“Through connections to her family, dual religions, rituals and historic re-interpretations she staged herself in performative postures, using dress and ritualistic objects to perform specific rites or ceremonies for the camera.”
“Whiteness is a position that anyone can possess regardless of their colour.”
“The image itself is being hailed as an icon of the current struggle between the American police state and the tremors of their abhorrent measure to kill young black Americans, which is no doubt racially and economically motivated”.
The words, “Southern Rites”, are at once a pun on the American ritual of prom… and an echo of the infamous canard, “state’s rights”.
Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956 @ The Gordon Parks Foundation Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-shopping, Mobile, Alabama, 1956 @ The Gordon Parks Foundation Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956 @ The Gordon Parks Foundation Untitled. Mobile, Alabama, 1956 @ The Gordon Parks Foundation Untitled. Mobile, Alabama, 1956 @ The Gordon Parks Foundation At Segregated […]
Barbara Kruger Untitled (Your body is a battleground) 1989 Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery New York “I hate to get to you on these words, but I wouldn’t call it an agenda-but I would say that I am interested in sort of, in not just displacing and questioning stereotypes.” Barbara Kruger Interview, excerpt from […]
Photographs from the area around Tallahassee, Florida in the 1950’s. A selection from the Red Kerce Collection. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.
Mike Brown @ Catherine Anyango “One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist, except in the darkness of our minds.” James Baldwin – Notes from a Native Son By Michael Salu, ASX, February 2015 It is THAT dark. You know, the dark that exists under your fingernails that you idly […]
Farmer’s Son with his Nursemaid. Marico Bushveld, December 1964, 1964 “During the years of apartheid, I was concerned with trying to…with exploring why people valued this peculiar and evil system and how they expressed those values in their homes, in themselves, in their bodies, in the things that they built.” Interview conducted by Laetitia Martinez, […]
In the early 1960s, African Americans in cities nationwide were growing frustrated with the high level of poverty in their communities. Since the years immediately following World War II (1939–45), middle-class white Americans had been leaving the cities for nearby suburbs. Businesses that had once provided jobs and tax funding in the cities were leaving […]
In the mid-1950s, LIFE magazine published a multi-part series that was titled “The Background of Segregation” exploring how the politically-violently-ethically charged issue was playing out from a Jim Crow South to the first fiery stirrings of the heroic Civil Rights movement. Today, here we sit, our cities crumbling – segregation (race, socio-economics, class, ideology) […]
“For me, everything is sacred, whether I’m photographing a human being or a statue or the good earth. It’s sacred, I absorb it. I want to absorb it.” Interview with Bruce Davidson, The Kojo Nnamdi Show (WAMU/Chicago), November, 2006 Q: You’re on the streets of Chicago, wandering into Pentecostal churches, how did that initial […]