Curator Megan
Steinman talks us through the work of the photographer who turns her subjects
into god-like beings.
Born in 1979
in Rochester, New York, photographer Deana Lawson has a prophetic origin story.
The city was famously the birthplace of Kodak, and Lawson’s grandmother cleaned
the home of its founder George Eastman, whereas her mother worked as an
administrative assistant in its offices.
Lawson’s
photographs are remarkable for their intimacy. Often naked or semi-undressed,
her subjects pose in domestic spaces; in kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms.
Although she uses settings more readily associated with documentary photography,
for the most part, her images are highly staged. To each shoot, she brings bags
of props (she has described the thrift store as part of her process), things
heavy with associations, to compose arrangements in which each object has a
significance akin to a still life painting.
Her work is
concerned with the black experience across the diaspora – as well as US states
such as New York, North Carolina, and Louisiana, she has travelled to the
Caribbean and Africa, enabled by winning the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. One
of Lawson’s hallmarks is the directness of her subject’s gaze. Her people are
regal, in the sense that they possess a dignity and authority, maybe an aura,
that’s hard to reckon with, or articulate. In a conversation with the filmmaker
Arthur Jafa in the recently published Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph,
Lawson said, “People are creative, god-like beings. I don’t feel like we carry
ourselves like that all the time, or that we know how miraculous we are.”
Deana Lawson:
Planes at The Underground Museum, LA, comes out of Lawson’s close relationship
with the gallery. In 2009, as juror of an art prize, its co-founder, the late
Noah Davis, was particularly struck by Lawson’s work, “which combined a
painter’s sense for spatial composition with an ethnographer's curiosity of the
human condition”. Since The Underground Museum’s inception in 2012, two of
Lawson’s works have hung in the space. As Megan Steinman, its director, told me
over the phone: “Deana, as an artist, represents so much of the ethos of The
Underground Museum, in the rigour, the aesthetic quality, and the mastery of
her craft… that kind of rigour that could intercept and be so essential to the
lives of the audience members that come into contact with it. (For The
Underground Museum) Deana is family.”
In honour of
Planes, we take a closer look at several works that feature in the show.
“NICOLE”
(2016)
In 2016, as
The Underground Museum’s first artist in residence, Lawson was assisted by
Freddy Villalobos, a young artist who also works with The UM. He introduced her
to people in his South Central L.A. neighbourhood, who she would photograph for
three of the works on display in the exhibition; Sons of Cush, Signs, and
Nicole.
Nicole lies
diagonally, provocatively, across the rug, taking up its full area, a stance
that says she’s in command of her space. Her children’s toys are piled up
behind her, from the haphazard way they push against the corner of the room, we
might deduce this has been done in a hurry. As Steinman reads it, “she’s
standing guard in the space of motherhood and redefining what that looks like.”
Here, roles oft-seen as seperate, discrete, are embodied in one reality, in the
same way that her stretch marks and the scar on her arm occupy the same body as
her tattoos and acrylic nails.
“KINGS” (2016)
“Kings” is a
found photograph, an image that Lawson carried around in her journal for
several years – it’s cut across the top, along the seam from where she had
folded the original. Lawson has a long-established practice of collecting found
imagery, at a recent panel in Miami for No Commission, an exhibition which
features her work, she spoke of how she was inspired by an image of the
photographer Diane Arbus against a wall of photos, “I (thought) I need to start
putting images up in my studio just for reference, or kind of just this
subconscious ether which I pull from… so I started going to the New York Public
Library and would just search random topics, like Harlem Renaissance, or gangs,
or Haiti, Hoodoo, whatever, and just scan images, just scan, scan, scan, print
everything out at Walgreens.”
In Planes,
there are collages that spread out from the corners of the rooms, unframed
images pinned directly to the wall. Steinman says that these mirror what Lawson
does in her own studio: “They are studies on what the diaspora might contain…
(they’re) not only historical, (but) very emotional too… those installations
are really meant to represent the breadth and depth of the diaspora, and what
could be defined as a black universal experience, if one could even try to
think about that.”
