Some questions that I am tackling in my solo piece (finally) that has a title (finally) thanks to the Schomburg Library uptown. If you haven't visited their Photographs and Prints archive, please do. But come prepared with a random time period or theme you'd like to research (all with the basic premise of "black people," of course), and they will hook you up...
Like the iconic photograph of Gordon, the escaped Mississippi slave who displays his raised whipping scars, his back to the camera, face partially obscured by shadow, the visual image gives us the power to point to our bodies and force the viewer to bear witness. But do we become anonymous by making ourselves into visual symbols of a lived experience? Do we come to harbor in our bodies the stereotypes, assumptions, and interpretations that visual images carry with them? What narratives are lost when only one moment in time is recorded in a photograph? What do we neglect to see and witness when only one part of a body, or a history, is pointed out? In an 1859 slave auction advertisement, a 25 year old woman is described as being “slightly ruptured,” coded language for a body burnt out by repeated childbirth. Do echoes of these “slight ruptures” still remain embedded in our bodies generations later?
I gotta get into the Schomburg for the Window Sex project. I've got similar questions I wanna dig into.
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