SUNDAY, JUNE 12 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE E13
significant for us to care about
and to think about and under-
stand the social structure around
this figure sitting in the chair,”
Adams says. “And so for me, as a
young artist, I realized that the
people around me sitting in
chairs are interesting, too.”
People “talk about this idea of
Black joy, which is kind of some-
thing that is pretty much repeat-
ed throughout my work. But what
people kind of misunderstand
about the idea of joy is, it’s not
necessarily about joy. It’s more
about normalcy. People translate
that into joy because they see the
Black figure occupying a space
with a sense of confidence and a
sense of prominence. And I think
that people think of that as being
joyful,” says Adams as he sits in
his studio in the Crown Heights
neighborhood of Brooklyn sur-
rounded by an explosion of color
that is his own art.
“I like that, but that’s not neces-
sarily my main focus. My main
focus is, I’m okay with making a
boring image,” Adams says. “We
don’t have to be performing in
order to attract people to who we
are, what we represent. I think
that the idea of us sitting, contem-
plating — that moment between
the action, I think that’s impor-
tant to keep in circulation as a
visual artist so people can see that
we have these moments of reflec-
tion.”
“Young Black people can see
that we have moments where we
aren’t doing anything,” Adams
says, “and that’s okay.” At a time
when the police have been called
because Black people have been
birdwatching or grilling or sleep-
ing, exalting Black people for do-
ing nothing is positively radical.ON BLACK LIGHT
This year, the second Gordon
Parks Foundation/Steidl Book
Prize was awarded to Jamel Sha-
bazz. He considers Parks his
North Star. “His life has been a
road map,” Shabazz says.
The Brooklyn-born photogra-
pher came to his craft through a
circuitous route. He dabbled in
picture-taking when he was a
child. His father was a photogra-
pher, and although he was barred
from using the expensive Nikon
cameras that he maintained, his
mother had Kodak Instamatics
that were accessible. “I was able
to see beauty that I didn’t know
existed. I was able to look at life
from a whole different perspec-
tive,” Shabazz says. “Once I
pressed that shutter, it was al-
most magical.”
But when he went into the
military, he left the cameras be-
hind. He was stationed in Ger-
many, and he turned t o music as a
refuge. He didn’t document his
time overseas, and that was some-
thing he regretted. So when he
returned home in the early 1980s,
he carried his camera with him
wherever he went because “I nev-
er wanted to be without memory,”
he says. Shabazz scoured the
neighborhood looking for stories
to tell and established a reputa-
tion as a street portraitist, some-
one who turned a compassionate
eye to his community, not just to
highlight style and personality
but also character. “I look for
love,” he says. “It goes beyond the
image. It’s about building a rela-
tionship, humanizing and trying
to aid them in any way I could.” A
retrospective of his work is on
exhibition at the Bronx Museum
of the Arts through Sept. 4.
Shabazz is a journalist trying to
document an objective truth; he’s
a street photographer who poses
his subjects. He tries to coax out
their humanity, which is often
hidden behind a wall of defen-
siveness. “I have to work extra
hard to get people to smile,” he
says. “We live in a society now
where it’s considered weak to
show compassion and smile and
all that.”
One of his most famous photo-
graphs, “Flying High,” shot in
Brownsville in Brooklyn in 1982,
captures three Black boys at play,
or perhaps, in competition. Two
of them serve as audience to a
third who is mid-back flip above a
pile of dilapidated mattresses set
in the middle of a deserted, graf-
fitied parking lot. No one is smil-
ing, and yet there is a profound
sense of escape, of daring, of
improbable lightness. It’s a call
back to Parks while also nodding
toward future possibilities.
In these last years, Shabazz has
thought a lot about how to re-
spond to the country’s relentless
mayhem: the murder of George
Floyd, the street protests, the low-
grade ache of having one’s culture
and one’s life politicized. “I’m
looking to make this world a
better place, to document and
bring light to it. To not just high-
light circumstances but to add
lightness,” Shabazz says. “Photog-
raphy is a form of visual medi-
cine. It’s a weapon to destroy
negative thinking.” And like
Parks, he chooses to deploy his
mighty artillery within his com-
munity — and let the impact
reverberate beyond.Hirshhorn Museum to disruptive
clothing designer Kerby Jean-
Raymond of Pyer Moss to the
working Joe citizenry of his
hometown of Baltimore.
“What I like about some of the
classic European paintings is that
there was a certain level of privi-
lege in the way that the painters
capture levels of mundaneness.
The subject has such privilege
that whatever they’re doing is
significant enough for us to think
about hundreds of years later. A
woman, just sitting in a chair, is soLike Parks, Bey aims to give his
subjects the dignity they’re often
denied, along with the ability to
simply be. He relishes capturing
ordinary people, folks whose rich
interiority is not often respected
or even noticed. “They’re just
living their lives,” Bey says, “but
all our lives are full of meaning.”
It’s a kinship also shared with
artist Derrick Adams, who was a
2018 recipient of a Gordon Parks
fellowship. Adams’s work is cel-
ebrated by audiences that range
from established curators at theous but in quieter, more intimate
moments, such as when he’s jog-
ging in a gray mist. Parks’s most
intimate photographs hold par-
ticular power for Dean. He’s fasci-
nated by those moments when
people are suspended between
hope and resignation, failure and
resolve. He admires the beauty of
the unexceptional and the activ-
ism implicit in documenting that.
