Greg Hagin Feb 25, The image, the capturer of the image: current readings and my project

In the time since we last met, I have been coalescing and preparing my project for this course. I found that this weeks assigned readings were both ones that I had read immediately in the week before our semester began. I realized that they had directly informed the premise for my project and, in the case of Bell Hooks, not just the execution/representation, but then the interpretation of the research.

James Van Der Zee was a commercial photographer who worked in the early to middle of the 20th century, and was known particularly for his images and portraiture of middle class African Americans in Harlem. His photography illuminated a people not just marginalized, but largely made invisible in the dominant segregated culture of America at the time. I have been familiar with his work and ethos for many years, and I have also been thinking of the power of the portrait and who wields that power.

I am taking Van Der Zee’s portraits of African American Women, and using that as an informing framework for a new series of images of women of color, all from a subset of NYC women in the universe of public education. But rather than the gaze of the outsider composing and capturing, these images will be self-captured. Not casual “selfies” but leveraging the ease of use and quality of digital photography so that the subject Is the photographer. The gaze is their own; the narrative in their hands/eyes.

Hooks is invested in knowing that the representations in imagery are not controlled by an outside or colonizing gaze; Cole, through Ariella Azoulay reflects that regardless of the creators control, “(Taking photos), looking at photos and being the subject of photos are mutually reinforcing activities in which the participants are interdependent and complicit.”

I hope to guide and help produce a diverse and representative study through contemporary portraiture, where agency is in the hands of the subject and the narrative is their own.