Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography. - book reviews

For her work Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (New Pres January 1995 $23) Deborah Willis Braithwaite solicited 18 contributors in an attempt to make go round on its head the elderly cliche about a picture's worth. The resulting thousands of words are decidedly jagged a curious hodgepodge that mixes the personal with the political. Here and there, like cherries in an underdone fruitcake, are jewels For the most part, however, this is a volume whose contents are everything single would expect in these politically correct, separatist times--predictable Afrocentrism and feminist cant, an abundance of academic jargon, and a sustained lack of any real insight.

In her preface, Braithwaite recalls three conversations that "made me awe why there has been no body offering a critical discussion of the photograph or the maker of the photograph in the African American community." The question is apt because there is, of course, a rich history of black photographic images dating back to the 1830 greatest in quantity of these early images are vicious stereotypes--"young black striplings used as alligator bait, and of advanced age grinning black men eating watermelon"--reflecting by what mode whites wanted to see blacks.

However, as early as 1840 the first known black photographer, Jule Lion, demonstrated the daguerreotype proces in novel Orleans, and there is now a large material part of work by black photographers. new interest in their lives and art has sparked a dialogue about "the ways individual looks at and interprets photographs and by what means identity and representation are put togethered in photographs of African Americans."

Picturing Us aims to be part of that dialogue. It also aims, Braithwaite makes clear, "to stimulate further discussion and advance critical writings in photography."

These are, to be positive laudable goals. For too a great deal of of our history, black images in art, photography and film have been created as well as interpreted by dint of whites. Thus the reinterpretation of black images, in whatever medium, is an important task. Perhaps, however, this piece of work is best left to novelists and bards to those who have musing deeply about the glories and limitations of being human. The task is too important, as Picturing Us inadvertently makes clear, to be ced to the academics, ideologues and cultural politicians who dominate this volume

The book's question at issues are manifold. To begin with, many of the writers have chosen photographs of genuinely personal significance--pictures of themselves as children, pictures of mothers, fathers and grandmothers. Thus Braithwaite writes about a photograph of her sister and herself; National Public Radio commentator Vertamae Smart Grosvenor writes about a picture of her grandmother, Estella Smart; bell bent holders writes about a photograph of her father, as does E Ethelbert Miller; and Lise Hamilton writes about a photograph, taken by dint of her father, of her mother and herself as a baby.

All of us have family photographs, as well as stories to move along with them that may be of interest to other family members and friends. Rarely, however, are they thus powerful, so compelling as to contain meanings that transcend the personal and warrant telling to a larger cluster Such is the case here. greatest in quantity often the essays are mundane, with a leavening, as in the case of Vertamae Smart Grosvenor's reminiscence of her grandmother, of the "faux primitif." bell hasps flirts with the provocative and original in her essay about her father before succumbing to bland polemics.

Elsewhere, readers may have feeling uncomfortably as if eavesdropping, unwillingly bearing witness to grief that more fitly should have remained private. of that kind is the case when Lise Hamilton writes about her feelings following the death of the white grandmother who refused to accept her fully

Here and there, however, the contributors rise to the occasion. E Ethelbert Miller's memoir of his father is poignant and powerful, managing to bear both love and mystery--how many of us, after all, will at any time really know our parents? The tone is dispassionate, not ever succumbing to sentiment or false piety. Miller's father was also a photographer, allowing the author did not always know this. Thus he is forced to imagine his father at work, developing "his pictures in the dark, mixing chemicals the way my mother prepared meals." Later, he concludes: "Photographs remind us of who we are, our ties to family and places. It is my understanding today that my father was looking for something in the dark. A way of creating a past or maybe level a family. There in forehead of his own eyes he could give birth to images."

Miller's essay is a search for understanding, as is Adele Logan Alexander's exploration of her paternal grandmother, Adella chase Logan, who at 47 killed herself by the agency of jumping from a classroom window at Tuskegee Institute in 1915 Born into a at liberty family of color, Logan was active in the women's suffrage motion and a teacher at Tuskegee. although as a child Alexander had known of this remarkable woman, it was not until she was an adult that she began the journey of deeper discovery. Her essay traces her search for Logan's antecedents, a search that l to the town of Sparta, Ga., and the discovery that Logan's grandmother, Mariah, was the daughter of a white justice Nathan Sayre, who had lived in clean defiance of law and local custom with a black woman named Susan chase in the early 1800s.