“When he was taking those
photos,” Dean says, “he was giv-
ing life to those people at the
same time.”cally myself,” she says. “In every-
thing I do, I’m always Black.”ON BLACK JOY
Swizz Beatz, or rather Kasseem
Dean, is sitting in a recording
studio in California, a baby grand
piano just behind him, where he’s
serving as supportive husband to
his wife, Alicia Keys, as she works
on an album. Keys started the
couple’s Parks collection by buy-
ing two portraits of Muhammad
Ali as birthday presents for Dean.
The pictures aren’t of Ali victori-with actor Viola Davis in 2020, a
year of such profound civic unrav-
eling that it has drawn compari-
sons to the 1960s? That was the
question Calmese asked himself
as he became the first Black pho-
tographer to shoot a cover in the
magazine’s more than 100-year
history.
He photographed Davis, who
considers her very existence an
act of protest, with her back to his
camera, her torso enveloped in
shadows and her body wrapped
in an indigo blue Max Mara coat
styled to expose the smooth ex-
panse of her dark skin from
shoulder to shoulder. Davis’s face
is in profile. She’s not looking at
the viewer; instead, she seems
lost in her own contented reverie.
Her posture is layered with both
grim history and determined op-
timism; it’s rich with influences
that infuriate and inspire. Calm-
ese was guided by artist Carrie
Mae Weems’s “Museums,” in
which she poses in front of re-
nowned art institutions with her
back facing the viewer. The back-
ward posture and unapologetic
gaze are also a rebuke to the
dehumanizing images of en-
slaved men and women taken in
1850 at the direction of Harvard
zoologist Louis Agassiz. And the
image speaks of Parks and all of
the evidence he produced show-
ing that a portrait can be fashion,
art, journalism and Black activ-
ism all at once.
“I wondered what that means,
for a Black woman to have her
back toward the viewer,” Calmese
says of a stance that is both
vulnerable and defiant. “I
thought about the Agassiz slave
portraits and ... the agency that
they claimed barreling down the
lens of this White man.”
For Calmese, who has been in
conversation on the Parks Foun-
dation website, photographing
Davis in the midst of racial justice
protests was an opportunity to
reframe American history: “I
knew: This is a moment to be
unapologetically Black.”
The beauty of Blackness is
complex. It’s hewed out of pain
and possibility. In a set of photo-
graphs exhibited in the fall at the
Sean Kelly Gallery in New York,
Dawoud Bey set aside his usual
focus on portraiture to further
the story of today’s racial reckon-
ing by photographing the re-
mains of five plantations in Loui-
siana not far from the Mississippi
River. The images from “In This
Here Place” are not of grand man-
sions or wizened elders but of tiny
wooden houses, shacks and
swampland captured in black and
white. Each picture is devoid of
humans, but their spirit, brutal-
ized but unbowed, is present. The
landscapes are haunted by the
voices of the Black men and wom-
en who were enslaved there.
“All those portraits I’ve made
have always been situated in a
certain place. And that place has
been part of the narrative. Now
I’m narrowly focused on the his-
tory or narrative embedded in the
landscape. Our history with this
country began on plantations,
and there’s a straight line from
plantations to George Floyd: It’s
the dehumanization of African
Americans,” Bey says. “I’m bear-
ing witness to what lives and
breathes in the land.”
Bey captures the spoiled splen-
dor of the landscape in the same
way that Parks allowed the power
of place to be a fully present
character in his work. In Parks’s
“Outside Looking In,” Black chil-
dren peer through a chain-link
fence into a lush playground they
can’t visit. Their backs are to
Parks’s camera. There’s yearning
in their body language; there are
ghosts in the weeds.
That image, shot in Mobile,
Ala., in 1956, inspired photogra-
pher Itaysha Jordan as she
worked on a story for The Wash-
ington Post’s magazine. She re-
created it as a specific commen-
tary on the fashion industry’s
outsiders and insiders. “I loved
that he could toggle between doc-
umenting African American life
and photographing for Vogue,”
Jordan says. “I wanted to capture
the spirit of Gordon Parks, be-
cause what is so impressive about
him is his versatility. He’s a story-
teller. And when I became a pho-
tographer, his work aligned with
everything I was interested in:
art, fashion, activism.”
Parks is the bridge between the
civil rights generation and many
of today’s social justice agitators
— the selfie takers, the guerrilla
street photographers and creden-
tialed veterans. Each of them uses
the camera to stake their claim on
the culture. Like Parks, who navi-
gated between the gilded estab-
lishment and 'round the way soci-
ety, Jordan tries to move seam-
lessly across boundaries. “I have
one foot in Flatbush and one on
the Upper East Side. I’m trying to
bring together both worlds,” she
says. And in these past two years,
“I’m more inspired. I’m more em-
powered to go even harder.”
“I have more confidence to go
out there and be more authenti-
ArtGORDON PARKS JR./GORDON PARKS FOUNDATIONDAWOUD BEY/SEAN KELLY GALLERY, NEW YORKJAMEL SHABAZZCLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: “Untitled (Gordon Parks with Fontenelle children),” Harlem, 1967, by Gordon Parks Jr.; Gordon
Parks’s “Untitled,” Harlem, 1 967; “Swamp,” 2020, by Dawoud Bey; Jamel Shabazz’s “Flying High, Brownsville,” 1982;
Bey’s “Cabin and Benches,” 2020; and Parks’s “Ellen Crying,” Harlem, 1967.DAWOUD BEY/SEAN KELLY GALLERY, NEW YORKGORDON PARKS/GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION GORDON PARKS/GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION