrative, both DeCarava’s photograph and Hughes’ text getting relatively equal space on the cover. Or maybe this cover is split into thirds: the title with DeCarava’s photo in the background is combinatory while the eyes that confront the reader and the text display the separate character of the contributors’ work. Either way, I think the graphic choice, to begin the narrative of this text on the cover, demands us to ask certain questions about how we engage with the text.
ReplyDeleteWhat changes when information like copyright dates, edition number, the Library of Congress Control Number, and the important “All Rights Reserved,” is presented not before but after the narrative of the text begins? The beginning of the narrative on the cover of the text might imply that in fact not all rights are reserved, that some rights extend beyond the boundaries of the text, and that the boundaries of the text are far more porous that we might (want to) think. The design of the interior pages continues this affect through the layout of the photographs in the text. On the third page of the text we have a simple layout: text first, image at the bottom, with a generous margin that allows the reader to place their thumb on the page without requiring them to touch the photograph. On the fifth page, however, the margin is removed; the image extends all the way to the right side and bottom of the page. If I continue to hold the book in the same manner that I did on the previous page, I am going to leave my fingerprint on DeCarava’s photography, the oils of my skin lingering on the glossy pages of the book (something that I did not think about when reading the almost-newspapery pages of Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices). There is a moment of hesitation where I wonder what effect I will have on this photograph, what my contact with it will do to the page over time. But I touch it, and my thumbprint is left behind, nearly imperceptible amidst the dark tonalities of DeCarava’s photograph, but there all the same.
The design of this text compels this exchange between reader and image. It is signaled immediately by the choice of image on the cover, the eyes of a black person centered and staring out at the holder of the material object. The stare emanates (perhaps it undulates too) and enters the reader, just as the reader enters the texts and leaves their own mark—and it doesn’t seem accidental that the mark I leave behind in my copy of the text is one mobilized as evidence by forensic science to record, catalogue, and criminalize. This text takes something of us with it, as we take part of it with us.
I also think that what Imani described in their post as “the vector of interiority” might compel or facilitate this exchange between reader and text. The reader accepts an invitation to enter into the interior world of Sister Mary and through that acceptance the reader invites the text into their interior as well. But I also think this interiority compels exteriority—the drive I felt to annotate the text with connections to Wright, Ellison, and other work by Hughes is one example. Another is, again, the cover of the book. The narrative, so focused on the interiority of Sister Mary, is also laid bare on the exterior of book.
The conterminous interiority/exteriority of the book demonstrates a practice of polytonality. The supposedly contradictory movement of the in/ex cross over and combine, performing both at once and hinting at that movement that lies between, the undulation between two extremes. We can see this polytonality in the misnomer of “black and white” photography that DeCarava subtly undermines while using the technologies of black and white photography. The two extremes of the color spectrum do not adequately capture the gradient of black and white that DeCarava captures, particularly in the photographs on pages 28 and 29, of the interior and the exterior of the subway. In these two photographs we see how lighting affects the tonalities of the photograph. The artificial lighting seems to allow for lighter shades in the person’s coat and the support beams of the subway station. The exterior photo (taken from the interior) displays a much starker contrast between light and dark, as the bright sunlight allows for the interior of the stairwell to sink into darker shades of black, particularly in the top right of the photo.
DeleteFinally, I want to return to the inside cover and the statement familiar to books containing fiction:
THE TEXT OF THIS BOOK IS ENTIRELY FICTIONAL.
ALL NAMES USED IN THE BOOK ARE FICTITIOUS AND ANY RELATION
TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL. (2)
But do we believe this statement here? Is this statement, printed after the beginning of the narrative, a legal wink at the reader? This is a narrative that cannot be contained by the framing of the text that houses it, and certainly cannot be contained by a single genre such as fiction (as wide as that genre is). It is and is not fiction; there are and are not relations to persons living and dead woven into the fabric of this text. And, in placing this statement after the narrative begins, Hughes and DeCarava close the gap between the para//text.
At the book salon for Hazel Carby’s 'Imperial Intimacies' at Brown last week, Carby said that the ambition for the work, which moves through transnational histories of empire and family, was to “disrupt the question of memoir.” The memoir as typically conceived, she explained, is dependent on “imaginary, coherent subjects,” whereas the aim here was to pull apart a sense of stable or linear motion—in time, geography, and visibility.
ReplyDeleteThese ideas resonated in reading Hughes and DeCarava’s Sweet Flypaper of Life and Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series in succession with Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices. Particularly with regards to the the notion of imagined subjects belonging to the memoiristic mode rather than the fictional, and the question of self-representation’s relationship to frequency. Both Flypaper, Kitchen Table, and 12 Million Black Voices share similar structural forms: essayistic vignettes, a distinct, observational narrative voice, and a simultaneous though not necessarily congruent photographic dialogue. While the three works share a desire to portray the “texture of [black] life” in Wright’s terms, and enact a purposeful disjuncture between image and text, they diverge in some critical ways. Black Voices, true to its title, attempts to vocalize a multitudinous “we” where capitalist histories seem to shape black communities in a fashion whereby they are defined by peripatetic flight, contingency, and trajectories of movement. Hughes and DeCarava’s work, on the other hand, occupy a different tonal register. Less sweeping in its scale, Flypaper, like Weems's project, dwells in intimate, domestic spaces as opposed to Wright’s, where the private sphere is a platform for his framing of observations of the public, systematic pressures on black life. Hughes’s scale also manifests itself in the singular narrator-figure of Sister Mary Bradley at the end of her life, emphatically refusing death’s beckoning because she is so “tangled up in living” (3). Bradley draws out this entanglement to beautiful, poetic effect in her portrayal of familial networks enmeshed within black life as one of joy, tenderness, and care.
