The Idea Of The Photograph

Deborah Willis with Thomas Allen Harris

By Deborah Willis, Ph.D.
New York University

When I grew up in Philadelphia in the 1950s and 60s, the camera was a central element in our lives. My family treasured their past—as evidenced in their ability to tell stories and preserve objects, recordings, clothing, and photographs. After my father’s death in 1990, I revisited photographs of family members, as well as photographs from other family albums. I found myself searching through his trunk of photographs and negatives in an attempt to preserve his memory. I was always struck by the range of photographs he produced and tucked away and wondered why?! I looked closely at the photographs of the men, women and children—dancing, working, playing, and posing. As I explored his world through the archive he created, I thought about the experiences I had had as a child in a semi-segregated society, ones he had during segregation that were so different, and finally my work as a photography curator at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the 1980s. Commonly known as the Schomburg Center, the library was inaugurated in May 1925 “to preserve this historical record of the race; to arouse the race consciousness and race pride; to inspire art students [and] to give information to everyone about the Negro.”¹

This essay looks at how the photographic archive documents, chronicles, and preserves images for the family and for the scholar. According to Paul Gilroy,

“Blacks [in Britain] have seldom been seen in advertisements or on television [in the 60s and 70s]. The pictorial symbols inherent in the political agitation of their communities, in independently published magazines or the minority markets in specialized items like cosmetics that have displayed the cultural assets and distinctiveness of the ‘racial’ group are limited and meager visual resources by comparison with the mainstream media. The cultural significance of record covers as a form of folk art is therefore enhanced simply because they offer one of the very few opportunities to see and enjoy images of Black people outside of the stereotyped guises in which the dominant culture normally sanctions their presence.”²

Gilroy’s thoughtful articulation of the absence of images of blacks in Britain and the U.S. during this period allows us to appreciate the need for an archive of images in various formats. I have written about African American photography for a number of years and have had the opportunity to research, examine and exhibit photographs produced by some of the photographers in the TALD collective, therefore, I am excited about sharing my thoughts about the use of the archive.

In the last five years, I have been rethinking how art is taught in the academy and how the archive is used by artists, scholars, and the general public. As an artist, who writes about black photographic imagery, I have consistently focused my research on body politics, race, gender, and the politics of visual culture—the central questions of visual theory. Today it is difficult to find one meaning in a photograph. In teaching visual culture, I often examine images of “uplift,” stereotypes, beauty, and politicized images in art and popular culture. In asking a viewing public to critique photographs in the media, picture books, public photographic repositories and private family albums, I hope to encourage them to embrace a more diverse way of reading photographs. Photographic collections have helped me to explore and decode the photographic references produced by many of the photographers, which reflect the political, ideological and aesthetic interests of the photographer and subject and therefore bring attention to parallels in visual and written discourse.

The photographic archive is often used as a stimulus for artists to create work about family, society, and politics. Without the archive, “do we dare imagine how many pioneering black photographers there might have been, had more favorable socio-economic circumstances prevailed?”³ a question activist Angela Davis posed in 1983. What is the archive today and how does it function as a live and active space for photographers, collectors, families and the scholar? Matthew Reason asserts that “the archive has the power to supplement but also supplant memory.”⁴ In my view the archive functions as an evolving memory space to uncover and recover materials and a resource for both the photographer and the community. Allan Sekula refines the notion of the archive by defining it has a “shadow archive…The general, all-inclusive archive necessarily contains both the traces of the visible bodies of heroes, leaders, moral exemplars, celebrities, and those of the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the nonwhite, the female, and all other embodiments of the unworthy.”⁵

The archive as a traditional space for preserving has evolved from documents to virtual spaces. The TALD/DDFR project is embracing new ways of disseminating and accessing ideas about the photographic archive and memory by organizing road shows and public lectures in order to attract a larger audience as they expand the importance of the photographic archive. As art historian Kellie Jones argues:

In this search for a personal identity, it soon becomes clear that the mirror of the outside world plays a crucial role in the manner in which one sees him/herself reflected by others. Certain questions pose themselves in this tense process: Does that mirror image—a perfect metaphor for art—flash back a recognized semblance or rather some skewed, partially coherent, stereotypical mask? Is this resulting image a construction of the viewed him/herself or of the viewer? What states of recognition has each deployed in their own interrogation of identity?⁶

Some of the photographers whose works are in the public archives are considering how photographic imagery is viewed within and outside of an art context, specifically the ways one looks at and interprets photographs. They are also thinking about how identity and representation are constructed in photographs of the racialized and gendered body. Many of the photographs in collections have made critical visual steps in constructing ways in which to comment and view the role the image has in contemporary photographic practices.

By looking at the diverse visual stories beyond the stereotypes and the visual construction of the story, the TALD/DDFR project is inviting a global reading of images in the collection. Stuart Hall asserts:

Within racialized forms of ‘looking’, profound differences of history, culture and experience have often been reduced to a handful of stereotypical features, which are ‘read’ as if they represent a truth of nature, somehow indelibly inscribed on the body. They are assumed to be ‘real’ because they can be seen—difference, visible to the naked eye.⁷

Hall’s remarkable reading of the different ways of looking is helpful in shaping discussions about visual images. Scholars and artists alike are re-appropriating, historicizing, and creating new works from the archive. The archive is becoming more and more interactive, not only in the virtual world but also with the local communities, in other words, people are engaging with the photograph and the photographer. It is fitting to link the mission of the TALD/DDFR project to the aspirations of the founding members of the Schomburg Center.

Amiri Baraka provocatively asserts that “we want our new black selves as absolute masters of our own space. Can you dig it, space…Space is what we are fighting for. Institutional space, living i.e. human space, thinking space…”⁸

This was stated some forty years ago regarding the philosophical framework of the Black Arts Movement. TALD/DDFR is providing a thinking space for artists, historians, and collectors. Like many archives working today, TALD/DDFR’s mission is responding to the social and aesthetic issues beyond the sometimes-insular photographic community. Although the approach to each photographer varies, this archive shares cultural and ideological affinities.

² Paul Gilroy, “Wearing Your Art on Your Sleeve: Notes towards a diaspora history of Black ephemera Ten 8 Volume 2 no. 3 P.132.

³ Angela Davis, “Photography and Afro-American History, in Ten-8 N. 24, p.5.

⁴ Reason, Matthew, ‘Archive or Memory? The Detritus of Live Performance’ in National Theatre Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 1 (Feb 2003)

⁵ Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive” The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton, p.347

⁶ Interrogating Identities, p.

⁷ Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy, Different, Phaidon, 2001, 4.

⁸ Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), “A Black Vaule System” in Woodie King and Earl Anthony (eds) Black Poets: The Theory, Practice & Aesthetics of the Pan-Africanist Revoulution, Mentor Books: New York, 1972, p.146.