“BARBARA AND
MOTHER” (2017)
Lawson has a
particular knack for persuading strangers to drop their guard. In her
conversation with Jafa, she talked about discovering the people she photographs
with the kind of language often used to describe falling in love: “it feels
like time stops… these are moments when my rhythm of time ruptures.” She finds
her subjects on the subway, in nightclubs, churches, beauty supply places, and
fried-chicken shops.
In the case of
Barbara and her mother, they met in a corner store in New York. Lawson was
fascinated by Barbara’s mother’s prosthetic leg, in the photograph a
thin-stemmed vase of flowers on the table mimics the leg in its proportions,
framing it. The ‘skin’ of the prosthetic leg is compelling, the contrast of the
upper thigh against the nearly-green foot, and the foot’s chipped red nail
varnish, matching that of Barbara’s foot behind it.
“SOWETO QUEEN”
(2017)
Lawson has a
painterly understanding of colour and composition. Here, the woman is posed in
what Steinman described as, “that quintessential Lawson corner”. On the towel
laid out beneath her signifiers of family life are scattered remote controls,
car keys, and a unicorn toy, as if, Steinman describes, “a child ran up to her,
and was like, you know, ‘Look at this!’” Curtains recur in Lawson’s work; net
curtains, thin, and translucent curtains, curtains which sag in the gaps
between their hooks. Here, heavy lavender pink and tight against the cornice,
they are drawn, and the family photos are turned to face away from her,
implying a stolen moment of privacy. The exhibition’s title makes reference to
multidimensional planes, the idea that time and space can be connected through
photographs. The woman occupies this space in a way that’s reminiscent of
“Nicole”, a connection that collapses the distance between Nicole in LA and
this woman in Soweto.
“UNCLE MACK”
(2016)
Uncle Mack
leans back, and there’s a gentleness to his expression that seems to contradict
the shotgun, to disarm it. It’s held defensively, across his chest, rather than
directed. As with “Soweto Queen” he’s against a corner, here, the family
portrait hanging behind him signals that it is his corner, his patch. Of this
photograph, Steinman spoke of Lawson’s ability to engender empathy, to
transmute an image of a man holding a gun into a tender portrayal of family
love and protection. Family is an ongoing theme in Lawson’s work, discussing
this in Miami, Lawson said, “I think my ideas about family are inspired by this
sort of fractured family within the diaspora. You know, mass incarceration, and
I think about the division of family being used as a tool for white supremacy,
so in some ways, my images are affirming black family, and black
connectedness.”
“NATION”
(2018)
In a borrowed
Lower East Side apartment with a ubiquitous parquet floor and brown leather
sofa, two men are seated, shirts off to reveal muscular, tattooed bodies. The
first points directly at the viewer, as if to draw our attention, but it’s the
second man, on the right, who commands it, who becomes the photograph’s focal
figure. His hair a shock of gleaming ringlets, his eyes roll back into his head
as his mouth is prised open by a futuristic apparatus, an orthodontic guide
that Lawson spray-painted gold.
In the upper
right of the frame, obscuring the face of a third man, there is a
postcard-sized print, an image of George Washington’s last surviving set of
dentures. Now on permanent display in Mount Vernon, Washington’s former
plantation, the dentures were created using the teeth of animals and sometimes
humans; Washington is said to have bought nine teeth from slaves. The print
confirms the horror, the action of torture, implied by the headpiece.
Deana Lawson: Planes runs
at LA’s The Underground Museum until 17 February 2018
The stories
behind some of Deana Lawson’s most powerful photographs. By Holly Connolly. Dazed , December 17 ,
2018
Imagine a
goddess. Envision a queen. Her skin is dark, her hair is black. Anointed with
Jergens lotion, she possesses a spectacular beauty. Around her lovely wrist
winds a simple silver band, like two rivers meeting at a delta. Her curves are
ideal, her eyes narrowed and severe; the fingers of her right hand signal an
army, prepared to follow wherever she leads. Is this the goddess of fertility?