Another point at which the works differ is their photographs. Black Voices deploys public documentation from the Great Depression. The majority of these images, though undoubtedly powerful for their specific purposes, link bodies to the social environments in which they’re depicted—labour conditions, industry, housing. These photographs bear an outward-facing directionality, a concern for sociality as manifested in public life. DeCarava’s and Weems’s pictures, by contrast, offer an entirely different—and stunning—sensibility: subjects are in motion, mid-sentence, and in the deep solitude of an unknowable inner life. In other words, these photographs, though positioned in direct conversation with the text, resist any easy readings. They invert the illustrative tendencies of photographs, asking instead to be reckoned with in ambivalent, effusive, and gestural moments.
To return to Carby’s effort of disruption, I wonder how we might hold these works in thinking about the possibilities of memoir. Given that none of them claim to be explicitly (or at all) autobiographical, what is the process of self-representation at work? How does Hughes and DeCarava’s metonymic project differ in its claims to truth from Weems’s and from Wright’s, which reads more like documentary narrative? Where does the personal fit in here? These forms bring me back to our discussion around DuBois’s sociological inquiry a couple of weeks ago. Specifically, the problematic of the individual and group as methodology, and how scale and form of representative methodologies alter the relationship to voice and consequently, frequency.
Hartman’s objective—to “jeopardize the status of the event,” the event being the disaster of transatlantic slavery—is a project that calls into question the mechanics of narrative: “the stuff of subjects and plots and ends” (Hartman 10). The experience of the enslaved subject is, according to Hartman, incommensurable with the fictions of history. The past, present, and future are a function of Man’s Universal Time and Progression—both systems of measurement that do not, as a rule, fathom black subjectivity.
ReplyDeleteAs I study Carrie Mae Weems’s “Kitchen Table Series,” I wonder how these black subject(s), who are not enslaved but are instead living in slavery’s aftermath, engage the lineaments of narrative. At first glance, the project seems to move easily along a somewhat predictable path, with a cast of characters that meet, fight, make love, make babies, drink, and split. A drama of the quotidian.
The objects that decorate the walls and table of the kitchen, however, make me think otherwise. There are birdcages, mirrors, decks of cards, glasses of water, glasses of wine, glasses of liquor, packs of cigarettes, tapestries, knives, notepads, newspapers… Some objects only appear once (the portrait of Malcom X, for instance) while others appear and re-appear in different hands, in new relationships, recalling instances of care, loss, despair, play. It’s worth asking: does this narrative actually progress or does it instead de-compose and re-compose? An offering of atemporailty (“past not yet past”) under the guise of plots and ends.
I also want to very briefly note the air vent and recall Christina Sharpe’s questions regarding aspiration and the atmosphere of antiblackness: “Who has access to freedom? Who can breathe free?” (Sharpe 112). In these photos, the air vent “[keeps] and [puts] breath back in the Black body in hostile weather” affording a micro, atemporal atmosphere in which black bodies do not “simply or only live in subjugation and as the subjected” (Sharpe 112, 4).
Reflecting on this week’s material and going back to the question of “how do rhythms are echoed in artistic practices?”, I couldn’t help but wonder how Carrie Mae Weems’ and Roy DeCarava’s photographs define, if not the texture of Blackness, certainly its rhythm. Both texture and rhythm give body to a black temporality, the temporality of black lives that we gain access to through the photographs.
ReplyDeleteThinking again with Fanon, and reflecting on the epidermic phenomenological experience of Blackness while captured by the white (capital) gaze, I can’t help but feel captured and fixated while looking at Carrie Mae Weems’ photographs. Placed at the end of the table, not a participant, but a spectator, watching all the movement that lives within these scenes of everyday life. I’m dragged by each one of the photographs, but I’m not the one that moves. The embody character of frequency and experience of Weem’s series dislodges the white gaze so that the black life can come into view. This visual operation renders black life possible, as I see and feel a succession of moments within frames that detail a wide range of emotions, a sonata or a play that discharges my view with the kinetic energy that passes through black bodies.
If frequency measurers the scale of perception, can the experience brought to the fore by Weems’ piece be thought as a radical black framing? If the photographs position me in space, they do it to open my senses to the black visual intonation (Arthur Jafa) of the passing-scene, a tableau-vivant where rhythm produces an emotional response. Frequency here is expressed as a reoccurring register within black life, a kinetic force that brushes against “the impossible odds” surrounding that what the image so intensely holds: the everyday possibility of life to flourish, to bloom.
There's also a question of positionality when it comes to the bodies portrayed by Weems’ photographs. Always at center, but in the depth of the image and enclosed by the wall, intensifying the perception of infinite space in front of it. The kitchen ends at the wall, but the extension of the room if undefined. Meaning that the gaze of the woman sitting on the table – first at the head of the table, then on side, and finally back at the head, and center of the image - is a gaze that extends beyond the reach of the scene, pointing at an elsewhere, out of the frame and imbued with possibility.
The readings this week made me think the formation of an identity, and the implications of a lack of an identity. In music and sound studies, a sonic identity is defined by “timbre”: when two instruments play the same note, we go to timbre to tell us which instruments they are. Timbre is the thing differentiates one sound from another and creates a class of sounds. However, the ways in which it does the differentiation work against the consideration of a sonic identity, because timbre almost always belongs to the listener, the perceiver of a sound.
