At Least They’ll See the Black

In two recent films, Kahlil Joseph and Arthur Jafa consider the poetics of African American life.

In 1953, the renowned Harlem photographer Roy DeCarava snapped David, a black-and-white portrait of a young black boy from the neighborhood: Hair nappy, his hands are folded behind his back as he leans against a lamppost. A single button holds his shirt closed, and yet the frown he wears allows him to peer, fully represented, directly into the camera’s eye. “He don’t never smile,” observed the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes when the image appeared in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a 1955 admixture of 140 of DeCarava’s quotidian images—of black men, women, and children going about their days and celebrated jazz luminaries playing music—paired with Hughes’s narrative. It’s DeCarava’s impressionistic image of black interiority that sits at the center of filmmaker and artist Kahlil Joseph’s film Fly Paper (2017), a monumental, twenty-three-minute ode to black Harlem, past and present.

These black artists’ photographs poetically employ light, shadow, and darkness to portray the ordinary and the sublime.

In ’s rapidly moving sequences, you (2017), at the New Museum, New York, contains a nonlinear narrative that expands upon the director’s use of the postwar black photographic image to, as DeCarava did, present Harlem as both a real mecca of black America and a fantastic and psychic region of the black imagination. In this way, recalls not only DeCarava’s pictures of black life, but also those of image makers who were part of the Kamoinge Workshop, a group DeCarava led in the early 1960s, including Ming Smith, Louis Draper, Anthony Barboza, and Ray Francis, and other documentarians of black life, such as Gordon Parks, Pittsburgh’s Charles “Teenie” Harris, Dawoud Bey, and Andre D. Wagner. These black artists’ photographs poetically employ light, shadow, and darkness to portray the ordinary and the sublime. Images like DeCarava’s portrait (1961), of the jazz musician, reveal the varied textures of blackness, and push the boundaries of what can be seen and imagined in the black spaces and faces of a photograph. They are part of a contemporary canon of black images that provide what DeCarava once described as “the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which … only a Negro photographer can interpret.”