Using Photography toTell Stories About Race

lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/using-photography-to-tell-stories-about-race

John Leland

Slide Show

View Slide Show10 Photographs

Credit Courtesy of The Gordon Parks Foundation

I stood in the lunchroom doorway with my friend Kevin, bewildered. It was our first week
at the High School of Music and Art, a West Harlem public school, and we had become
instant friends. Still, I did not know where I belonged in a room that had casually self-
segregated into racial camps where “minority” teens gravitated to one side, whites to the
other.

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Apparently, in 1971, the choice was simple for most of our classmates. But less so for
me. I knew I wanted to sit with Kevin. But while we both lived in low-income housing
projects, we differed in one significant way: Kevin was black and I was white. After a
white student told us we did not belong on her side, my mind was made up: We headed
to the “Black Side,” as we called it, where we ate until the lunchroom gradually integrated
during our freshman year.

This story comes to mind whenever I’m asked why I write about race and photography. I
return to it because where I sat in that divided lunchroom says a lot about my
relationship to race and my lifelong fascination with it. My sister and I were among the
few white kids in our predominantly black and Puerto Rican housing project on the
Lower East Side. Except for a harrowing stint at a Jewish day school, where I was
tormented for being poor, my classmates and my young neighbors and friends, were all
people of color. They allowed me into their lives, and I learned a lot from them.

But it was the prejudice they experienced, and I observed, that provided my most eye-
opening lesson.

As a Jew, I have known anti-Semitism. As a gay man, I have known homophobia. But
neither has seemed as relentless as the racism I witnessed growing up — a steady
drumbeat of slights, thinly-veiled hostility and condescension perpetrated by even the
most liberal and well-meaning people. It was painful to watch, and as my friends let me
know, considerably more painful to endure.

Continually observing this reality shaped how I understood racism: When people told me
they had experienced prejudice, I believed them. I had rejected the liberal tendency to
defensively dismiss the victim to protect the accused.

My childhood also exposed me to cultures and histories that most white people were
oblivious to, even if they lived in an international city. I learned about these things from
my friends, classmates, teachers and my socially conscious father. As my activism and
passion grew, so did my solidarity with the Lower East Side. But my enthusiasm was
dampened at Music and Art, where my poverty again alienated me from some of my
teachers and classmates.

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 Photo

“I am amazed at the emotional depth ofDawoud Bey’s diptychs of people the

same age as the victims of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing — both at
the time of the bombings and the present day had they lived. His meditation
on the tug between past and present helps us to grasp the enormity of the loss
of six innocent lives.” Credit Dawoud Bey

Out of embarrassment, I hid my background and interest in race.

My freshman advisor at Hunter College, certain that the study of race was inconsistent
with my “cultivated mind,” as she put it, persuaded me to focus on art history. My studies
in college, and later in graduate school, completed my transformation from Project Boy
to Cultured White Man. I was conditioned by my art history professors to believe that
only the work of white people mattered. I engaged a mainstream art world — museums,
galleries, collectors, and publishers — that viewed artists of color as sentimental or
irrelevant at best, but more often as inept and dull. I eventually accepted these racist
myths, even as I continued to live in the projects.

But I also experienced another awakening: I learned how to see.

My mentors in art history were rigorous and demanding, teaching me to visually analyze
paintings and photographs, both to appreciate their aesthetics and to grasp their
underlying cultural meaning. I was trained to “deconstruct” images, to evaluate the ways
they advanced an agenda or manipulated or inspired viewers. But my teachers were
oblivious to artists and photographers of color and work about race, a deficiency I
inherited from them.

Yet my roots tugged at me as I started to miss the ardor and conviction of my youth. The
art world that once seemed glamorous and exciting now was insufferable in its casual
and deeply ingrained bigotry, elitism and allegiance to wealth. I picked up books by
intellectuals ignored by my professors — brilliant race writers, like W.E.B. Du Bois, James
Baldwin, and Frantz Fanon, who were deconstructing the world years before the scholars
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I had been assigned to read in school. I engaged new colleagues and researched new
artists. And I began doing projects about race, relearning how to see and comprehend it
through pictures.

In the summer of 2012, after a quarter century of publishing articles and books and
curating exhibitions that reconciled the insights of my formal education with those of my
life, I started writing Race Stories. I think of it as a learning experience, for me and the
reader, fostering the racial and visual literacy denied me by my teachers.

My relationship with the art world remains tenuous. While some things have changed —
art history has become more inclusive, for example, and a few artists of color have
become superstars — the problem of racism persists. Recently, I attended a dinner in an
expensive restaurant celebrating a friend’s New York museum retrospective, and the
scene was typical and dispiriting: A sea of affluent white people dressed in black.

These days, I rarely go to events like this. In their segregation, they bring me back to the
contentious lunchroom where, as a bewildered teenager, I pushed beyond the imposed
limitations of my race. But in situations like this dinner, there is no “black side” to which I
can retreat, no haven that even remotely resembles the life I lived or the one I live now.

In the slideshow above, the author selects and writes about some of his favorite photographs
explored in the Race Stories series.

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and
Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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