Of wisdom? War? No doubt she’s divine—we have only to look at her to see that.
Yet what is a goddess doing here, before these thin net curtains? What relation
can she possibly have to that cheap metal radiator, the chipped baseboards, the
wonky plastic blinds? Where is her kingdom, her palace, her worshippers? Has
there been some kind of mistake?
Examining
Deana Lawson’s “Sharon” (2007), a black viewer may find the confusion of her
earliest days reënacted. Before you’d heard of slavery and colonialism, of
capitalism and subjection, of islands and mainlands, of cities and ghettos,
when all you had to orient yourself was what was visually available to you;
that is, what was in front of your eyes. And what a strange sight confronts the
black child! The world seems upside down and back to front. For your own eyes
tell you that your people, like all people, are marvellous. That they are—like
all human beings—beautiful, creative, godlike. Yet, as a child, you couldn’t
find many of your gods on the television or in books; they were rarely rendered
in oil, encountered on the cinema screen or in the pages of your children’s
Bible. Sometimes, in old reruns, you might spot people painted up, supposedly
to look like your gods—with their skin blackened and their lips huge and
red—but the wise black child pushed such toxic, secondary images to the back of
her mind. Instead, she placed her trust in reality. But here, too, she found
her gods walking the neighborhood unnoticed and unworshipped. Many of them appeared
to occupy lowly positions on a ladder whose existence she was only just
beginning to discern. There were, for example, many low-wage gods behind the
counters at the fast-food joints, and mostly gods seemed to shine shoes and
clean floors, and too many menial tasks altogether appeared to fall only to
them. Passing the newsstand, she might receive her first discomforting glimpse
of the fact that the jail cells were disproportionately filled with gods, while
in the corridors of power they rarely set a foot. Only every now and then did
something make sense: a god was recognized. There’s little Michael Jackson and
grand Toni Morrison, and, look, that’s James Baldwin growing old in France, and
beautiful Carl Lewis, faster than Hermes himself. The kinds of gods so great
even the blind can see them. But back at street level? Too many gods barely
getting by, or crowded into substandard schools and crumbling high-rise towers,
or harassed by police intent on clearing Olympus of every deity we have. And,
for a long, innocent moment, everything about this arrangement will seem
surreal to the black child, distorted, like a message that has somehow been
garbled in the delivery. Then language arrives, and with language history, and
with history the Fall.
Deana Lawson’s
work is prelapsarian—it comes before the Fall. Her people seem to occupy a
higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory, in which diaspora gods can be found
wherever you look: Brownsville, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Addis Ababa.
Typically, she photographs her subjects semi-nude or naked, and in cramped
domestic spaces, yet they rarely look either vulnerable or confined. (“When I’m
going out to make work,” Lawson has said, “usually I’m choosing people that
come from a lower- or working-class situation. Like, I’m choosing people around
the neighborhood.”) Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs,
just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are
beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.
Born in 1979
and raised in prelapsarian Rochester, New York—well before the collapse of
Kodak—Lawson arrived in the world with a matchless origin story: her
grandmother cleaned the home of George Eastman, the founder of the Kodak
empire. (In what she has called the “mythology” of her family, her grandmother
overheard Eastman ask his nurse where his heart was situated, the morning
before he shot himself through the chest.) Kodak was foundational in practical
ways, too. When Lawson’s mother applied for a factory job there, the man who
interviewed her felt that she was more suited to office work, and so instead
she landed an administrative job, which she kept for the next thirty-nine
years. The Lawsons thus found themselves in an interesting social position:
“middle-class-aspiring,” living on the working-class East Side of Rochester but
not on blue-collar salaries, and with a father, a manager at Xerox, who, as
Lawson has described him, was an avid family photographer, daily documenting
Deana and her identical twin, Dana, in times both happy and sad.
