Defying narratives of suffering, Kennedi Carter’s powerful images center Black joy

Document Journal
Text by: Des Magness
Photography by: Kennedi Carter

The 21-year-old photographer on leaving art school, combatting the erasure of Black cowboys, and why she’s not moving to New York or LA

Focused on tenderness and gentle beauty, 21-year-old photographer Kennedi Carter captures Black American narratives with a fresh and nuanced voice. Carter’s intimate narrative projects, such as Ridin’ Sucka Free and Soon As I Get Home, dive into topics ranging from Black horsemen to love stories to, recently, her own family in North Carolina. Carter’s artistic aim is, primarily, to make her viewer feel good—she describes her work as “aim[ing] to reinvent notions of creativity and confidence in the realm of Blackness.”

Born in Dallas, Carter now lives and works in Durham, North Carolina, a place that she feels often grounds her work. Her image-making describes the American South in new terms, often creating rich and textured spaces of power for her subjects. It is easy to be drawn into the realm Carter has created; the gaze of her subjects is often confidently unwavering, and these images blend contemporary reality and historical reference into one visually striking moment.

Girls at the Trail Ride by Kennedi Carter

Des Magness spoke with Carter about the realities of isolation as an artist, leaving art school (for now), the grounding qualities of working in a smaller city, and what it means to be creating such powerful images of Black American life in the South.

Des Magness: When did you start taking photographs? Tell me a little about finding your voice in your work.

Kennedi Carter: I started in high school. It was about three, four years ago. I took a photography class, and I enjoyed it a lot. I thought it was going to be something I could cruise through, but my teacher was more adamant about putting in effort, and I ended up liking it a lot. It was something that I stuck with. I was in college for two years, and I took some photography courses there which I enjoyed for itself, but I ended up moving onto a different path. It was what it was—I took time away from school, started focusing on broadening my portfolio and making work that I care about.

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Courtesy of: Document Journal

These Powerful Photos Prove How Universal Motherhood Really Is

BuzzFeed News
by Kate Bubacz

“Interestingly, in art, even though it is so fundamental, real-life depictions of motherhood have been underrepresented over the course of history.”

Motherhood unites us all — everyone, no matter your relationship, has a mother. The digital exhibition on view at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago beautifully explores this theme, pulling together a collection of work by photographers known for their photographic practice exploring family life, as well as more unexpected names who happened to capture a moment of parenthood. The result is something that touches on the joys of family in all forms — the whimsical, the magical, the tedious, and the trite — without being reductive to how a mother should look. We spoke in depth with Chief Curator and Deputy Director Karen Irvine about this unique look at the topic and how it can be used for future shows. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Karen Irvine: This collection is a way to sort through images based on subject matter, and to bring consideration to one topic and show how diverse it can be. A lot of these images, I wouldn’t say are sweet, but they are definitely provocative. There’s humor. They confront bias. I think there’s a lot going on in this set. It wasn’t meant to lay the groundwork for an actual in-person exhibition. It was just meant to be on the website as a digital exhibition.

This digital exhibition was organized by one of my former colleagues, Allison Grant, who was our old curator — she did this as part of a show that we had on view about motherhood, which was called Home Truths: Photography and Motherhood, and that was organized by Susan Bright. We had that exhibition back in 2014, and it was all about the stresses and joy of motherhood, which extended into parenthood as well. This was set up as a print viewing set. Allison compiled all of these wonderful pictures from our collection that actually literally depict motherhood in progress and then put them up on our site, so it’s a really nice resource. […]

Latoya Ruby Frazier courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Photography

People like Melissa Ann Pinney — a lot of her practice has been based on motherhood. She’s looked at her daughter, Emma, throughout her whole life and chronicled her growing up. LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work has a lot to do with her family, and primarily her mother and her grandmother. Cindy Sherman, her practice overall isn’t about motherhood but we have this confrontation with the sexualized pregnant woman and that’s an interesting image, it almost looks like she’s in warrior face paint, and yet it’s like sexy and also kind of confrontational. Kelli Connell’s work is about a relationship between two women, but it does take you through the narrative of building a family. I don’t think that children ever appear in that project nonetheless. And of course, Carrie Mae Weems, her kitchen table is about motherhood, specifically.