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting to consider timbre alongside Ellison’s work. In his writing on Wright in the article Richard Wright’s Blues, Ellison claims that the formation of identity or individuality is always a process:
Man cannot express that which does not exist – either in the form of dreams, ideas, or realities- in his environment. Neither his thoughts nor his feelings, his sensibility nor his intellect are fixed, innate qualities. They are processes that arise out of the interpretation of human instinct with environment, through the process called experience; each changing and being changed by others. (Ellison, 270-271)
Ellison’s consideration of experience and the formation of an identity as a process, echoes Judith Butler’s understanding of identity as performative, as opposed to a fixed quality. The expression of these processes depends on their existence in reality. Going back to timbre, if the perceiver defines the timbre of Black American identity, what reality does it express? Does this reality actually exist in the person’s environment? Or does it only exist in the eyes of the perceiver? What does the ability dictate someone else’s identity impose on the subject of this identity?
In Harlem Is Nowhere, Ellison’s ‘nowhere man’ who is “in a constant search of an identity” (Ellison and Parks, 4) has to always fight against the social factors that are supposed to shape the black American identity (Ellison and Parks, 1). Is it possible to think of the search after the black American identity as a search for self-definition that is not dictated by perception?
In the opening paragraph of “12 Million Black Voices”, Wright writes: “you usually take us for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem” (Wright, 10). The timbre of Black American identities is a result of processes that took (and are still taking) place throughout history, that managed to morph and change it, while still maintaining the same core sonic identity, which becomes inaudible through the saturation of perception.
The discussion about knowledge as power, and the use of language as resistance in part two of “12 Million Black Voices”, “Inheritors of Slavery”, speaks to the role of the voice and language in the formation of an identity, it’s ability to appear, and the required conditions of heardness that are necessary in order to participate in any sort of resistance. Wright describes situations in which the slaves’ ability to “steal” the language of the Lords of the Land, and to learn ways to use it as if it was their own has created a sense of victory and freedom:
We stole words from the guarding lips of the Lords of the Land, who didn’t want us to know too many of them and their meaning. […] We proceeded to build a language in inflections of voice, through tonal variety, by hurried speech, in honeyed drawls, by rolling our eyes, by flourishing our hands, by assigning common, simple words new meanings, meanings which enabled us to speak of revolt in the actual presence of the Lords of the Land without their being aware! (Wright, 40)
In this description we learn a lot on a formation of a sonic identity through voice contours and language. The instrumentalization of language that is expressed in this passage creates a mask through two conditions of heardness: the one the Lords of the Land hear, and the one that the slaves hear in their own reality, which allows them to resist and claim their sonic identity as their own.
Thinking in relation to the readings for next week, which I mistakenly read thinking they were included in this week’s discussion, I was struck by how the aesthetic and affective vision of The Sweet Flypaper of Life is a very different representation of Harlem than the one presented in Ellison’s “Harlem is Nowhere.” When I look at the The Sweet Flypaper of Life, I know that every single photo is somewhere, coming together to form a spatial collage of all the different possible somewheres one can be while Black in Harlem. Weems’ similarly positions "The Kitchen Table Series" as taking place on/near/around the location of the kitchen table. While Adrienne Edwards’ preface essay discusses the kitchen table as a symbol and the legacy of domestic spaces in Black women’s art, I think it is also important to foreground the specific, physical position of the kitchen table—its surface, its edges—as represented in the photos themselves. Like Harlem, the kitchen table is somewhere.
ReplyDeleteBeing somewhere for Weems and DeCarava and Hughes involves navigating different levels of interiority and exteriority. DeCarava and Hughes include both interior photos taken inside apartments and exterior photos of the streets of Harlem, as well as potentially boundary-disrupting liminal spaces such as the subway, the windowsill, and the doorway. Similarly, though all her photos take place inside the interior space of the kitchen, Weems’ project also imagines interiority and exteriority, with the text forming the interior thoughts and feelings of the image’s seen and unseen subjects, rendered at times almost like a stream of consciousness, in addition to referring to events that occur on the “streets” beyond the kitchen table that are not visually represented. Taken together, Weems and DeCarava and Hughes create a visual archive of the multi-dimensionality of Black life; its interiorities, its environments both social and physical, its private and public spaces.
This week I am thinking with a question that has surfaced at various points over the course of the seminar: Can a “black gaze” exist? Or are there other ways of looking and sensing that can emerge from within the enclosure?
ReplyDeleteThinking along these lines, I am particularly moved by a short text-image sequence in DeCarava and Hughes’ The Sweet Fly Paper of Life. Sister Mary, Hughes’ fictional narrator, recounts:
Yes, you can set in your window anywhere in Harlem and see plenty. Of course, some windows is better to set in than others mainly because it’s better inside, not that you can necessarily see any more. But back windows ain’t much good for looking out. I never did like looking backwards nohow. I always did believe in looking out front—looking ahead—which is why I’s worried about Rodney: What do you reckon’s out there in them streets for that boy? (84-86).
This text is accompanied by three photographs: first, an image from outside of a child sitting indoors at an open window reading comics; next, a dimly-lit indoors image of the young man referred to as Rodney, standing against the wall in his characteristic trenchcoat and brimmed hat, half in the light and half in shadow, with the hint of a smile on his face; finally, a street image featuring imposing columns and building facades that seem to swallow up the two pedestrians caught in the frame. This passage condenses many of the themes that surface throughout the narrative. Class allows some Harlem residents, like Chickasaw’s girlfriend, to inhabit “better” domestic interiors than others, though this does not afford them any special view on the neighborhood and world around them. Even those who must work the longest hours, women in particular, are able occasionally to savor some fleeting leisure time—“every so often, ever so once in a while, somedays a woman gets a chance to set in her window for a minute and look out,” Sister Mary explains earlier—though they might spend some of this time worrying, as Mary does, about the well-being of the men who depend upon their labor (58).