On one
memorable occasion, he took a picture of the twins on the stoop together, Dana
with a recently broken thumb and Deana holding her sister’s cast in her own
hand: “We’re both dressed exactly alike. We both have the same frowns on our
head. That picture kind of pierced me. I think that was, like, the beginning of
identifying with another person, or trying to understand another human being’s
pain, in a way, through looking at myself.” This self-in-other experience
intensified years later, when Lawson’s sister, then seriously ill with multiple
sclerosis, permanently dropped out of Penn State (the twins had arrived
together), leaving Lawson with the weight of her family’s expectations on her
shoulders. (“When my sister got sick, I had to win for both of us.”) It was in
college that Lawson wriggled out of her business major and started taking
photographs. From the outset, they were “staged”—like a family portrait, only
more so—for she always liked to choose the people, the setting, the clothes,
and the pose.
As Cindy
Sherman has amply demonstrated, the most obvious route for a photographer with
these anti-vérité instincts might be the self-portrait, but in the bulk of her
work Lawson appears only in relation: she is the unseen person whom all these
striking-looking people are looking at. How she manages to create this relation
is a fascinating question. In person, Lawson—a striking woman in her own
right—has a soft-spoken, rather shy manner that seems to belie the fearlessness
and will it must surely require to travel to far-flung places, talk your way
into strangers’ homes, and then get them to pose precisely as you want. (My own
response upon seeing her work for the first time was: How do you convince
Jamaicans to take their clothes off?) To do so, you would need to know how to
listen, but also how to ask the right question, and at the right moment. You’d
have to be self-effacing and yet forceful enough to pursue significant leads.
With her ethnographic skills, and in her choice of destinations, Lawson might
remind us of Zora Neale Hurston, whose idiosyncratic 1938 anthropological study
of voodoo and folk practices in the diaspora, “Tell My Horse,” traverses some
of the same territory to which Lawson has been drawn—Jamaica, Haiti—and is a
text that Lawson herself has cited as an early inspiration.
Like Lawson,
Hurston was constitutionally attracted to the marginalized, the obscure, the
ostensibly lowly. And, like Hurston, Lawson’s fullest subject is the diaspora
itself. Looking at “Otisha” (2013), in which a young, naked Jamaican woman
poses like a piece of West African statuary among the many leatherette couches
that fill a cramped and overdecorated living room in Kingston, I thought of the
Pocomania (or Pukkumina) cult that Hurston encountered in Jamaica, and which
she heard a local man define as the compulsion to make “something out of
nothing.” The diaspora is a broad and various thing, but one rich vein running
through it has surely been the historical, economic, and personal necessity of
making “something out of nothing.” In an illuminating conversation that Lawson
had with Arthur Jafa, a Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker, Jafa sketches
this journey from nothing to something in miniature:
Initially, when
Africans step off those ships they have the same battery of cultural
verification and affirmation that most people have. But a defining experience
for black people during slavery is the separating of folks from their children,
from their partners, from their families. So, very quickly, Africans become a
new kind of people, black people. We create culture in free fall, but we also
create kinship in free fall.
Jafa, too, is
a diaspora explorer. (His 2017 video installation at the Museum of Contemporary
Art, in L.A., “Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death,” was set to Kanye
West’s sublime gospel-inflected “Ultralight Beam,” and used a huge variety of
found film footage to create a phantasmagoria of black images through history.)
In their conversation, which will be published later this year in “Deana
Lawson: An Aperture Monograph,” Lawson and Jafa declare themselves profoundly interested
in this new kind of people, a concern that never aspires to a sociological
neutrality but, instead, pulses with love. Black people are not conceived as
victims, social problems, or exotics but, rather, as what Lawson calls
“creative, godlike beings” who do not “know how miraculous we are.” In her
work, she tells Jafa, she wants “to try to locate the magnificent and have it
come through in the picture.” In response, Jafa notes, “It’s like black people
are inherently scarred by our circumstances, and you’re trying to take
photographs of them that look past that, like an X-ray looks past surface
scars.”
Which is not to
say that the surface scars pass unrecorded in Lawson’s photographs.