Dorothea Lange, her image the migrant mother is one of the most famous, but her practice was not about motherhood in any substantial way. She did document a lot of mothers, but it had much more of a social documentary impulse. This is then a collection with a very diverse set of makers and intentions, which is lovely. I think that’s what makes this work, it’s so resonant. Everyone has a mother. It’s such a universal theme.

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Courtesy of: Buzz Feed News

Where Are the Photos of People Dying of Covid?

New York Times
by Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis

In times of crisis, stark images of sacrifice or consequence have often moved masses to act.

Recently, a friend, colleague and mentor, the cultural historian and critic Maurice Berger, died at 63 of complications from the coronavirus.

Every day that passes, particularly as I hear the wail of ambulance sirens going by on the West Side Highway near my window, I think of Maurice. I think of the conversations about images we might have had regarding this moment.

Much of what I know and teach about how images structure and shape issues of race and justice I learned from his scholarship and life experience. Visualization is a powerful tool — it can help us more deeply understand the severity of the situation as we work to curb the virus. But the visuals we need most in this time are difficult to come by.

I thought of Maurice when a friend living in Milan, who was among Italy’s earliest diagnosed coronavirus cases, sent me this text message in March: “If people could only see what it is like in the hospitals, they would stay at home.” He was admitted to the hospital earlier that month, but with his doctor’s agreement quickly left, feeling that his bed could be better allocated to others experiencing far worse symptoms.

[…]

A photograph of Civil War casualties of the Battle of Cold Harbor, in Virginia (1865).
John Reekie, via The Library of Congress

We would have talked about how the impact of photographs of people affected by the tainted water in Flint, Mich., aided the start of a nationwide understanding of the unconscionable injustice uncovered by Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha and illuminated by photographers such as LaToya Ruby Frazier. We would have discussed how artists like Keith Haring, Félix González-Torres, David Wojnarowicz and the collective Gran Fury made visible the AIDS crisis in a time of government inaction.

We would have talked about how reports on the Civil War death count — totaling around 750,000 by recent estimates — filled newspapers, but photographs conveyed the cost of the conflict in a way nothing else could. “Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations,” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in The Atlantic after photographs of the carnage went on view in Mathew Brady’s New York City gallery in 1862.

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Courtesy of: The New York Times

Installation view #museumshutdown

LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze

Contemporary And

Hundreds of independent art and museums spaces were forced to close due to the Corona-Crisis. In this series we are celebrating the fantastic artistic events that are right now sitting behind closed doors. Take a look on how visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier turns her camera toward Lordstown, Ohio, and the workers of its General Motors plant in The Last Cruze, a deeply personal investigation of labor, class, community, and family, installed at Wexner Center for the Arts.

Installation View of LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze at Wexner Center for the Arts

Chevrolet Cruze until 2021, the facility was officially unallocated by GM and stopped production in March 2019. Employees in Lordstown have been faced with the difficult decision to transfer to plants in other parts of the country. For many, this means dividing their family or leaving their support networks. As the plant went quiet and the workers’ lives were rerouted or put on hold, the UAW International Union began negotiating their contract with General Motors. During this period of profound uncertainty, Frazier was in Lordstown with the members of UAW Local 1112 and their families, collaborating with them to record their stories. Presented for the first time in Ohio, The Last Cruze features over 60 photographs and other audiovisual elements—as well as the last automobile from the GM Lordstown Complex itself—in an installation that visually echoes the plant’s floating assembly line.

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Courtesy of: Contemporary And

In Memoriam A Tribute to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

The Brooklyn Rail
by Jane Ursula Harris

I met Genesis in 2007 at the opening of a show I’d curated called Keeping Up With The Joneses. Along with work by Pope.L, Laurel Nakadate, LaToya Ruby Frazier (in her New York City debut), among others, it featured a photo of Lady Jaye in their Gates Avenue apartment dressed for work in one of her dominatrix outfits. Like a Vermeer by way of Pierre Molinier (one of Gen’s favorite artists), she stands gracefully in the tiny cluttered kitchen, her long slender body extended by stilettos, and her blonde pixie cut refracting light from the window behind her. I’d wanted work related to their pandrogyne project, which I’d discovered via a friend, but fate intervened. A month before the show was to open, Gen texted to tell me Jaye had passed, a devastating revelation that made the gauche prospects of negotiating what works to include impossible. I let Gen decide, and s/he picked the large-scale photo of Jaye in the kitchen.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Jane Harris. Courtesy the artist.