What interests me most about this passage, however, is the complex series of contrasts that Sister Mary poses between interiority and exteriority, past and future, stillness and movement—all activated by the experiences of seeing and reflecting. We see in this moment of meditative looking how Sister Mary’s forward-thinking attitude and hopes for societal progress are troubled by uncertainty and the specter of danger, but also counterbalanced by an embrace of the present and its small, meaningful pleasures. Indeed, throughout the narrative Sister Mary seems to look ahead, behind, and around, often in no particular order. Her sense of futurity is grounded as strongly in her everyday present as it is in a horizon of expectation. Sister Mary’s looking is not a “gaze” in the sense that she does not fix the objects of her attention within an ordering frame. Rather, she senses the movements of ordinary black life across the thresholds of imagination and actualization, giving and withholding, endurance and celebration. In this respect, Sister Mary’s looking parallels DeCarava’s photographic eye, which mimes the humming energy of Harlem’s people and urban milieus without staging scenes of either respectability or pathology.
The encounter between image and text is an important one and historically for the medium of photography has been largely capitalized on by disciplinary projects whose terms were prescribed, and in many ways continue to be, by racialization, the prison-industrial complex, orientalism, voyeurism and their associated archives. The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes and Carrie Mae Weem’s Kitchen Table Series demonstrates an alternative trajectory or relationship that can take place between photographs and texts based on a poetics of relation. Borrowing from Edouard Glissant’s writings on opacity, I will focus on the ways in which the artistic projects we look at this week engage in different ways with shadows and opacity, in dialogue with the texts, but never reducible to them.
ReplyDeleteDeCarava, Teju Cole tells us in an article called “A True Picture of Black Skin” is concerned with representing the opacity of Black life, and does so by staying deep in the textures and the tones of his images, a stylistic choice that also functions in some form of allegorical relationality with the impossibility or incommensurability of capturing the complexity of his subjects. He sits with rather than tries to transcend the insufficient but alluring form of a photograph; a medium endowed with the capacity to capture anything that comes before the lens of the camera but never entirely. And this capacity extends well beyond the initial event of the photograph (see Azoulay Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography). This, Cole refers to as “the power of shadows” referring specifically to the technical choices and chiaroscuro effects of DeCarava’s photographs which he chooses not to “correct” according to the lighting meters and parameters of the medium which was designed to optimize the visibility of white skin.
Carrie Mae Weems plays even more dramatically with shadow effects in her series, drawing explicit attention to the role of shadow and light as the people and objects who revolve around the protagonist at the table recede, return, and disappear into the darkness of the scene behind and above the table throughout the series.
In both series I am interested in how the texts narrate the scenes and to what extent this changes what we expect and what we give to the images. The captions, if we can call them that, animate the images, subjects, and stories allowing the subjects to speak; they offer names, affiliations, affects, and associations that elaborate on and alter the frequencies of Black life represented. The right to narrate and the right to opacity are entangled in a web of imperial, anti-imperial, familial, personal, and political conditions that continue to shape and reshape the ways photographers, photographed subjects, and their viewerships engage with images. I will suggest that the text is transformative rather than descriptive and gives more rather than less to interpret and reinterpret, mirroring the repeating intervals and impulses of the modalities or frequencies we’ve explored together so far. In the last section of Walter Benjamin’s “Small History of Photography” he asks: “Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot?”
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ReplyDeleteDelia defiantly stares at the camera. There is no smile in this picture, only tightly pursed lips. Her bodily tension is so visible that we can feel it expanding beyond the image. Her face is slightly blurred, creating a contradictory sense of movement in a picture that pretends to evoke an absolute stillness. She was one of the four South Carolina enslaved people photographed at the request of the naturalist Louis Agassiz. Being blur in face of a gaze that tries to frame and catalog her can be perceived as a fugitivity strategy, a refusal to be completely absorbed by the codes of the scientific white gaze that tries to capture her. I wanted to begin this response evoking Delia’s image because I believe it showcases the ways in which Roy DeCarava’s and Carrie Mae Weems’s photographs can be perceived as the construction of a counter-archive to these eugenics’ scientific photographs. When discussing the “close relationship between photography and the ‘sciences’ of physiognomy and phrenology in the nineteenth century”, Alexander G. Weheliy (2015) argues that “black life was also an integral part of this visual cum technological codification… there cannot exist a contemplation of photography that is not also a consideration of black life” (p.35-36). Thus, counterposing these works brings to stark relief how DeCarava and Weems are deeply engaged with a project of portraying black life and sociability to rearrange the visuality codes that are the foundation and results of the white gaze. And sociability is a central word here since one of the main differences between these pictures is that while the scientific photographs usually portray black people as sole individuals, reemphasizing the project of occluding the possibility of black kinship. It seems crucial, then, that the photographic works with what we have engaged for this week’s meeting – as well as Langston Hughes’ textual intervention – focus on a rich black social life.
