The Black Male Body

Phenomenological Occurrences in Visual Media and the

Possibility of Liberatory Images

Introduction

In our complex American experiment of democracy, we can point to the politically constructed issues and policies that enshrine the Black male body. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations of Black bodies have powerfully debilitating possibilities because of their negative detonations and connotations. With the emergence of new media transducing racialized information from multiple popular cultural constituencies and mass-mediated news sources, and through the steady climb of hate group proselytization via the internet, Black bodies are being socially reconstituted and redefined on a daily basis.[1] The spectacle of the black male body exists in a 24-7 performative stance that is unyielding by historical design. The black male body performativity of being both the site of desire and repulsion, hyper-visible and invisible, simultaneously occurs as both the subject and the object. This activity creates an in and between liminal space. I refer to this in and between as a phenomenological occurrence where resoluteness of one's own self inscriptions reside. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first-person point of view.[2]Phenomenology is a school of philosophy established by Edmund Husserl that examines the structures of experience and consciousness. This phenomenological occurrence is also where the black body's fears, judgments, and opinions reside through inscriptions that are continually re-energized through visual cultural media. My focus here is on the interiority of the phenomenological occurrence, but not in the strict Husserlian sense, but as a point of centering the experience from the first-person point of view of being both the object and subject simultaneously and rendering this occurrence visible through my photography making practice.

My uncle Melvin Sharp, the man that taught me to tie my shoes.

Liberatory Images From Inside the Phenomenological Occurrence

A departure point for the phenomenological occurrence of distorted space bordering the black body was established by photographing the men in my family. To render these images in my making process, I engage the corporeal and the spiritual through the use of lighting and color. The light/white represents the white gaze, and the dark that encapsulates the subject represents the phenomenological occurrence. These portraitures function as a means of developing the foundation of inquiry into the subjectivity and objectification that happens simultaneously for black male bodies as a basis of my making practice. More specifically, these portraits drive my desire to disrupt this phenomenological occurrence through image-making and create a liberatory space beyond the visual cultural narratives of fetishism, criminality, illegibility, and invisibility inscribed in the black male body. As noted by Stuart Hall, "cultural meanings are not only in the head. They organize and regulate social practices, influence our conduct, and consequently have real, practical effects."[3] My search for answers on how to position the black male body away from or outside the continual bordering process of mapping its existence enables me to understand the inherently political processes of representation itself.

My family portraits provided a space I would consider not of resistance but a space of quietness through my research. Our collective phenomenological occurrences merged into a bubble of quiet communion amongst black men allowing for intimacy to exist in the room. They were, in essence, free to be themselves in a safe space. The men in my family were no longer performing as objects of desire, subjects of criminality, or tropes of hyper-masculinity. The result of our communion pointed me in the direction of a liberatory practice, free from the constraints of black male body inscriptions. Liberatory images I have come to see are born not as an act against something but simply as an act of creating something. From my personal experience, images of liberatory considerations originate in the quietness of the phenomenological occurrence. Author Kevin Quashie describes it as, “Quiet instead, is a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life – one’s desire, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears. The inner life is not apolitical or without social value, but neither is determined entirely by publicness. In fact, the interior dynamic and ravishing is a stay against the dominance of the social world; it has its own sovereignty. It is hard to see, even harder to describe, but no less potent in its ineffability. Quiet.”[4]