Circumstances are in no way hidden or removed from the shot; nothing is tidied
up or away, and everything is included. Dirty laundry is aired in public (and
appears on the floor). Half-painted walls, faulty wiring, sheetless mattresses,
cardboard boxes filled with old-format technology, beat-up couches, frayed
rugs, curling tiles, broken blinds. (It’s instructive to contrast Lawson’s
staged portraits of low-income black folk with the young Californian
photographer Buck Ellison’s staged portraits of wealthy white folk, replete
with the discreet symbols of wealth: wood panelling, cashmere sweaters, silk
shirts, linen pants, polished chrome kitchen-cabinet handles, crystal
tumblers.) That these circumstances should prove so similar—from New York to
Jamaica, from Haiti to the Democratic Republic of the Congo—carries its own
political message. But the repetition also takes on a mystical cast, as we note
visual leitmotifs and symbols that seem to reoccur across time, space, and
cultures. Paragraphs could be written on Lawson’s curtains alone: cheap
curtains, net curtains, curtains taped up—or else hanging from shower
rings—curtains torn, faded, thin, permeable. Curtains, like doors, are an
attempt to mark off space from the outside world: they create a home for the
family, a sanctuary for a people, or they may simply describe the borders of a
private realm. In these photographs, though, borders are fragile, penetrable,
thin as gauze. And yet everywhere there is impregnable defiance—and aspiration.
There is “kinship in free fall.”
In “Living
Room” (2015), taken in Brownsville, Brooklyn, all the scars are visible: the
taped-up curtain, the boxes and laundry, the piled-up DVDs, that damn metal
radiator. At its center pose a queen and her consort. He’s on a chair, topless,
while she stands unclothed behind him. They are physically beautiful—he in his
early twenties, she perhaps a little older—and seem to have about them that
potent mix of mutual ownership and dependence, mutual dominance and submission,
that has existed between queens and their male kin from time immemorial. But
this is only speculation. The couple keep their counsel. Despite being on
display, like objects, and partially exposed—like their ancestors on the
auction block—they maintain a fierce privacy, bordered on all sides. They are
exposed but well defended: salon-fresh hair, with the edges perfect; a flash of
gold in her ear; his best bluejeans; her nails on point. Self-mastery in the
midst of chaos. And the way they look at you! A gaze so intense that it’s the
viewer who ends up feeling naked.
When you
create kinship in free fall, you may grab at certain items on the fly. The
similarity between these items constitutes its own realm of interest. How often
we find—especially in the more comfortable homes—luxurious sateen in brown and
gold, heavy brown wood, silver jewelry, fabrics of dark green and dark red,
tiles and wallpaper intricately patterned in geometric form. (I am describing
my own mother’s living room as surely as any Lawson has photographed.) What
deep satisfaction, then, to stand in front of “Kingdom Come” (2014), in which
two young Ethiopians in Addis Ababa, a boy and a girl, stand ramrod straight,
staring out at us, dressed in the Coptic-like finery of their church. Their
gowns are a dark-red velvet, threaded with silver embroidery; the walls behind
them are deep red, too, and panelled in dark wood; gold crosses hang behind
them. In such an image, you find yourself able to track the aesthetic roots of
so much of what Lawson has shown us in diasporic living rooms worldwide: the
red and the gold, the geometric patterns, the heavy wood, and that ubiquitous
silver bling in which, elsewhere, Lawson photographs a bedazzled New Yorker,
“Joanette” (2013), who has stripped to the waist, the better to highlight her
silver bangles, her silver hoops, her silver rings. Kinship in free fall, yes,
but still connected, however tenuously, to the thick braid of our African
heritage, cut off at the root so long ago.