ReplyDeleteThe Sweet Flypaper of Life constructs the narrative of a black family that lives in Harlem, emphasizing both the public and private sphere. In contrast to the supposed stillness in the scientific photographs, in this book the black bodies are in constant motion: walking around and occupying the streets (“It’s nice to see you folks all dressed up going somewhere” p.65; and “At night the street meetings on the corner – talking about ‘Buy black’, ‘Africa for the Africans’” p.81-82) or celebrating and dancing in their homes (“They put a party every Saturday night. Usually not no big party. Just neighbors and home folks. But they balls back and stomps down” p.42-43). These parties also are also a key element since they do not establish this domestic space as an emulation of a normative private sphere, but one that is open to different relationships beyond the nuclear family, in which the superposition of all these spaces create a multilayered black social life that is not confined to a singular and rigid configuration. This idea is also present in Weems’ The Kitchen Table Series and how it uses the repetition of the same frame to portray a diverse array of situations that takes place around a kitchen table. If the idea of the kitchen table can evoke an imaginary centered around the family and the domestic, the series once again emphasize a rich social life, that also represents a familiar life but that is not circumscribed by it. Finally, I would like to think about how these works also evoke a very sensorial effect. These bodies are constantly touching: a fatherly kiss (Flypaper, p.25), a mom braiding her kid’s hair (ibid, p.56), a man holding his own hands (ibid, p.71), or friends supporting and caressing one another (The Kitchen Table Series). Can the repetition of scenes depicting these other sensorial realms be a way to dislodge the centrality of the gaze in pursue of other ways to relate to these images?
A central question that emerged for me in thinking through The Sweet Flypaper of Life occurred between the opening two pages and the closing afterword, particularly around two central themes of the work: an invocation of fictionality as protective strategy against visual facticity and the resistance to affective truth and registration. To speak to the former, I found myself questioning the organization of the front-cover text alongside the onlooking eyes of what appears to be a guileless child and subsequent warning on the inside cover: “The text of this book is entirely fictional. All names used in the book are fictitious and any relation to persons living or dead is purely coincidental” (2). What are we to do with these elements and how are we to understand this hermeneutic? Within these first two pages, it appears a symbolic employment of externality and internality is marshaled, with the concentration and magnification of the eyes conjuring a twofold sense of invitational intimacy; the appearing eyes of the child seem to both beckon readers to behold and to behold an affective, soulful truth. The deployment of these eyes alongside the fantastical opening “When the bicycle of the Lord bearing / His messenger with a telegram…” (1) proved curious and I wondered whether or not this inclusion of the maybe cliched “soulful eyes” was intended to be playful. And the subsequent preface to the book on the inside cover furthered that curiosity: How might we understand the employment of exteriority and interiority to be at play here in the rendering of these visuals and accompanying texts? What do we do with the seeming invitation to look and the following command to look differently, though not necessarily look away?
ReplyDeleteThe closing afterward places affective registration in conversation with visual facticity, particularly as she writes, “DeCarava seeks traditions of spiritual wisdom from our multiplicity of voices. He considers the experience of joy as a perception of the senses and the soul…Hughes was able to imbue each imagined individual with vivid agency….the cadence of their improvisations in image and word bring an entire audience of people into an intimate, emotional arc of transformation” (Sherry Turner DeCarava). At what point are we able to ascertain affective truths about a photograph? I want to think more about ways of knowing and, though we might turn away from Enlightenment traditions visual primacy for knowledge and evaluation, how a rhetoric of affective perception and registration is mobilized in service of a knowing perceptibility. What the work reveals through fictional narrative caption and, if I might add, in resisting conventions of narrative plot and photographic documentation, is the slippage between perceptibility and visuality. In engaging with the work, I have been left to consider what truths are really to be known.
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ReplyDeleteFor the last couple of weeks I have been thinking through the idea of phonic substance, and frequency as something which one is trying to attune to in the engagement with the films, texts, and images we have been discussing. In as much as they are something to attune to I have thought of the frequencies as something which asks almost for misreading. But I am not sure what I mean by misreading. To frame it another way I would ask: What does it mean that Moten’’s articulation of phonic substance is in relation to a photograph? What does it mean that the section we read is in a chapter called “Visible Music”? Something, at least, in the language of the description, is happening by way of crossing the senses. Hearing a photo. Seeing music. In as much as that tension was in play I had thought of the attunement something like a misreading which doesn’t uphold a border to the frequencies which push against it. I say all this because it operated as a framework maybe not necessarily in my mode of engagement—in part, because maybe attunement could never be so formulaic—but at least in the language of the description of frequencies. "The Sweet Flypaper of Love" troubles this articulation because, perhaps, its text and images move this misreading back and forth between themselves. Perhaps, misreading isn’t the best word for it.
ReplyDeleteI also wanted to write, specifically, about Sister Mary’s refrain of “Now, you take.” The phrase is a kinda hinge which moves the text at moments by altering the focus. (7, 8, 17, 27, 40, 48, 53) It is a certain rhetorical device on which might have no other meaning than a comparative gesture which brings a new subject into narrative focus. But as I follow it it seems to be doing a number of things. In its first iteration “Now, you take Rodney” is there a tension in the phrase when Sister Mary, as narrator, is addressing the “Lord?”(3) I think the tension is raised by the fact that the opening paragraph being one about death but also home—even though the language of the first paragraph is of coming and staying rather than taking. The suggestion is not that Sister Mary is suggesting that Rodney be taken in this moment by the Lord but rather that the valence is there and that it echos through the moments and turns throughout the book. My suggestion is also that a request to take could be more than a negative aspect as well—I’m thinking now of a line from a prayer “if I should die before I wake/I pray the Lord my soul to take.” The thinking of all this is really to gesture toward what I read as the partial valences of praying but this may have all arisen from my reading moving to fast past the messenger boys leaving and it might also take Lord to be more than just a rhetorical refrain. What is perhaps more interesting is that on two pages after the phrase Sister Mary says, “Now, Lord, I don’t know—why did I take Rodney?’” This moves the dynamic of the phrase. It opens even as it was already opening into the kind of vivid description of living. (perhaps it was behind the photos to a degree) and it becomes about Sister Mary’s taking in of Rodney. What does the phrase do after that? Later on page 27 Sister Mary says, “Now, you take the subway” which blends further the ambiguity of the phrase as it becomes a command or a pun in as much as you do take the subway.