My work and this thesis engage in the phenomenological, not as an end goal of interrogating the political process of representation. I create work that both depicts and becomes the liminal space of the black male interiority. The subjects in my thesis images are of the men in my family. They are posed in a forward-facing position to be looking at and also looking back at the viewer. My family portraits reside in an intermediate stage of my discursive exploration of the interiority as I know it from lived experience. Even as the external space around my body is displaced, as demonstrated in my images, the interior is distinctly aware of my body and the white gaze. I look to multiple readings, including Stuart Hall, Fred Moten, and Mark Sealy, for words to express the phenomenological occurrence. To render the occurrence in my making practice, I look to two artists exploring the nuanced interiority of the black experience as what I consider a liberatory practice of picture-making. They both experienced seminal moments that allowed them to affirm themselves and subverted the expectations of illegibility due to the phenomenological occurrence. These artists are photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode and multidisciplinary artist Kerry James Marshalls. For Fani-Kayode, the black male nude becomes the 'canvas' on which he stages a series of 'investigations' of black masculinity and gay desire – a forbidden voyage into, and against, 'identity.[5] On the other hand, Marshalls chose a literal and conceptual route in his usage of the color black in various shades, doubling the color of black and the black body to present Blackness in its uncompromising position in their representation in our visual culture. The color black and the absence of the physical body becomes the site of interrogations of its representation in resistance to being the object both inside and outside of the predominant culture.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode used his own self inscriptions from inside the phenomenological occurrence while rearticulating, disrupting, and shifting the positionality of the black male body. The body provided a point of intersection for a number of different planes of meaning – racial, sexual, cultural – which constantly disrupt and unsettle one another.[6] Handled with great tenderness, and stressing its profound vulnerability, the black body appears as a translated object, suspended somewhere between erotic fantasy and more ancestral spiritual values.[7] In Fani-Kayode's work, the black body is not a transcendental signifier – the 'real,' outside representation, which brings it to a halt, but a combination of codes used to construct it.[8]  Codes of African traditions of posture, gesture, body decorations, Yoruba culture, and a no-European cosmology. These were methods used by Fani-Kayode for navigating the unbridgeable distance as a black man in society, between himself and his family, compounded by his homosexuality and his physical exile from Africa. The black men in Fani-Kayode's frames performed differences both theatrically and culturally through staged constructions that explored the interiority of desire, fantasy, and ecstasy.[9] Fani-Kayode's work is unable to escape the objectification married to the black male body. Still, through ancestral rituals and the use of African cultures and subcultures, he is able to tap into the interiority of the black queer experience. Fani-Kayode's work, I assert, is another liberatory making practice to render self-inscriptions inside of the phenomenological occurrence.    

Artist Kerry James Marshall articulates the phenomenological occurrence of the black male body both literally and conceptually as Black aesthetic in his work. Marshall's work is inspired by his personal history and recurring elements of the American experiences, both past and present. In his work, A Portrait of the Artist as Shadow of His Former Self, 1980, the bust of a black male is rendered almost entirely in the shade of black. The figure's features are hard to discern, save for the whites of his eyes, his gap-tooth smile, and his undershirt.[10] Marshall's portrait renders the theme of invisibility that is happening as a result of the white gaze activating the phenomenological occurrence. The image is a statement of the black body's disappearance in the public eye. Our individuality is supplanted by the constructed cultural narrative of the Black man. Painted when he was twenty-five, the work marks a significant transition of the artist. "Everything changed when I made the painting,"[11] Marshall told Wyatt Mason of the New York Times. This work sparked Marshalls' interest in countering stereotypes by creating work that shows the different facets of the Black experience. The Black aesthetic or doubling of Blackness becomes part of the context of color that is attached to the black body. The color black and the black body becomes the site of interrogations of its representation both inside and outside of the predominant culture. "What we have before us is a portrait of a black man by a black man, but one that looks the way a black man might feel about being looked at in a white world by people who see, in the face of a black man, not a person but a shade, a shadow, a pigmentation: blackness."[12] Marshalls' making practice is liberatory because he isn't seeking to critique the art historical narrative of Western paintings, where black skin is absent. Instead, his interest is in being a part of that history and expanding it. Through his making process, Marshall works to find ways to represent the black body through his imaginary ideal while recasting history where the black body has always been present.

