Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers & the Emergence of a People

Short Synopsis

A feature length, two-hour documentary and multimedia outreach project that explores how African American communities have used the medium of photography to construct political, aesthetic and cultural representations of themselves and their world.

Description/Treatment

OVERVIEW

It is an issue of visual literacy because an image is never just an image. It has a background, a context and a history. Especially now, on the heels of the historic election of the first Black president of the United States shaking the familiar foundations of the carefully constructed images that have shaped the popular culture’s view of what “Blackness” is and who “Black people” are. This unprecedented and bold new film breaks the mold, both in terms of its approach to the subject matter and its visual style. It challenges the peculiarly American construction of race and in the process lifts the veil on the hidden history of a people and a nation. At every critical juncture in the evolution of Black Americans, Black photographers have been there documenting the transformation from slave to hip-hop artist, from sharecropper to corporate executive and from the urban housing project to the White House. Their lenses have captured the story of the ordinary lives of a people who have been integral to making America what it is and keeping America’s focus on the great promise of what it can become.

Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People is a feature length, two-hour documentary and multimedia outreach project that explores how African American communities have used the medium of photography to construct political, aesthetic and cultural representations of themselves and their world. With funding from the Ford Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and the National Black Programming Consortium, this ground-breaking project will be the first film to vividly bring to life the individual photographers and photographer collectives- both anonymous and celebrated, historical and contemporary - whose images and personalities helped define and transform the lives of African Americans through the magic and power of the camera lens. After working on this project for six years, we are now seeking funds for postproduction and completion. Because this project has such a rich visual field of photography as well as a large historical scope, a significant part of the budget is alocated to lisencing fees as well as the scanning and animation of the photographs and archival materials.

In Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce wrote: “history is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Through A Lens Darkly is about contemporary African American artists probing the recesses of the American dream by interrogating images of stories suppressed, forgotten and lost, seeking to engage the fullness of American history in their work. Among others, featured artists include: Deborah Willis, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Anthony Barboza, Lyle Ashton Harris, Hank Willis Thomas, Glenn Ligon, Coco Fusco and Clarissa Sligh. The work of pioneering Black photographers from the 1840s to the present will be interweaved throughout the film to portray how the images from these men and women helped reclaim the collective self-worth and humanity of African Americans. They are highlighted in the film to uncover the rich history of African American contributions to the development of photography as an art form and a force to be reckoned with. Contemporary artists frequently utilize the works of these earlier griots, agitators and crusaders as inspiration for their own work, often adding a contemporary context for issues, questions and insights posited decades before. From 19th century photographer and abolitionist JP Ball to 20th century photographer and icon Gordon Parks, Through A Lens Darkly will reveal black photography as an instrument for social change, as a pointed African American perspective on American history and as a particularized aesthetic vision.

The overall narrative will illuminate the methods by which African Americans have claimed voice and agency in the construction of black representation in an often inhospitable social landscape. It will illustrate that the challenge to overcome limits to social progress and representation in the cultural and political fabric of the nation has been an ongoing struggle for generations and that representation in media can be seen as equally as powerful as political representation. Through A Lens Darkly will investigate the ways in which representation within a mass media society defines the limits of one’s life: how other people perceive one to be, the obstacles and ceilings one encounters, what kinds of opportunities are withheld or presented, essentially, one’s very humanity. Conversations with artists will reveal the story behind their images - often for the first time on film - to demonstrate the remarkable personal journeys they have undertaken to create work that inspires, enrages, motivates and, above all else, provokes a dialogue to help viewers, Blacks as well as others, better understand themselves and the African American community.

While there have been a few films focusing on individual black photographers within the last ten years, such as the profile of Gordon Parks, there has not been a film that explores the subject of black photographers as a community of creative activists in dialogue with each other and with an eye to both the historical and contemporary contexts. This will be the first film that vividly brings to life the individual photographers, photographic collectives and anonymous and celebrated subjects whose personalities have defined and transformed the lives of African Americans.

Treatment

The voice of the film will be a personal, yet fractured, form of storytelling as exemplified by Thomas Allen Harris’ innovative approach to documentary filmmaking. Mr. Harris, an independent filmmaker who began his career as a photographer, is ideally suited to guide audiences through this project- like a private eye on a case. A 2006 recipient of a United States Artist Award, Mr. Harris’ critically acclaimed films explore issues around identity, family and desire in the context of the larger African Diasporic community. Normatively, he draws from the rich heritage of the literary and arts canon of African-American autobiography to re-define “personal” inquiry through the documentary form. In his work, autobiography is defined not by a single voice or perspective but by multiple voices—often in conversation—to produce communal biographies. Mr. Harris comes from a family with a long history of photography and social activism and he frequently uses his family archives to take audiences on journeys of self-discovery that transform and challenge conventional notions of race, ways of seeing and documentary filmmaking. Mr. Harris, as an artist who is part of and in dialogue with a larger community of artists, will narrate Through A Lens Darkly.

As narrator and an essential character in the film, Thomas lays out the deeply personal outlines of the journey he and the viewer are about to undertake. It begins with how one “sees” oneself, juxtaposing self-definition against a background of reflected judgment. A judgment that has, in the case of African Americans, been posited by the larger society, refracted through a prejudicial lens and then foisted upon the subject as a given. Thomas, as an African American, questions just how much of himself is truly “his” and how much has been defined for him by society’s determination of who Blacks are, how they are to be seen, what is acceptable for them to act and be like, etc. Thomas interrogates our collective fears about Black people, as reflected in the photographic images made over the last 160 years, by gathering a group of fellow artists, historians and scholars to dissect how those fears came into being and how, using the power of the camera, these photographers have transcended that legacy and created a much deeper, richer and more expansive worldview of the Black experience and the Black community.

JAMES BALDWIN: Every negro boy and every negro girl, born in this country until this present moment, undergoes the agony of trying to find in the body politic, in the body social, outside himself, herself, some image of himself or herself, which is not demeaning.

NARRATOR: When you look in the mirror, what do you see?

With these opening lines, against a montage of contemporary African American photographers interacting with Thomas and images of African Americans made by Black photographers over the last 160 years of photography as a serious medium of representation in this country, Through A Lens Darkly begins the journey of understanding how photography has been used to define WHO WE ARE.