Perhaps another valence in ‘now, you take’ might be in the taking of a photograph. But I am not really sure what to do with that other than notice it.
Unlike Carrie Mae Weems’, The Kitchen Table Series, my first encounter with DeCarava’s photographs have been through his collaboration with Langstone Hughes in The Sweet Flypaper of Life. I am intrigued by the synergy of voice and image - the ways in which they come together to create something unique. However, I also wonder how to speak of DeCarava’s images without relying on the text or if this is a necessary task. How, for example, do these photos exist outside of the book? Do they have titles? What role does the fictional narrative, along with the curation of images, play in mediating a type of meaning of DeCarava’s photographs? Is the text annotating the images or are the images annotating the text?
ReplyDeleteThrough Sister Mary Bradley’s narration we are invited to move through (navigate) a family / community that lead full lives and move through the world with agency. In a sense, her voice turns the still photographs into moving images which, as Leslie Hewitt notes, “have life in them that isn’t stopped or arrested” in time. Of DeCarava’s work, Sherry Turner DeCarava explains that, “the photographs express not struggle but a sense of utter stillness” and it is through this stillness that I am forced to slow down (a change of pace from the ways we have become accustomed to viewing and encountering images today) in order to draw out the subtle pronouncements of blackness, which register on a lower frequency giving us, as Tina Campt notes in her Black Visual Frequency: A Glossary, “profound insights into the everyday experiences of black folks as racialized subjects.” This slowing down of time is achieved through his technique of printing images in a narrower range of deep tones, which he called “infinite shades of gray” though, as Sherry notes, “often hover in the ambiguity of the darkest charcoal …” Within the context of art history, the term chiaroscuro is used to reference the use of contrasting light to achieve a sense of volume in figures and objects. The term originated during the renaissance and the effect was employed most notably in paintings depicting nativity scenes which reduced most light sources except the one coming from the infant Jesus, thus emphasizing a kind of divine light emitted from Jesus, conveying a sense of stillness. In DeCarava’s photographs, blackness is given dimensionality through minimal sources of light and through the structuring of space and how that space communicates with its subjects. For example, on page 68, the subjects are pulled forward into the light but there is also light behind giving them volume and articulation in low registers. Rather than existing outside of or in the periphery of the frame, this older woman and boy are framed by door frame - a structural shaping that allows the subjects to be read outside of the modes representation of black bodies (within the history of representation).
Like Kerry James Marshall’s painting, DeCarava’s photographs debunk the notion that black is the absence of colour and light (and therefore not a colour) by favouring the colour black in a chromatic space. For Marshall this is achieved by never using the colour black in other parts of his paintings other that in his figures thus making them stand out and for DeCarava it is in the tonal range of blackness in his subjects thereby portraying the colour black vis a vis blackness as complex subjects. For example, the images of page 58 and 59 we are not just invited to view the subject in her interior space but are also offered a glimpse of what she is witnessing thus creating an additional dimension or layer of the subject. It is easy to fall within the tropes of documentation due to his relentless capture of the everyday ‘sculpting’, to borrow from Leslie Hewitt, a space for a community and the subjects in the photographs but here exists poetic articulation and expression of black sociality. Among the many images that stand out, I am particularly struck by the images in 78 and 79 (or perhaps the montage of these images with text) which depict picketing as everyday action. In these images I am confronted with the ways that I have become accustomed to viewing black bodies in space protesting often as spectacle but never as “Coming and going. Picketing lines picketing:”
DeleteFinally, I am intrigued by the use of the colon in Hughe’s writing and wonder what sort of shift it signifies within the text. If, in the english language, colons are used to connect or add emphasis between clauses, I wonder if the colon here acts like a cut, connecting image to text and text to text? I am drawn back to Christina Sharpe’s, In the Wake, in which she explains, “I am thinking here, ushering here, into the gap, Black annotation together with Black redaction not as opposites, but as trans*verse and coextensive ways to imagine otherwise.” How as Michael ( our classmate from Brown) asked during our session together a few weeks ago can we think about the sonic of an image when we think of the image as the interval - as already something that exceeds its own form?
Leslie Hewitt, “A Radical Vision: Roy DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KEiirMrI2w
DeleteTina Campt, Blacc Visual Frequency: A Glossary,” Foto Museum, June 5-July 31, 2018, https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/series/154906_black_visual_frequency_a_glossary
Sherry Turner DeCarava, Light Break (New York, First Print Press, 2019), 11.
Roy DeCarava and Langstone Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life (New York, First Print Press, 2018), 78-79.
Christina Sharp, “Weather” in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, Duke University Press, 2016) 115.
Our reading this week has made me reconsider frequency as the stuff of life, the background buzzing, shifting, moving, standing, the "coming and going" of everyday life (78). When are things not coming or going? There's an atmospheric nostalgia to Sister Mary Bradley's voice, but also a sense of things being incomplete -- because, as others have pointed out, life is always repeating or riffing on itself, like when she says, "I used to be kind of a sleepyhead myself, so I understands him [Rodney]. And I think my friend, the lady that lives downstairs, she understands:" (37).
ReplyDelete*Posting on behalf of Imani*
ReplyDeleteThe Poetics and Interiorities of “The Sweet Flypaper of Life”
Encountering this text was a very meaningful, moving, and intimate experience for me. I have a lot to say, but I want to focus my post on the interiority and poetics of the text as well as what they illuminate, say, and argue about the frequency and knots of black life.
