REVIEW ESSAY: REPRESENTING BLACKNESS AND THE AMERICAN WAY

Eli Reed: Black in America. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York and London, 1997. Preface, Gordon Parks; 176 pages; $29.95; and David Levinthal. Blackface. Arena Editions, Santa Fe, NM, 1999. Preface, Manthia Diawara; 155 pages; $65.00

Eli Reed: Black in America is an impressive visual compilation harvested from more than sixteen years of life-enriching travel, astute observation, and creative photography. With persistence and dedication, Eli Reed pursued what he describes as a "self-assigned" project to translate artistically his encounters with Black Americans from all walks of life, in communities from across the United States, into the medium of photography. The book's 175 elegantly intimate duotones highlight the diversity of Reed's encounters and provide insight into the complexity of "Blackness" in American society.¹

Gordon Parks, the distinguished photographer, painter, writer, and filmmaker, penned the poetic forward for Reed's book. Parks describes Reed as a "truly fine photojournalist" who works with "sensitivity, perceptiveness and discerning eye." The book also contains a brief artist's statement in which Reed describes his artistic goals and aspirations and shares six poems with the readers as well. "This book deals with life for black Americans now and reaching into the next century. It is, in a large sense, about spirit and substance, about success and failures, and social intercourse between the races, particularly blacks and whites," Reed says.² Beginning with the written text and extending through the book to the last photograph, readers will find that Reed's photographic project stems from a deep-seated respect for the subjects of his photographs.

Reed's creativity rests on the assumption, which also is asserted visually by his photographs, that Black men, women, and children are legitimate and engaging subjects who inspire robust art making practices. This may seem obvious. However, in a Eurocentric culture that manages to deify the colour white and normalize whiteness as a social identity such an assumption remains unusual. In addition, Black in America emerges in an era that is flush with millennium fever that encourages the veneration of high technology and the celebration of the hybridized innovations of postmodern art. As a result, it is all too easy to underappreciate the traditional aesthetic qualities of a contemporary photographic project like Eli Reed's.

The very act of choosing to represent the Black body in ways that do not demonize or hypersexualize Blackness, refuse to pathologize the Black experience, fail to ridicule Africaness, or reject the representation of Blackness simply to aid in the construction of whiteness casts an artist's work into the middle of long-standing debates that reveal the inescapably political nature of aesthetic choices.

All too frequently, viewers both professional and lay embrace the problematic formulation that if an artwork represents a Black person or a person of African descent, then the art is about "race" or racial issues to the exclusion of other issues such as gender. Moreover, if the art is about "race," then it is art that delves into the realm of the political. In short, Black equals race, race equals politics, and politics does not equal Art. Conversely, if the subject of a work involves figures who are identified as white or European, no commensurate political definition surfaces simply on the basis of their whiteness. Another critical response, whether conscious or unconscious, simply dismisses pictures like Reed's as being art for a special interest group, lacking in a broad appeal that is often referred to as universal but which is actually appeal for a white audience.

When the politicization of Blackness intersects with discredited but still common understandings of documentary photography and photojournalism as being casual, unmediated transcriptions of daily life or historic events, then viewers routinely overlook the artistry or take it for granted. Ultimately, Eli Reed: Black in America is the type of publication that encourages us to resist knee-jerk responses to photographs - especially photographs representing people of African descent.

Reed's title page photograph, Central ward, New Jersey (1993) opens the book with a thought-provoking visual meditation. Reed constructs the photograph so that a Black woman, holding the hands of her children as they step off the curb to cross a busy street, appears in the right background, while a portion of a voluminous American flag, stripes falling vertically, nearly fills the picture's left side. It is a profound composition, reminiscent of the biting socio-economic commentary of Gordon Parks's well-known 1942 photograph American Gothic.³ Reed's frontispiece brilliantly establishes a quiet, contemplative tone that flows through the entire collection.

