Black Gold
During a recent trip to Atlanta, I visited the Deana Lawson exhibit at the High Museum of Art. Lawson’s portraits reach across the Black diaspora, portraying intimate scenes staged in locations including Togo, Jamaica, Brazil, and the U.S. I was fascinated by the fact that many of Lawson’s subjects were strangers to her and each other. Rather than depictions of relationships that already were, her photos instead are speculative images, visioning new and perhaps temporary intimacies. Alongside these staged portraits are Lawson’s family photos, blurring the boundaries between “real” and imagined bonds, nuclear family relations and the sprawling kinship of Black people across the globe.
I was in Atlanta for the Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners conference, so maybe it’s unsurprising that I was most moved by a piece about the land. In the 2021 piece Black Gold (“Earth turns to gold, in the hands of the wise,” Rumi), Lawson portrays two men: a jewelry vendor named Star, and Los Angeles-based urban gardener Ron Finley. Most of the frame is taken up by Star, who wears a loud patterned shirt and holds up blinged-out chains, crosses, and watches dangling from his arms. The flash of the camera illuminates him and the jewelry against a gray nighttime background. On the left side of the image, next to Star’s elbow, is a small holographic inset of Ron Finley, standing squarely with an eight-tine rake over one shoulder.
The feeling of each image, the affects of the two men, are surprisingly similar. Both look directly at the camera, holding the tools of their work. Finley working the soil, the “black gold” that yields food, nutrition, new life. Star selling a different kind of nourishment—an aesthetic balm, the promise of shine.
In Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice, Krista Thompson writes of various ways Black people perform for each other and for the light of the camera, creating cultural practices around the blinged, the sequined, the emblazoned. Looking at scenes including Jamaican dancehall, roadside photo studios, and Bahamian proms, Thompson explores the diasporic glitches and translations communicated through visual technology. As Thompson writes,
How can black people, through popular practices, create different forms of legibility through photographic and videographic technologies, given the historical relation between whiteness and light and the very notion of the representable? How might they differently shine, glow, or bling through the photographic and videographic medium and in the public sphere?
In many ways, the usage of light in Black Gold—the insistent shine illuminating Star’s shirt, jewelry, and skin, the ways holographic manipulation of light distorts and blurs parts of Finley’s image—is reminiscent of the visual practices Thompson explores. The title Black Gold (“Earth turns to gold, in the hands of the wise,” Rumi) tells a story about value and transformation. About the working of soil and metal to produce things that bolster our survival, and perhaps the exploitation inherent in those histories of labor. Through her photographic techniques, Lawson also speaks to a narrative of collective self-making, a practice of catching and dancing with the flash of the camera, insisting you are seen by those you are shining for.