The entirety of Hughes’ text is a prayer between a grandmother, Sister Mary, and her God. The words, therefore, reach and strive towards something and occupies an interstitial, between state between the orator and her listener. While God’s ear is her intended destination, the ear it will land upon is uncertain and rife with possibility because the text creates a relationship between whoever encounters the physical book. This is especially apparent from the texts’ covert because the visual and written text begins there. As she speaks (and I mean speaks because the language of the text is black vernacular and therefore incites my personal aural, social black world, forcing readers to hear, rather than just read her), I hear not only an older black woman, a “granny,” or a “gg” (greatest granny) speaking, but my own.We see this even in her narration (and therefore singing and sounding of the blues (45), we become God and the addressee of this tale which is really about asking God to embrace Rodney, her grandson instead of worrying about her. Because vernacular is the language of the text the reader constantly operates in a double/layered temporality with Sister Marty and her family. I refer here to the proverbial “be” and other verbs that place the reader and speaker in multiple frequencies/states of doing/being in the present and future. Double speak also emerges in phrases such as: “Somebody is always passing.” (77), which could mean walking by or passing away/ dying. More, the speaker’s dislike of looking back similarly conveys the temporal logics of the texts’ verbiage and drive into future temporalities: “But back windows ain’t much good for looking out. I never did like looking backwards nohow. I always did believe in looking out front—looking ahead—which is why I’s worried about Rodney (85). Mary’s use of the window here is important and deeply entangled with how she thinks of interiors as well as futurity.
From Imani, continued:
DeleteRegardless, we hear the tale and a different narrator before Sister Mary begins to narrate how she is “so tangled up in living” that she “ain’t got time to die” cause she “got to look after...” so and so and so and so. (3) While I believe that Sister Mary’s text tells us many things about the frequency of black life (how frequency changes across generations (8-16), how American consumerism deeply impacts the desires of black folk and therefore the frequency of our lives (14-16 i.e. the cars), how different (some) bodies operate on different temporalities and rhythms within a larger frequency (58-64), how physical enclosure, architecture, and class dictate ones frequency (66-70), how frequential and sonic materialism’s such as music can get inside you and ignite/change one’s frequency momentarily and perhaps forever (7), how black aesthetic production emerges from our specific generation’s experience of black life’s frequency (i.e. “off-time” 12), and the way the frequency of black life changes based on geographic location (58)), I am most taking by how she conveys the entanglements of frequency, labor, and care (27). Thus, it is also important to note that black life (and aesthetic production) is—once again!—entangled with the figure of black maternity. (Yet, how does this figure differ or relate to the figure that Fred Moten conjures, imposes, and constructs in In the Break?) Her direct line (or two-way) to God conveys that she does not fear death. She is more “afraid” or perhaps anxious to miss life. She is just so tangled up in it. And this entanglement with life is part and parcel with her tetheredness to her loved ones.
Indeed, she narrates the story of herself and the tangle of her life through her progeny. Rodney, whose personal frequency seems to mirror her own at his age, specifically upnerves her worriations. She understands the something inside of him (7). She has to stay and protect her grandchildren from the “cruelly optimistic” imposed desires that, she believes, will inevitably noose them (8).
Sister Mary conveys the entanglements of frequency, care, and labor through Rodney, herself, and her daughter Melinda. She compares Rodney to her other grandson, Chick. She tells: “He [Chicksaw] always goes to work dressed up. Chick’s as different from Rodney as day from night. Could dress his self when he was three years old. Gets up early in time to take the bus all the way downtown to work, don’t like subways. But Rodney don’t hardly get to work at all no kind of way, says daylight hurts his eyes. Never will be integrated with neither white nor colored, nor work, just won’t.” On pages 16 and 17, Sister Mary sketches the stark contrast between her two eldest grandsons through metaphors (night and day) and movement. Rodney is nocturnal, indolent, and fixed in unfixidity. Chicksaw, on the other hand, works and has a frequency that I read as a kind of flow, style, and swagger through life. Chicksaw also goes steady with a girl and Rodney has at least three girls lined up. While most would read Rodney’s indolence, nonmonogamy, and absentee (non) parenting as laziness, I follow Sister Mary and Cameron Rowland in thinking about the difference in these frequencies as situated around care. Rodney loves music and moves for it. He seems to have divested from the frequencies of the outer white world. Chicksaw loves to dress and primp and he works to do so. It is not clear if he dresses for himself or others. And I do think dressing for oneself and the interior black world is different from adorning oneself for the white world (i.e. respectability politics).
Imani, contd:
DeleteFor me, some of the most poignant moments of the text were pages 20, 21 which feel like a temporal portal because the first little boy is, first, fully clothed then shown either taking off his shirt on putting it on depending on how you read it in relation to the “caption.” The in motion, stuckness, movement of the image of the sign painter on 36 was also moving and seemed to get at Sister Mary’s assertion that “You’re right. I done got my feet caught in the sweet flypaper of life—and I’ll be dogged if I want to get loose.” (92) This stuckness speaks to a sort of sweet stillness ever as life, her loves, and her emotional tetheredness to them propel her onward. The image of the little girl laying on her stomach on the ground on page 64 and its “caption”: “And some ain’t going no place at all,” also feel like a rupture because the words double speak idleness and the totality of the enclosure. However, placing the little girl there gives the words several more meanings as I wonder what she is looking at and why she is chillin’ like grown folk. My favorite images are on page 66 underneath “But it’s sad if you ain’t invited” because they show black people beautiful facades as well as the isolation of enclosure and being kept out by being put inside. They also allow some privacy to the subjects. More, the small child looking outside is a punctum because her white attire sits in contrast against the black facade. Her looking towards the camera alludes to some desire to look and that pulls on something inside of me. I also love the images on page 68 and DeCarava’s reconfiguration of the camera’s gaze through an emphasis on black looking (and inciting the viewers curiosity about black curiosity) through angles.