Conclusion

My work and this thesis did engage the phenomenological occurrence and functioned as an entryway of rendering through photography the nuanced interiority of the black male body. I learned, as stated by Moten, "As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others."[13] Being in communion with the men of my family created a space for intimacy and an expanded understanding of each other's movement through time and space. We shared relationship heartbreaks, insights of queerness, career choices, family choices, experiences of police brutality, and unfulfilled hopes and dreams in this space. I continue to assert the phenomenological occurrence that obscures our interiority is inextricably tethered to the black male body and is activated in time and space as the performance of Blackness. This performance of Blackness is a continual power and subordinate struggle, where "the act of picking up a camera from within a condition of oppression becomes an act of transgressive liberation, almost as important as the making of the photograph itself, because it creates the possibility for something new to be seen, some different to emerge."[14] My family portraits were my act of picking up the camera and rendering the reflection of myself through the images of the men in my family and constructing my desired representation of selfhood. Both Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Kerry James Marshall undertook the same journey to self-inscribing the black body through the imaginary as an ideal that worked for their making practices. These artists have carved out a critical space to challenge the traditional ways of employing and deploying understandings of what images are supposed to do in modern to contemporary visual culture.

As a Black man, I suffer from no identity problems. However, I am aware that the black male body's hypervisibility and simultaneous invisibility are a byproduct of competing cores values, mainly between those rooted in European and Euro-American conceptions of the identity shaped in the imaginary of white supremacy. This awareness of my prescient positionality inside the gaze inspires my work through my own personal and shared histories of other black men moving through time and space. A statement by Fred Moten offers some consolation as he states, "Blackness is something "fugitive," an ongoing refusal of standards imposed from elsewhere."[15] My family images are evidence of the black male body and function as a counternarrative from an autobiographic perspective from within the phenomenological occurrence. While simultaneously subverting the white gaze and carving a liberatory space for an existence free from historical black body visual trauma. I have shifted my making practice into a liberatory space for creating images through my research and studies. However, I assert the phenomenological occurrence is inextricably tethered to the black male body, and it happens in time and space as the performance of Blackness.  

Bibliography

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[1]Mark Sealy, in Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2019), p. 5.

[2] David Woodruff Smith, “Phenomenology,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford University, December 16, 2013), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/.

[3]Stuart Hall, Jessica Evans, and Sean Nixon, “Introduction,” in Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices (London: The Open University/SAGE, 2013), p. 3.

[4] Kevin Quashie, “The Sovereignty of Quiet: beyond Resistance in Black Culture,” in The Sovereignty of Quiet: beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), p. 64.

[5] Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy, in Different: a Historical Context: Contemporary Photographers and Black Identity (London: Phaidon, 2001), p. 41.

[6] Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy, in Different: a Historical Context: Contemporary Photographers and Black Identity (London: Phaidon, 2001), p. 41.

[7] Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy, in Different: a Historical Context: Contemporary Photographers and Black Identity (London: Phaidon, 2001), p. 41.

[8] Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy, in Different: a Historical Context: Contemporary Photographers and Black Identity (London: Phaidon, 2001), p. 41.

[9] Mark Sealy, “Rights and Recognition in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2019), p. 226.

[10] “LACMA Gifted Kerry James Marshall's Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self,” The online edition of Artforum International Magazine, February 18, 2019, https://www.artforum.com/news/lacma-gifted-kerry-james-marshall-s-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-shadow-of-his-former-self-78657.

[11] Wyatt Mason, “Kerry James Marshall Is Shifting the Color of Art History,” The New York Times (The New York Times, October 17, 2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/t-magazine/kerry-james-marshall-artist.html.

[12] Wyatt Mason, “Kerry James Marshall Is Shifting the Color of Art History,” The New York Times (The New York Times, October 17, 2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/t-magazine/kerry-james-marshall-artist.html.

[13] Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2009): p. 178, https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.0.0062.

[14] Mark Sealy, “Rights and Recognition in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2019), p. 224.

[15] David Wallace, Lauretta Charlton, and Alice Gregory, “Fred Moten's Radical Critique of the Present,” The New Yorker, April 30, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/fred-motens-radical-critique-of-the-present.