Deana Lawson The Conjurer

Deana Lawson The Conjurer

A Conversation with Greg Tate

WORDS

As this is written in early spring, Deana Lawson has two exhibitions up in Manhattan, one at the Guggenheim Museum, where she is presenting her show Centropy as the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize winner, and another at Sikkema Jenkins, her gallery in Chelsea.

A third major show is upcoming this fall at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

Lawson’s recognition as a profound orchestrator of convulsively charismatic images of Black subjects was inevitable— not least because of her unique depictions of Black folk in domestic spaces in a time of Black pictorial hypervisibility. She has stated that her work “negotiates a knowledge of selfhood through a profoundly corporeal dimension; the photographs speaking to the ways that sexuality, violence, family, and social status maybe written, sometimes literally, upon the body.”

On another occasion, Lawson revealed to an interviewer some of her primary inspirations: “vintage nudes, Sun Ra, Nostrand Ave., sexy mothers, juke joints, cousins, leather-bound family albums, gnarled wigs, Dana Lawson, purple, the Grizzly Man, M.J., oval portraits, Arthur Jafa, thrift shops, Breakfast at Tiffany's, acrylic nails, weaves on pavement, Aaron Gilbert, the A train, Tell My Horse, typewriters, Notorious B.I.G., fried fish, and lace curtains.” Our brief chat on Zoom revisited a few of these madeleines and sifted in a few more epiphanic treats (and treatises) for good measure. —Greg Tate

Greg Tate: I want to start off by asking you about your journey to becoming an artist who makes photographs—someone who’s pursuing a singular vision through the medium.

Deana Lawson: Well, one of my earliest memories as a child is trying to build a flying car with my twin sister, Dana.

I remember pulling all these things out of the back room from my toy box, and I was so excited that we were going to rig up something that could elevate us off the ground and have us float off into the sky. I had a lunch box for a seat, and some rope, and some other gadgets, but the more we started to work on it, the more I became overwhelmed that what we were trying to make wasn’t going to happen. A slow seeping disappointment settled in that we didn’t have the knowledge to use the materials we had in our bedroom to make us levitate. So one of my earliest impulses was to make something happen.

I come from a family that wasn’t into the learned arts, but art was everywhere, through the way my parents cooked, through language, through the way my cousins could tell a story. My cousin

Shannon had a knack for telling these stories that are always strange and unusual about local people in the family. Her laserlike observations about things going on throughout the family are drawn from the way everybody confides in her. And for good reason, because she’s the one who takes care of everybody when they get older. I’ve never met anybody since who can captivate me with their storytelling the way Shannon can.

GT: She sounds like a combination of a detective, a nurse, and a priest.

When did you learn that photographs are a medium that could possibly provide you with that degree of storytelling detail and intimacy?

DL: I don’t know how much a picture can tell a story, but definitely the first time I saw Diane Arbus’s photographs, when I was in college, and something in the subjects’ faces and their postures ...

I felt like I was looking at them and at the photographer at the same time, and that was when I knew it was possible. Though I would get a similar impact looking at my father’s pictures in our family albums. Except those were people I knew.

GT: Your father was pretty consistent about taking pictures?

DL: Very consistent. Always had his camera when we traveled, whenever we had an event, birthdays, Christmases.

GT: When did you start taking pictures of the family?

DL: My first year in grad school at RISD.

I wasn’t plugged into a Black community in Rhode Island, and I didn’t want to take pictures of myself. So, I figured I should go back home to Rochester, to what I knew.

I asked my mom to put on a wedding dress in our living room. And when I brought that picture back to a critique at RISD with Sarah Charlesworth—who was lukewarm at the time about my work—she said,

“Here is something that you need to revisit.” So I continued returning to Rochester to photograph my cousins and my aunts.

I showed a picture of my aunt at Rush Arts, around 2000, where I had her wear a sequined dress. Her living room is ivory leather, and a there’s a little menagerie of objects, and she always has long acrylic nails and is poised and beautiful. That was another sign—photographing my family in spaces they inhabit. There was a transformation that was beginning to happen. I realized that I didn’t need to bring them to a studio. That was when I began to recognize the power of the interior space and the power of the figure coming together.

What I’m doing integrates mythology, religion, empirical data, dreams. It's about Blackness, but it's about something else too.

GT: After a time, you moved outside of the family circle in pursuit of the strange and familiar.

DL: Eventually, I felt like I’d exhausted something working with family and realized that what I was looking for wasn’t only found in blood kin. I started to go to church in Rhode Island because I didn’t know how else to find Black people there.

I remember one woman named Hazel, who I photographed at the church in front of a curtain. It looked like it was in a private space because churches have this feel that’s private but not domestic. I was looking for community besides my party-crowd grad-school friends. And a yearning for home.

GT: Let’s go back. What compelled you to pursue art with a capital A for your initial university education? Still quite the leap for some Black middle-class families.

