This is not a plea, an apology, a begging for my stance to be “acceptable.” It is merely an attempt to define and clarify artistic obligations inscribed by the boundaries of “Black women’s photography." By Zoé Samudzi.
“She is not naked as she is,” John Berger writes. “She is naked as the spectator sees her…to be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, turned into disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded.” He offers entrée into conversation about photovisuals and the erotic, which Audre Lorde refines in describing that the erotic is not the incapacitating demand of endless extraction by and for others. It is rather a bridging “sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual” that seeks to mediate “what is not shared between them” and “lessen the threat of their difference.” What does it mean to photograph a body that can be nude but never naked? To take a self-portrait within a body when that body can only be objectified and never self-subjectify and self-make? (Recall, here, Fanon’s sociogenic thinking that blackness exists only as an “Other” in contrast with whiteness, and Sylvia Wynter’s subsequent offering that liberation comes through annihilating the anti-Black genre of human as Man.) This is the metaphysical dilemma of Black womanhood, and assertions of insurgent gaze offer opportunity for new and re-contextualized semiotics of Black [always already gendered] embodiment.
The camera, then, becomes both the insertion of a self-asserting gaze and an extension of self. (Capturing intimacy, too, begets a representation of self through/with another. Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is this intense, messy, fraught, confounding, diaristic work at its best: a narrativization of an autonomous epochal self whose existence is dependent upon the others with whom these intimate moments are shared.) In capturing the self, though, Carrie Mae Weems deftly demonstrates this in her Kitchen Table Series (1990) and previously in Portrait of a Woman Who Has Fallen From Grace and Into the Hands of Evil (1988). We see this also in Renee Cox’s chameleon spectacularity, Mfon Essien’s postmastectomy bareness, Delphine Fawundu’s exploration of African womanhood, Zanele Muholi’s sapphic expressions, Hélène Amouzou’s autoportraits, Stacey Tyrell’s whiteface, Jenevieve Aken’s interrogation of women’s social roles, Nona Faustine’s archival disruptions, Naima Green’s tender #attractionexperiment, and scores and scores of others.
This nature of both art/studio and vernacular photography offers another means of creating autobiography. It can be an articulation of potential and possibility and imagination as much as it offers permanent capture of impermanent and insurgent reality; we project onto a photograph our own meaning-making and translation as we allow the photographer to present their own story. Intimacies further provide opportunity for a self-determining/defining politic: Who am I on my own, and how am I actualized by, through, and with another? What is the meaning of my decision to be naked (not nude) with you? What would it mean if I would and could never? Skin’s destruction (the neutralization of a violent neo-Nazi is an unarguable social good) is followed by an emotionally conflicted aftermath. Is Marcia doubtful, plagued with remorse, weighted by inescapable tensions within all natures of intimacies? I loathe white men as a class: their very existence counters my unwavering desire to annihilate whiteness. And violence against my oppressor is self-actualizing! So then what is the source of this seemingly paradoxical Stockholm Syndrome compelling return again and again to a space saturated with deep resentment?
This is not a plea, an apology, a begging for my stance to be “acceptable.” It is merely an attempt to define and clarify artistic obligations inscribed by the boundaries of “Black women’s photography.” Visualizations of intimacy are unvocalized yearnings for creature comforts as well as confrontational promptings of internal reckonings, often contradictory and deliberately avoided ones. The Lorde reminds us, do not forget, that Eros, the mythological “personification of love in all its aspects” is “born of Chaos.” In more familiar mythology, Eros was the offspring of the goddess of love, Aphrodite, and the god of war, Ares (a fitting coupling); but as a primordial god, he was the fourth to emerge after/potentially of Chaos (the empty chasm of nothing created out of the cosmological separation between heaven and earth), Gaia (Mother Earth, herself), and Tartarus (the abyssal and torturous underworld). And so through these erotic artistic endeavors we are forced to engage the flattening cliché that “the heart wants what the heart wants,” as though “the heart” and “the mind” are separate. In recalling the erotic is not pure sensation in abstentia of feeling, but rather a powerfully feminine affective politic and a lens with which we might honestly and earnestly self-reflect and share and acknowledge our respective needs and realities, we might begrudgingly, affirm this cliché’s truth.