Sometimes, as
in a picture like “Mama Goma” (2014), taken in Gemena, in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, that heritage feels close at hand. A young, heavily
pregnant woman stands in a cheap-looking shiny blue dress, meant to imitate the
finest satin, with a large hole cut in the middle from which her bump
protrudes. Her palms face upward, like someone about to begin a ritual or
ceremony. Behind her, sprays of cheap tinsel are pinned to the wall; before
her, a silver spoon sits on a table like an offering. The remnants of ancient
faiths and previous glories touch the edges of the frame; echoes of the Vili
people of the Kingdom of Loango, maybe, who traded their copper, finely carved
objets d’art, and luxurious fabrics with the people of Holland, a historical
memory that is here transmuted—but somehow not reduced—into a tablecloth
patterned with flowers and a Dutch windmill that turns no more. In “Hotel
Oloffson Storage Room” (2015), a naked woman, perhaps an employee of the hotel
in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, perches on the edge of a discarded bed, surrounded by
old mattresses, old chair cushions, and old hotel art. These simple paintings
have been left half-forgotten in the lowliest corner of a tourist spot—one is
of trees, the other of three mystical-looking owls—but in their humble way they
each make reference to Haiti’s storied art factions, the Jacmel school
(dominated by landscape art) and the Saint-Soleil school (incorporating voodoo symbolism).
Meanwhile, on the door hangs an amateurish bust of Jean-Jacques Dessalines,
Haiti’s revolutionary general. And in all this décor—in the cushion covers and
the bedspread, the walls and the art itself—that red, green, and gold persist,
framing our mysterious nude and, like her, retaining an innate magnificence.
You make
something out of nothing. You borrow, steal, adapt. Sometimes, in Lawson, this
adaptation involves direct quotation. (Her “Three Women,” 2013, which poses
naked girls standing in Beyoncé-like formation, recalls Albert Arthur Allen’s
naked chorus lines of the nineteen-twenties; in “Ashanti,” 2011, a nude on a
sheetless mattress in a grim, bare room assumes the position of the figure in
Ingres’s “Grande Odalisque.”) More often, the referents seem to come from
intimate experience. I’ll bet there are diaspora folk stretching from London to
Kingston to Detroit who will recognize, as Lawson does, how many couches can be
squeezed into a space that cannot really accommodate that many couches, and,
moreover, how one couch in particular will be a matter of special pride, and
therefore covered with plastic for its own protection.
This
bold visual recognition of rarely acknowledged commonalities is a great source
of pleasure in Lawson’s work. One of the things many people in the diaspora
have shared—unavoidably—is the experience of poverty, but Lawson’s work
suggests other, deeper vectors that may also connect us: certain gestures and
interpersonal attitudes, strategies of escape, modes of defense or display,
pleasures and fears, aesthetics, superstitions, and, perhaps most significant,
shared fantasies. First among these is an idealized vision of Africa. Of
course, Africa has an independent reality, made up of fifty-four separate
states, but Lawson isn’t trying to capture that reality any more than she is
photographing Detroit when she sets up her camera in that city. Naturalism is
never the intention. Everything has an otherworldly aura, each space is both
the particular and the universal, and each person at once an individual and a
symbol, an archetype, an avatar. “Africa,” in Lawson’s photographs, is
unabashedly the site where diasporic longing, fantasy, and sentiment—after much
journeying and seeking—finally converge and are fulfilled.
find a
more ambivalent story. Wanda’s fierce gaze tells us that she has sampled the
tree of knowledge, that she knows the ways of the world. She’s known for a long
time. But her melancholy firstborn is only just discovering how things are, and
her younger daughter, with her beaming smile, is still (happily!) in that Eden
of innocence in which Lawson has pointedly framed the three of them. Which
raises the question: When we call black women queens or lionesses, or when we
call Asian mothers tigers—or any of the other colorful terms we conjure up to
describe minority women fighting the daily battles of their lives—what are we
doing? We come to praise. But, at the same time, don’t we bury—and implicitly
sanction—the idea that a fierceness like Wanda’s is the bare minimum needed to
raise a black family? I’m again reminded of the ladies in Buck Ellison’s
pictures: languid, relaxed, sometimes a little bored, at worst a little
impatient for the camera to go click. They have not the slightest touch of
fierceness about them. But, then, they have no need of it.