DL: Yes. Well, when I went to undergrad, I went for business. Dana and I were dressing alike because we always envisioned working as a team. We had gone to a high school that promoted STEM and that was what success was to us. So at Penn State, we went into international business. It was a beautiful year to be in college, that freshman year between 1997-98. The years The Miseducation ofLauryn Hill, Mos Defand Talih KweliAre Black Star, and Erykah Badu’s Baduizm were in the ether, and during the same time we attended the Million Woman March. Things started to crack open in terms of these existential questions: Who am I? What am I here for? Dana decided to leave business school and switch over to African American studies and English. A good friend of ours became deeply involved in poetry, and I realized spoken word wasn’t for me, and that I’d always wanted to do fashion design.

I applied to Parsons, but they denied me, and I’m so happy they did or I might not be talking to you today. I was moping until I read Iyanla Vanzant, and she was saying, “Whatever is in you must come out, or it’ll kill you.” That’s when I decided to transfer to Penn State’s art school, where the students were a bit stranger. Of course, my parents didn’t know what was going on with their daughters. We’d left home for college with perms and shoulder-length hair and came back with dreadlocks.

GT: Y’all got turned out by Lauryn Hill! That bohemian intervention is so necessary for so many of us who were raised properly. Discovering that, Oh, you can be Black and walk round in the world looking like that. In terms of art school, did you take drawing, painting, and sculpture classes?

DL: Yes. I remember my sculpture teacher introduced me to the work of Kara Walker.

I went to the library and looked at her silhouettes. I saw fantasy and nightmare and circus and speaking to history. I knew I was definitely in the right area. The next semester, I enrolled in photography and discovered Arbus. That sealed the deal.

GT: At a certain point, you start to unabashedly render nakedness and Black flesh and Black folk exposing themselves to your camera in domestic spaces. I’m curious whether you see your work as some kind of statement about Blackness and photography.

DL: I don’t think I ever meant to make a statement about Blackness directly, but I remember looking at many nudes, and not being impressed, and saying, “If I had done this, I would’ve ...”

GT: Upped the game, ha!

DL: [laughs] I always knew that I had a certain vantage point as a woman—most of the nudes I saw were by men, and I had a whole other idea of what the erotic and desire looked like. But it was a slow process.

I recall looking at some of Katy Grannan’s pictures in grad school—her project The Poughkeepsie Journal, where she put ads in newspapers and went to the houses of people who responded to her ads. I was interested in how she was working. I began looking closer at the power of melanated skin in color, not black and white, and how, if you captured it in color with the right sort of lighting, with the pose, and the space, that it could be transcendent. So, I just kept at it without trying to make a statement about Blackness. And I still don’t know if I am. But there was curiosity and a strong conviction about putting certain elements together and what could happen.

GT: At a certain point, you became more emboldened and audacious in terms of your verbal interaction and your directorial demands on people. What occasioned those breakthroughs? What got you to break your own fourth wall and go beyond what your subjects were, maybe, comfortable with?

DL: Part of it was figuring out what I was willing to do in order to make something happen. There was a woman in Harlem I met online when I was living in New Haven, and I decided to drive to Harlem and make this photograph. Distant travel started to open up. That woman, Berette Macauley, and I ended up becoming lifelong friends, and she and another subject helped me go to Jamaica. That led to me traveling to other places that I wasn’t familiar with.

GT: I know that you’ve dealt with resistance from subjects in sometimes contentious negotiations, which required another level of being emboldened and audacious. At what point did you decide that you were going to be more like a film director, like, I’m going to get this shot no matter what?

DL: It takes a lot of psychic energy when you get rejected. It still hurts me. It’s like a punch in my stomach. It takes a lot to go up to a stranger sometimes and not know what’s going to happen. I haven’t done it in a while, but I’ve seen people on the train I want to go up to and realized that I’m not ready yet. I’m never super confident about that.

GT: Are you saying you have no spidery -sense, or that you’ve been known to ignore it?

DL: Both. I do have a spidery-sense, but sometimes I’ll ignore it when I feel compelled enough. Luckily, knock on wood, I’ve gotten some amazing results from situations that could’ve been not good. But there’s a part of me that is bold and believes that the picture must prevail at all costs.

If I can put pictures out there that represent truth as I see it, it’s like being a news reporter and a great philosopher.

GT: Photography brings its own level of power and seduction: What are the ethics of making art with real people? Then the whole situation arises that whatever you put in a gallery is a representation of Black folks, and you’re setting yourself up as middle ground between Blackness and the white gaze. There’s the ethics of that too.

DL: I think photography is a slippery slope especially when you’re dealing with somebody’s likeness, somebody’s body.

This is the one technological medium in the arts that’s seen as a record of the creative, autographic arts, meaning “made with the hand,” same as painting and sculpture. Yet people will take a photograph as the truth more than any other medium. In that sense, there is a certain power to it. And if I can put pictures out there that represent truth as I see it, it’s like being a news reporter and a great philosopher.

At the same time, I know that I’m showing at predominantly white spaces. My goal was to become so big that eventually the name becomes so popular that it becomes a household name, and more Black folks would have access to the work without having the fine-art knowledge of white spaces. For me, my heroes were artists like Basquiat. I want to be big like Basquiat, except I’m using a camera where he was using paints. I hope to make work that speaks two tongues so that the community I am making the work of would know what I am talking about.

