Annotated Bibliography #4 Assignment

Erina Duganne, in her article, “Roy DeCarava, Harlem, and the Psychic Self,” is interested in how anthologies and exhibits are curated and what decisions get made, so as to portray a particular curator’s vision. She shows what happens to individual artists’ visions when their photographs are taken out of the context of their entire body of work and placed beside other photographers’ work. In particular she writes about DeCarava and Edward Steichen’s use and rejection of DeCarava’s photographs for the The Family of Man exhibit. Duganne also reads DeCarava’s way of looking at Harlem (especially when published alongside Langston Hughes’ writing in the book Flypaper) against Aaron Siskind’s portraits of the same place, arguing that DeCarava photographs in search of belonging whereas Siskind—a white photographer—was photographing to remain “objective.” DeCarava was immersing himself in Harlem (even though he remained somewhat detached, creating a tension in his photographs), she furthers, whereas Siskind was purposely distancing himself… However, Duganne also implies that both photographers were trying to stretch the definition of documentary photography. DeCarava was struggling, she writes, to “transcend photography’s literalism,” and Siskind was interested in how to get his own psychic experience into the photograph’s documentary frame. Ultimately, Duganne proposes that DeCarava was working through issues concerning his own racial identity while photographing in Harlem. Like contemporary photographer Dawoud Bey (who says that he wants to photograph persons without offering the viewer the context of their environment), Duganne cautions the viewer against reading DeCarava’s pictures reductively. His photographs, she concludes, “exist and participate in a complex network of social and psychic relations whose meanings are shaped by the broader societal forces and historical context in which they are embedded” (Duganne 165). Her subsequent reading in “Epilogue: Dawoud Bey and the Act of Reciprocity” of Bey’s rejection of the documentary genre and championing of the studio photograph is really interesting, as it points to how the boundaries of the documentary couldn’t stretch far enough, at least for Bey, when it came to representing race through the photographic lens…

Like Bey, this next week’s featured contemporary African photographer, Samuel Fosso, also champions the studio portrait—but for different reasons. Please read about Fosso’s photographic process (Samuel Fosso’s “Here’s Looking at Me” in The Guardian 27 June 2002:

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/jun/27/artsfeatures2

& study Fosso’s photographs and write Annotated Bibliography #4 on one of Fosso’s studio self-portraits. (Due October 5 at midnight.)

At some point during the week read Frantz Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled” in your photocopied packet and watch Isaac Julien’s Black Skin, White Mask (1996) on Youtube (there are five parts and here is the link to the first part which links automatically sequentially to the next four parts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDpLmQEwjLM

I look forward to receiving this week’s Annotated Bibliography #3 this coming Monday.