I arrived late to the opening (a bad habit I have even when I curate), and it was very crowded. My ex came up to me and told me he’d given Gen some kind of pill (Oxy I think) to ease he/r pain. I don’t know if s/he took it, but I share that anecdote because I don’t believe in moralizing the use of chemical substances to alter oneself whether for peace of mind, spiritual growth, or pleasure. And Gen made lots of work—music and art alike—under the influence of various substances, particularly hallucinogens, which s/he treated as ritual conduits. I still covet one of the beautiful gridded collages made from heroin baggies that s/he and Jaye made, and Blood Bunny (1997–2007), the life-sized wooden rabbit they rubbed with blood derived from the ketamine injections they took for astral travel. When I wrote an essay for the Believer on Gen’s survey at the Warhol Museum, s/he showed me the related scars on he/r arm; small cuts made by Jaye to bring he/r back into he/r body.

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Courtesy of: The Brooklyn Rail

The African-American Art Shaping the 21st Century

New York Times

Prominent black artists on the work that inspires them most.

OVER THE PAST 20 YEARS, a new vanguard of African-American creators has helped define the 21st century. Jordan Peele. Ta-Nehisi Coates. Kara Walker. Ava DuVernay.

It’s the first time since the 1970s that black art, history and political life have come together in such a broad, profound and diverse way. That convergence was evident in the farce of “Chappelle’s Show”; on the pair of albums D’Angelo released 14 years apart. You can see the imprint of the Barack Obama presidency on “Black Panther”; Black Lives Matter on Beyoncé; the country’s prison crisis on Kendrick Lamar. You can sense that convergence haunting the fiction of Jesmyn Ward.

For eight years, all sorts of black artists sailed through the White House, and shaped the depiction of black America, by thinking transcendently, trenchantly, truthfully. They adjusted the way the entire country can look at itself.

So we asked 35 major African-American creators from different worlds (film, art, TV, music, books and more) to talk about the work that has inspired them the most over the past two decades: “Atlanta,” “Moonlight,” “Get Out,” “A Seat at the Table,” “Double America 2,” and on and on. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.

From the start, black people have been at the center of American popular culture — essentially because white people placed them there, through imitation and mockery and fascination. Ever since, the struggle for black artists has been to wrest control of their own culture, to present themselves, in all of their complexity, diversity, innovation and idiosyncrasy, and represent one another, as rebuke, as celebration, as advancement.

So while the power these artists have attained might be a breakthrough, the primacy energizing their art is centuries old. Maybe these two decades of fertility and surprise constitute new territory. But, as these artists are about to explain, they amount to what someone like Beyoncé knows well: homecoming.
— WESLEY MORRIS

LaToya Ruby Frazier on Flint Activists

Amber Hasan Musician, author
Shea Cobb Poet, musician
Interview by Salamishah Tillet

LaToya Ruby Frazier: I’ve been on the ground here in Flint, Mich., ever since I did my first photo essay about the water crisis, which was published in the September 2016 issue of Elle magazine. Amber Hasan, her rap song “No Filter” was a big hit here that helped people understand the intensity of the water crisis. Her song inspired my photo essay.

Shea Cobb also did a poem that ran online with the Elle piece, about her daily reckoning with lead-contaminated water and trying to protect her daughter. Cobb and Hasan formed an artist collective called the Sister Tour with artists, activists and entrepreneurs that advocate for other women, artists, activists and entrepreneurs. These have been the women on the ground, keeping the narrative out there and trying to get access to clean water. These are everyday folks that people are not thinking about because they don’t know they’re out here doing grass-roots initiatives, and fighting for the quality and access to clean drinking water. As an artist, to stay with photographs and storytelling that lead to a solution, and to play a key role, and to be able to fund that solution, I couldn’t ask for more.

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an artist and academic.

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Courtesy of: New York Times