Mathew Pokoik - news

Kara Walker, Cotton Hoards in Southern Swamp, from the series “Harpers Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated),” 2005.

I’ve recently been considering how racism has been addressed by photographic artists investigating the American experience. This came about due to a variety of events. First being the Kara Walker show at the Whitney, an excellent example of the power of art to speak to the challenging places of our cultural pysche. Then, recent incidents such as the Jena Six, or much closer to home, at Columbia University, where a noose was hung on the door of a controversial African-American professor. Both events highlight the fact that racism and inequality are a living reality in contemporary America (just in case you are one of the many who believe this is no longer the case).

I strongly believe that one of the roles art can play in our world, culture, and experience is to touch upon these places; to address them in ways that are more complex and nuanced, less black and white, right and wrong, than we may often be willing to accept. Over the next few weeks I would like to take up this challenging and difficult subject matter, to examine some of the ways photography has examined racism in America, ways in which photography bears-witness to this basic American conflict and reality.

Many of the images I will highlight address the basic grammar of visual images; how images can encompass complex social events often with more power through an oblique glance than through the obvious photo-journalistic photograph of “historic events”.

Minstrel Poster, Alabama 1936, ©Walker Evans

The first image that comes to mind on this subject is Walker Evans, Minstrel Poster. It is a remarkable image that creates a feeling of both awe and discomfort in me. It holds my attention by the simple fact that I do not entirely understand it. That is its challenge; we need to work our way through its possible meanings ourselves, with no help from Evans, because of his neutral point-of-view.

In this photo we have an advertisement for a Minstrel Show, a first hand document of popular stereotypes of African-Americans in the 30’s. Playing a banjo, stealing a watermelon, chasing chickens, big-lipped, clowning and laughing, a happy-go-lucky image that degrades by painting a picture that all is happy under the sun. Even the title of the Minstrel troupe “J.C. Lincoln’s Sunny South Minstrels” paints a picture of a comic barrel of monkeys Shangri-la of the African-American experience. As if no harm came be done, which is certainly the image that these stereotypes project.

And yet, the poster is ripped and falling apart; sections are missing giving us only a partial picture of this document. In fact, is the document the poster or is the document Evan’s photograph? Is this torn and fading poster a metaphor for the fading depression era South or is it simply a straight photograph of a torn poster?

Peter Galassi has the following to say about Evans’s work from the introduction of Walker Evans & Company:

Evans approaches the decaying show bill and the weathered facade with the same blunt frontality. The forthright address of his photography may be interpreted as an uncompromising indictment of an ugly fact or as an admiring regard for a beautiful thing…The originality of Evan’s “clinical editing of society” involved a convergence of critical intelligence and passionate feeling. His skeptical mind rejected conventional taxonomies of American identity; to construct his own, he photographed only what moved him. It might inspire him to wonderment; it might fill him with anger and disgust; it might provoke his sense of humor or his sense of irony, or both. If it left him bored or indifferent, he ignored it. Once his volatile intuition had selected the significant thing, however, he recorded it with the studied indifference of an archaeologist, stripping the image of any pictorial rhetoric that would instruct the viewer how to feel.

It is exactly this “stripping of pictorial rhetoric” that challenges me when I approach this image. It is what it is, and Evans presents this torn and fading Minstrel Poster for us to determine what it may mean. We need to navigate these treacherous waters ourselves. Is this only a poster from a era in our collective history? Or is it something greater, a set of facts that rise to a grim poetry, giving voice to an aspect of ourselves and our culture we would prefer to turn away from?

I also find curious that Evans presented us with two different croppings from the same negative. The one above is as he presented it for the MOMA exhibition of American Photographs in 1938. The cropping below is how it was published in the book edition of American Photographs, placed in a sequence after four straight portraits.

Minstrel Showbill, 1936 ©Walker Evans