In the
history of photography that has concerned itself with Africa and its diaspora,
the concept of the portal has been central. In a newspaper, say, a photograph
of a black subject is usually conceived as a window onto another world. Even
the most well-meaning journalistic images of black life have the intention of
enabling a passage, from the First World to the Third, for example, or from one
side of the railway tracks to the other. It might be impossible for a black
photographer in a largely white art world ever to wholly divest herself of this
way of seeing, but in Lawson’s “Portal” (2017) we come as close as I can
imagine. What are we looking at? A ripped hole in a couch. That’s all: no human
figures, no other context. Just a hole in the kind of couch with which Lawson
has made us, by now, very familiar. After staring at it awhile, you might
notice that it is almost Africa-shaped, but what you see initially is its
magical properties. Like the voodoo practitioners Zora Neale Hurston met in
Haiti, Lawson has the rare capacity of being able to take an everyday domestic
object and connect it to the spiritual realm. Her work does not show us “how
the other half lives.” Rather, it opens up a portal between the everyday and
the sacred, between our finite lives and our long cultural and racial
histories, between a person and a people. “Portal” presents, in abstract, what
Lawson is doing in every other photograph:
I feel a lot of
the figures that I use, I want them to be like a pivotal point, or like a
vehicle or a vessel for something else. Diane Arbus was always keen on this
idea of what the photograph is and what it does. What you see in the photograph
is one thing; the specifics or what it references or what it’s symbolic of is
greater than that. She said the subject is always more complex than the
picture.
What you
see is not what you get. We are more than can be seen. We are here and
elsewhere. Some of Lawson’s portals appear to facilitate a crossing over into
the realm of myth and fable, especially in her pictures of young black men,
whom she has several times photographed in groups, emerging from pitch-black
backgrounds, like figures painted by Caravaggio. Out of the void they come,
riding in on horseback (“Cowboys,” 2014) or throwing gang symbols with their
hands (“Signs,” 2016). Both idealized by Lawson (in their physical beauty) and
pathologized by the culture (as symbols of violence or fear), they are largely
liberated from the kinds of domestic circumstance and context in which Lawson
tends to frame her women. Such images are transhistorical, transpersonal,
transcendent, and take at least some of their inspiration from previous
portals, as Lawson explains to Jafa:
Jorge Luis
Borges and just his writing of “The Aleph,” and the center of the world is
pinpointed in the basement. Or, in “The Matrix,” the oracle was the black woman
in the kitchen smoking a cigarette and making cookies. Like, that’s where, like,
the shit is—the knowledge. That’s the site of another dimension, maybe, but we
don’t know it. That information has been distorted. But if black folks really
knew that, we’d just be on a different plane.
To reach
this plane, you must pass through a portal—or maybe it’s a veil, or a curtain.
Where should you seek it? There are some obvious points of entry you might
visit—funeral homes, voodoo festivals—but you should also try places more
obscure: broken couches, broken blinds, broken windows. Don’t give up. The
reward will be great, once you arrive. In recent years, Lawson has begun
explicitly framing this destination: she has taken a picture of a loving, naked
couple in the lush Congolese forests, half hidden in the undergrowth (“The
Garden,” 2015) and another of beaux fondly clinging, half-dressed, posed
together in tropical gardens (“Oath,” 2013). These images are infused with a
spirit of fantasy, set as they are in a dreamed-of Africa, an imagined and
beloved homeland where harmony reigns, reunited souls pledge their troth, and glorious
black bodies luxuriate, unashamed, in a natural environment. This isn’t a
practical or political reality but a state of mind, sacred precisely because it
is literally unattainable and geographically fantastic. This Africa of the mind
contains Detroit and Kingston and Port-au-Prince and Brownsville. It is eternal
and everywhere. It is in all of us. It is the portal that leads us back to
ourselves.
Deana
Lawson’s Kingdom of Restored Glory. By Zadie Smith. The New Yorker , May 7,
2018.
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