Reed turned his camera on people of all ages, occupations, and political persuasions, capturing them as they live, love, work, play, and struggle to survive despite economic, social, and political odds. The rich black-and-white photographs span the decades from the late seventies to the mid-nineties. Fortunately they are not arranged chronologically, because the arrangement and juxtaposition of these photographs by subject matter is one of the book's key strengths. From the first plate, Mother at the funeral of her son shot by a classmate, Brooklyn, New York, (1992) to the final plate, Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial, Montgomery, Alabama, (1995), the collection reads like a profound visual thesis on the art of living Black in the USA.

Gordon Parks describes how each photograph stands on it's own. "A majority of the exposures Eli Reed makes seem to be thought out and wedded to moments that are meaningful. With that discerning eye shifting from course to course, he keeps us seeing things we never expected to see; keeps us remembering things that are important to remember."⁴ Whether looking at photographs of rap artists and actors, men and women, an elderly mourner and a young dancer, interior scenes or exterior shots, chaos or peace, the designers positioned the images so that contrasting conditions, emotions, activities, classes, and ages enhance the signifying power of each photograph.

Eli Reed: Black in America joins the recently expanding number of books that place into the historical record the work of Black photographers such as James Presley Ball, James VanDerZee, Morgan and Marvin Smith, Gordon Parks as well as the Nigerian-born A. Olusegun Fayemi. Making their work available to a larger public has been an important step in reconstructing not only the history of Black Americans, but also society's visual imagination. One shortcoming of Reed's book is that both Parks's forward and Reed's statement describe Reed's work as representing "the Black man's" experience, even though a majority of Reed's photographs contain or foreground women. Yet, his work does sharply contrast with the conceptual and feminist photography of contemporary artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Pat Ward Williams or Renee Cox. Eli Reed: Black in America dramatically differs in structure and subject from another recently released book, Blackface, by photographer David Levinthal.

In Blackface, white photographer David Levinthal serves up seductively beautiful, full-colour pictures of mass-produced white supremacist toys, decorative figures, and advertising icons.⁵ This new book adds another volume to the artist's ever-growing series of photographic studies based on manufactured objects and playthings such as toy soldiers and Mattel's Barbie dolls. Levinthal began collecting and photographing white supremacist memorabilia in 1995, and the one-hundred-plus photographs that make-up Blackface is the published result.

Levinthal focused his camera on a controversial body of utilitarian and decorative objects, all of which have gross caricatures of Black people integrated into their design. He examined a wide assortment of items including, cookie jars, salt and pepper shakers, banks, puzzles, target games, standing figures, and ash trays. Manufacturers produced this type of merchandise in large quantities from the latter decades of the nineteenth century to the first six decades of the twentieth.⁶ In the parlance of those times, such terms as "darky," "blacky," "nigger," "niggra," "coon," "wench," "mammy," "pickannies," "spearchucker," or "spade" were used to describe this type of representation--as well as the Black people they claim to represent. Levinthal's carefully composed portraits of "darky art" force viewers to engage or reengage a broad range of representational traditions fashioned by the Euro-American imagination: visual, linguistic, philosophical, and ideological.

Historically, these photographed products were created by the white imagination, marketed to whites, and consumed by white working-class Americans. Necessarily, they and the photographs tell us more about whiteness than blackness. Items of this type lost much of their social acceptability and profitability in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement's moral critique of racism and its political assault on various forms of racial discrimination and racial disenfranchisement. This forced most producers to withdraw such items from the circuits of commodification. Presently, there is a renewed interest and a rapidly expanding market for the originals as well as the even cheaper reproductions currently being imported from countries like Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Some Black Americans are among the new breed of distributors and collectors. Nevertheless, given that these objects are expressions of white culture, it is ironic that people now gather and sell such articles, or newly minted "White Only" signs, under the contested labels of "Black Memorabilia," "Black Collectibles" or "Black Americana."

