Objects of Personhood

 Medium: Photography

Critical Term: Personhood

 


Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons

Elevata

2002

Cuban 

96 x 80 inches

P2004.11

 


Lorna Simpson, American (Brooklyn, NY born 1960)

1957-2009 Interior

2009

American

Gelatin silver prints

overall dimensions variable

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Margaret Fisher Fund 2010.1

 

Malick Sidibé, African (Soloba, Mali 1935 - 2016 Bamako, Mali)

Untitled (studio portrait, young couple with baby)

April 1, 1976

Malian

Gelatin silver print

sheet: 12.7 x 8.5 cm (5 x 3 3/8 in.)

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Anonymous Gift in honor of Michelle Lamunière P2001.39

 

 


Yinka Shonibare, British (London, England born 1962)

Fake Death Picture (The Suicide - Leonardo Alenza)

2011

British

Digital chromogenic print

framed: 194 × 148.9 × 4.1 cm (76 3/8 × 58 5/8 × 1 5/8 in.)

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Ruth and William S. Ehrlich 2016.420


 J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere, African (Ovbiomu-Emai, Nigeria 1930 - 2014)

Atiai

1970, printed 2012

Nigerian

Gelatin silver print

sheet: 128.3 x 121.3 cm (50 1/2 x 47 3/4 in.)

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Margaret Fisher Fund 2013.29

 

 

Lalla Essaydi 

Les Femmes du Maroc #45

North African (Moroccan)

Chromogenic print

sheet: 20 1/16 x 16 1/16 inches

2009.78.3

 

Fredrick Douglass, “Lecture On Pictures,” Picturing Fredrick Douglass: An Illustrated Bibliography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American, eds John Stauffer et al. (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation), 126-141.

 

Kobena Mercer, “African Photography in Contemporary Visual Culture,” Travel and See: Black Art Practices since the 1980s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 170-185.

 

Focusing on the medium of photography, I selected six works from North and West Africa, the Caribbean and the United States to consider the role of picture making and sight in the development of selfhood, citizenship, and notions of belonging. The medium struggled to become integrated into larger Western art historical canon for the perceived lack of skill required to materialize an image. As the “pencil of nature” there was an assumed veracity of photograph objects that removed them from the scrutiny of artistic interpretation, for some time at least. This constellation of photographs takes on both the history of photography and colonialism to capaciously think through the potentiality of the medium. The works range from conceptual self-portraiture to highly stylized studio photography all lending to a wider analysis of the many currents of influence in the sphere of African Diasporic art history and its many confrontations with more Eurocentric aesthetic and thematic frames. In Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ Eleveta (2002) and Lorna Simpson’s 1957-2009 Interiors, photography acts as a critical reflection upon which we structure our existence. The conceptual photographers enlist their bodies as a malleable material offering critical insight for their work. Malick Sidibé’s untitled portrait exists as the only studio photograph included in my chosen collection, but represents an important nexus of diasporic exchange that occurred within the medium of photography. Studio portraits across the diaspora represent a point of convergence among many aesthetic practices, but also a stage for individuals to embody their desires. Additionally, both Yinka Shonibare and Lalla Essaydi offer contemporary reimaginings of late-modern visual tropes through the meaning of photography. Collectively, these objects explore the notion of personhood which I assert as my critical term or unifying line. 

 

Centering personhood as an extension of humanity, I find these objects considerably poignant in their addressing of the human condition with respect to race, place, and other markers of identity such as gender. Rather than reifying the power of a term such as “human,” I feel the use of “personhood” gives room for the individuality of community and the complexity of defining humanity for oneself. The photographs examine the makings of self in the public and private spheres of one’s life to even further complicate understandings of identity. Ultimately, in a multitude of ways the images bring forth the continuous negotiations of the self through the medium of photography. 

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