Yet, the images on 70, 72, and 98 most convey the entangled poetics of the two forms of text. On 72 “and hold their hands” is enjambed and operates as a cut/ zoom that transitions us into the beautiful and heart wrenching closeup of the man’s hands. Still, now, I wonder at the tension of that line—how holding ones hands both describes what Hughes and DeCarava’s works do, but also this simple gesture and act of mundane self-care. Although the man feels more posed in the full body picture of him on the park bench, the close up is intimate and wounding—another punctum. On 72, the sliding plane of the picture from page 73 slips into the bottom half of 72 just as seamlessly as the black man’s timbers on 73 threaten to. But the moment of contradiction between Hughes’ “Yet there is so much to see in Harlem!” And the two men’s willful looking into the wall (or out of the walls) away from the inside of Harlem change the meaning of Hughes’ words. They take on the political lilt of DeCarava’s image and beg us to think about how one sees Harlem: whether one sees Harlem from its walls or if “seeing” Harlem is the affective experience of perpetually looking out. Last, the image of Sister Mary or a possible Sister Mary shocks as we are used to seeing her through her loved ones. The resounding, friendly, and intimate: “Here I am” puts the reader on the receiving end of something profound. I cannot say if it is care or intimacy (or both) but the moment arouses a strong sensation after everything.
One thing I am still very interested in thinking about is the relationship between the figuration of the spider I mention above and the sweet fly paper of life. How is Sister Mary’s entanglement in life connected to the sweet fly paper? And is this stuckness necessarily bad? How does Mary’s story augment, push back on, or perplex notions of fixity, movement, change, temporality, and futurity we have encountered in texts such as Fanon’s Black Skins?
As I encounter the cover of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, I am provoked to return to Christina Sharpe’s engagement with Black annotation and Black redaction. I wonder how to sit with Flypaper and The Kitchen Table Series in conversation with the question Sharpe (2016:115) raises:
ReplyDeleteIf we understand portraiture to be both the “art of creating portraits” (image and text) and “graphic and detailed description,” how might we understand a variety of forms of contemporary Black public image-making in and as refusals to accede to the optics, the disciplines, and the deathly demands of the antiblack worlds in which we live, work, and struggle to make visible (to ourselves, if not to others) all kinds of Black pasts, presents, and possible futures?
How do these visual/textual ensembles refuse and exceed the “evidentiary thrust” forced upon Black photography, as well as photography’s optical conventions? What opportunities for other types of imaging and imagining do they open up? Beginning with the cover of Flypaper, the cropped image of the presumably Black child’s eyes (the image appears to be a zoomed in and cropped version of the image on page 3) resonates with Sharpe’s use of Black redaction to counter the ethnographic gaze of Agassiz’s images of Delia and Drana. Sharpe focuses on Delia and Drana’s eyes in order to deeply engage their gaze, their looking back at and past the capturing of the white photographer. Providing a set of eyes on the cover of Flypaper attunes us to this way of looking, of thinking through Black interiority as suggested by Sarah Lewis in the Foreword to The Kitchen Table Series. Aside from this cropped set of eyes, DeCarava performs a type of Black redaction across the set of photos, using close-up shots to bring the fullness of the Black face into view. Many of these faces show a type of contemplative or pensive looking, either directly at the camera or off toward the distance. A few full smiles are sprinkled in a few times throughout the text. What is DeCarava trying to convey about the affective register of Black life through this type of looking conveyed in the “deepest black” shades? This deep blackness, this making blackness blacker, refuses photographic conventions of joy residing in “brightness”. The photographs demand to be felt, attended to.
I feel that the deep blackness that DeCarava is representing is in conversation with the affective space of the visits to town Du Bois engages with in “Of the Black Belt.” The quotidian nature of what is represented exceeds an evidencing of Black capabilities of participation in the American project. DeCarava conveys the beauty of the Black ordinary on its own terms. Paired with Hughes’s Black annotations, the visual/textual ensemble shows a type of joy in everyday life that does not always register through a smile, but sometimes through a quiet holding of hands (page 70-71) or through the movement of coming and going. The pensive and contemplative photographs are the imaginative content for Hughes’s narration of “how good [life] is.” Flypaper is possible because of “what the authors have seen and known and felt deeply about their people,” what Sharpe refers to as the “knowledge from and of the everyday.” Teju Cole, in writing about DeCarava in “A True Picture of Black Skin,” argues that DeCarava’s photographs employ right to opacity that resonates with the work of Glissant. I see this opacity within the deepest black shades and the facial expressions of the photographed, which make them illegible to a certain type of gaze and simultaneously enable Hughes’s annotations though their entanglements with his knowledge of the everyday.
Thinking with Sweet Flypaper and The Kitchen Table Series in conversation, I am provoked to return to Jafa’s Black visual intonation. While Jafa’s method is preoccupied with the question of film, I’m thinking about how Flypaper and Kitchen might constitute a Black photographic form. Both texts employ a type of Black annotation and redaction, with annotations that exceed the restrictions of fact and fiction, and redactions through focusing, shadows, and deep blackness. Do these methods enable DeCarava and Weems to move beyond the trappings of photography presented by Weheliye? Can the use of shadow subvert the visual logics of the racial epidermal schema? Does the representation of quotidian spaces as facilitating community and becoming move beyond the demands of evidencing Black life? Do the annotations make Black life visible “to ourselves, if not to others?”
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