Levinthal created a stunning set of portraits from more than a dozen different categories of these consumer goods. Against a stark black backdrop, he photographed figurines and jar tops made in the form of grinning and gaping-mouthed males; rotund female servants; minstrel performers; naked Africans; bag-toting redcaps and caddies; thieving, watermelon-eating children; indolent and ignorant males; and Uncle Tom's Cabin characters, as well as a group of sinister-faced grotesqueries. Necessarily, Levinthal's photographs will become embroiled in heated debates that date back hundreds of years. In addition to the obvious issues of racial hatred and subjugation, these debates include art world arguments that hold fine arts as superior to crafts; contentions about the political and psychological influence of imagery; aesthetic disagreements regarding notions of the beautiful, and critical disputes focusing on the constitutive nature of representation.⁷

The book's title, Blackface, capitalizes on the cultural currency of a term initially used to describe the make-up practices of white minstrel performers and entertainers who rubbed burnt cork on their faces and hands to masquerade as people of African descent. Blackface minstrelsy emerged in nineteenth- century America as an important, albeit increasingly bawdy, form of social entertainment where theatrical performers lampooned and ridiculed Black men, women and children.

In The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, David R. Roediger, maintains that blacking-up and minstrelsy helped European ethnic immigrants develop a consciousness and bond as free-white Americans. They are theatrical traditions that were essential in the formation of white working-class male identity.⁸ Using the term `Blackface' to describe either the manufactured objects or pictures of them marks a subtle shift in the discourse. Thus, the book's title is not merely descriptive or a casual use of the vernacular; it is enigmatic in its references and allusions.

Levinthal's book is minimalist in design and layout. There is an illustrated essay, "The Blackface Stereotype," by Manthia Diawara. It is followed by nearly one hundred full-colour plates. Levinthal's short acknowledgements come at the end of the book. There are no titles or dates for any of the individual photographs, nor are they labeled "untitled." There are no informational captions identifying the item in a picture, its original date of manufacture, or its probable use. There is no list of plates or lenders. The absence of these editorial and design conventions helps focus our attention on and enhances the significance of what the book does contain - Levinthal's Art.

The rejection of devices that focus attention on individual photographs effectively encourages a reading of the images as a whole series, as a carefully composed study of types of visual stereotypes. It is a formalist approach that draws its authority from the modernist notion that art can and should stand on its own, unmediated by labels and critical or historical commentary. Considering the material, this approach has a dramatic and unsettling effect, because the objects in the photographs have the ability to ruffle the feathers of some, while making others proud as a peacock. In other words, some viewers find the bug-eyed, red-lipped, grinning objects to be grotesque and dangerous, and at the other end of the spectrum, some viewers see them as humorous and appropriate. Levinthal himself makes no written claim. As a result, the aesthetic, cultural, and social aims of his photographs remain ambiguous, open to multiple interpretations from a variety of perspectives.

Manthia Diawara, the astute film theorist, filmmaker, cultural critic, and director of Africana Studies at New York University, wrote the text for Blackface. Diawara maintains that "David Levinthal's work is important because it confronts us with the Blackface stereotype, makes it speak to us directly, without an intermediary, and demands a response from us regardless of our race, age, or gender" (Blackface, 7). The very presence of Diawara's authenticating essay undermines Levinthal's modernist assertion that an artist need not discuss his or her intentions, their art's meaning, or the significance of their work historically.

This contradiction is heightened because Diawara's text is not just an endorsement but a polemic defense of Levinthal's appropriation of "darky art." Moreover, the Guinea-born Malian scholar⁹ stridently insists on the right way of evaluating the merits of Levinthal's photographs, if one wants to consider oneself "modern." Since the only statement that Levinthal makes about his art is that the book designers took "the raw materials of my artistic vision and have helped create a vital and powerful visual narrative," Diawara's explicit instructions on how to respond to the controversial photographs is overkill (Ibid., 153). Nevertheless, the future may find that the text is more interesting and contentious than the photographs it defends.

In a peculiar intellectual twist, Diawara establishes his argument that "Levinthal's art is unique and refreshing" by attacking the art and critical stance of Black visual artists and African-American scholars who have struggled to debunk white supremacist imagery and ideology in their work. Dismissing the people who paved the way for Levinthal's studies as retrograde "traditionalists" and "bourgeois nationalists," Diawara asserts that Black people need to "embrace the stereotype," just as many young "Black artists, actors and rappers" are doing (Ibid., 7). He even ends his essay with a sweet autobiographical narration of how his young, visually innocent son led him to an epiphany about this matter. He concludes his essay saying: I need "to stop being the custodian of these stereotypes, to distance myself from them and begin to enjoy the humor in them. Only then will.I become an individual and modern" (Ibid., 17).