GT: Toni Morrison was once asked if she expected the people she was writing about to read her books. She said, “No, but if they did read them, they would recognize themselves in them.”

DL: Exactly, because not only would that community know what I’m talking about, but they would know it better than curators who have the art language. And I’ve had proof of this—I’ve had friends and strangers who aren’t in the art world look at the work and pick up on subtle shit and have a complex language to talk about it more so than curators who default to me out of fear of not knowing how to talk about the work. I’m not afraid of the white gaze or exploitation because I know my intentions. My goal is to raise consciousness about Blackness in a certain proximity and framework that’s about transforming power and ideas of value.

I don’t know if people truly understand—or maybe because I haven’t vocalized it yet—the scope of the work.

That it’s trying to push other ways of knowing, in other fields. If, say, I was born in other lifetimes, in Haiti, I would probably be the woman selling jewelry on the side of the road with a creative force that has to come out. Or, if I was born in 800 BCE would I have been a priestess? Or doing some alchemy? The tools I’ve chosen for this lifetime are modern technology, but the spirit behind them ...

GT: Conjure! Voodoo! Hard to get across in conversation but very present in the work.

DL: Yeah! What I’m doing integrates mythology, religion, empirical data, dreams. People try to position me as just taking pictures of Black bodies, but if we were taking Blackness as a norm, what else would we be paying attention to in the pictures? It’s about Blackness, but it’s about something else too.

GT: You shot in Jamaica, and you shot in the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo], and in Haiti twice; you level those worlds of Black difference because of your intimate approach.

We may not know where the pictures were taken, we just know it’s always with Black folk at home, with themselves, and there’s no sense of any gaze around that’s outside of that tribe. Once you go into another culture as an American with a camera, all kinds of anthropological baggage follows you there. How do you think of yourself in those places as opposed to more familiar African American spaces?

DL: I’m highly aware of myself as an outsider in those spaces because I don’t speak the language often, but I embrace that outsider position. I think of other projects in photographic history where the photographer wasn’t American, and it’s almost like they have an edge ... a clarity because of their position as a foreigner.

The most obvious would be Robert Frank’s The Americans or Jacob Holdt’s American Pictures. Or Bertien van Manen, a Dutch woman photographing in Appalachia, resulting in her work Moonshine—her work is insane. So even though we know the role of the outsider historically has contained gaps of misinterpretation, implied ethnographic viewpoints, and racism, there are these outliers, examples where that removed vantage point (or bird’s-eye view) delivered something that rings with clarity and beauty. Also keep in mind, I am an artist, not a documentarian.

I am continually destabilizing the image as a record or document, since my directorial hand is so strong. The final composition that the figure and I arrive at may or may not have anything to do with the person(s)

I am depicting.

GT: I want to go back to conjuring and religious imagery and talk about the presence of holograms and cosmologies in your new work.

DL: Holography, at its best, is truly enigmatic, no other process that I know activates my psyche in this way. For me, holograms are a means to push consciousness through visuality. A way to imagine a possible field, invisible to the human eye, but one that could potentially become visible through holography. The first full holographic/ photographic piece I made was Deleon? Unknown (2020). In this image, an anonymous figure lies on her back, her eyes are closed, her arms are unusually crossed, almost like an Egyptian mummified figure. Her pose oscillates between rest and death, and yet her body, particularly her stomach, seems full of life ... Is she five months pregnant? The pen scribble made by my child Grace is concentrated around the mouth and looser by the arms and belly.

The hologram near her stomach depicts an elephant tusk-like object, which may be difficult to decipher. The hologram glows an alien greenish yellow. Perhaps I was drawn to this tusk because it conjured childhood memories of my mother’s elephant collection ... or maybe I was channeling the Kingdom of the Edo people in Benin City, where real carved elephant tusks served as spiritual points of contact and were placed on elaborate shrines dedicated to divine kings. The sum of all parts here—the found picture, a child’s mark, the hologram of the tusk, the mirror frame—creates a vibrating unnameable thing. The inlaid glass hologram inside a traditional photographic print amplifies the supra-sensible within the real, which is a metaphor for how lived experiences could operate.

GT: You’ve figured out a way to augment the sense of mystery. You’ve told me that your holographer initially told you that it would be difficult to insert a holograph into a regular picture. I thought,

Never tell a sister there’s no way to do something she wants to do. MLK said that we were the veterans of creative suffering, but we’re also the veterans of creative speculation.

DL: That’s the truth. The holograms are so sensitive to light that the laser hitting the picture has to be relatively at a 45-degree angle to be perceivable. I had to figure out how to have this piece of glass in the picture be placed like a jewel and be flush to the picture. In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin compares the painter to the magician and the photographer to the surgeon. The painter is doing tricks like a magician, but the photographer is like a surgeon using a knife to cut into the body, slicing into the real world, into reality, making that incision. Like you’re taking this frozen moment from real time, that’s fixed and will never move, and seeing what kind of alchemy can occur.

Greg Tate is a Harlem-based writer and musician. He is the author of several books, including Fly boy 2: The Greg Tate Reader (2016).