Clearly, it is absurd that people of European ancestry created these objects in the building of American culture and the forging of social, political and economic relations. Yet, these objects have helped to shape values and attitudes as wells as practices and institutions that privilege whites while disadvantaging Black people. Therefore, some might suggest that Diawara's narrow directive to search for the humor is in itself a bourgeois intellectual luxury. Also, although Diawara might dismiss me as "Old School," it is important to recognize that it is legitimate for someone to find Levinthal's photographic project uninteresting, derivative, or lacking contextualization. If, like Diawara's son, readers are bored with his father's history or Levinthal's portrait-like studies of hate and insecurity, they are not by default lacking in competent critical faculties.

Diawara appropriately argues that viewers need to avoid simplistic evaluations of whether art presents a positive or negative image of Black people and use imagery as a springboard to develop more complex critiques. It is unfortunate that he was not consistent in his rejection of binary oppositions. He opens his essay with the obligatory nod to the construction of whiteness: "Inherent in the Blackface myth is a white fantasy that posits whiteness as the norm" (Ibid., 7). However, Diawara spends far too little time examining what the mass-produced items or, more importantly, what Levinthal's photographs actually say about whiteness and the ways Blackface constructs whiteness as superior. Rather, his reading of what he calls "the Blackface stereotype" primarily centers on what the images say about Blackness, how they represent white assertions about Black people, or Black people's responses to the Blackface stereotype.

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison recalls that when she "stopped reading as a reader and began to read as a writer" she experienced a revelation regarding the conventional representations of Black people in white Americans' literature.

Likewise, as a reader and viewer, I long to hear Diawara do the hard work of speaking directly to or about the white consumers of Blackface. It would be interesting to read his analyses of white responses to the photographs, whether celebratory or critical, or his admonitions to white readers - or creators of art, like David Levinthal.¹⁰ But we are left with a strange critical silence on these issues and given a critique of Black artists and scholars instead. This simply short-changes Levinthal and his photographs as well as the viewers/readers.

Eli Reed: Black in America and Blackface are books that fall on opposite sides of an artificially constructed but well-established divide that differentiates social documentary photography and art photography. Visually, both books present us with new visions, raise aesthetic questions, and ask viewers to reexamine the meaning of Blackness/Whiteness. Both are glossy coffee table publications. Nonetheless, I suspect that they will rest on tables in very different types of homes.

References

Goings, Kenneth. Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black American Collectible and American Stereotyping (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Culture, Media and Identities, Vol. 2 (Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage Publications, 1997).

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 95-127.


	Reed used a range of cameras from 35mm to medium format. These include the Leica rangefinder, the Canon EOS, and the Mamiya RZ67 format.


	In Parks's classic photo a Black woman stares out at the viewer while standing in front of American flag, holding a mop and broom, with the mop head and bristle side up. The photographer self-consciously references the 1930 painting, American Gothic, by the American Regionalist Grant Wood.


	See Kenneth Goings, Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black American Collectible and American Stereotyping (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 1-18. Stereotyping does not begin with the figurine. Companies first found marketing success when using Black advertising "spokesservants" to sell all types of merchandise, from pancake flour and yams to soap and shoe polish. Black spokesservants were used to promise such things as soap so good it could wash the black off a Black child. When spokesservants vouched for the strength of bootblack, Black people were represented as using it for makeup.


	See Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Culture, Media and Identities, Vol. 2 (Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage Publications, 1997).


	David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 95- 127.


	The family of Manthia Diawara settled in Mali after they were forced to leave Guinea over thirty years ago.

Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2000)

ISSN: 1525-447X

REVIEW ESSAY: REPRESENTING BLACKNESS AND THE AMERICAN WAY

References


	He used Polaroid Polacolor ER Land Film and the Polaroid 20 x 24 inch camera.


	See Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge Press, 1997).


	Black in America, unpaginated essay.


	Black in America, unpaginated essay.