Christina Sharpe’s omni-disciplinary book In The Wake: On Blackness and Being shook my orientation in the world and my visual cortex. A brief overview: Sharpe proposes the term “the wake” to describe the afterlives of Transatlantic slavery and its cultural reverberations. In her argument, she investigates media, poetry, literature, theory, and personal experiences in tandem to unpack the situation of existing “in the wake.” She stretches the word “wake” into all of its possible positions: the wake of a boat on water; the wake as a funerary procession; the recoil of a gun, declaring: “To be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfold- ing” (Sharpe, 13-14).  

The text is brilliant, as are her punctuating lines of inquiry into images throughout the book. I was particularly moved by two images that Sharpe interrogates — both photographs of young children being transported to safety after Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, taken by Joe Raedle for Getty Images.


Sharpe responds to the above image:  

“She is alive. Her eyes are open. She is lying on a black stretcher; her head is on a cold pack, there is an uncovered wound over and under her right eye and a piece of paper stuck to her bottom lip, and she is wearing what seems to be a hospital gown. She is looking at or past the camera; her look reaches out to me. Affixed to her forehead is a piece of transparent tape with the word Ship written on it.

Who put it there? Does it matter? 

What is the look in her eyes? What do I do with it?”

(Sharpe 2016, 44)

When considering the perceived onto-epistemological role of images in our lives and a broader social consciousness — photos that claim to tell us what we know, that tell us what has happened, and who was there; that promise to hold feeling, knowledge, being, and time — the question Does it matter? appears radical. In our epistemological image-economy, of course, it matters; by the same metric, I would argue that the circumstance of the image doesn’t matter at all, as the image is still seen, consumed, and explored regardless of the particularities of its coming into being.


The questions Does it matter? and also What do I do with it? push me to call into question the force of photography not only as a site of knowledge but also as a practice of looking. Dawoud Bey calls to looking practices in his 2012 series The Birmingham Project, in which he visited the site of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. In 1963, prominent black church was bombed by a four KKK members. Four young girls perished in the bombing, ranging from ages 11-14: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair. 20 other young black people were injured, and two young black boys were murdered in the aftermath. In the project, Bey photographed duos — old alongside young — from Birmingham in a church setting. The younger subjects reflect the age of a victim in the racist attack. The older subjects reflect the age that an affected witness or victim would be today.  


Bey says on the power of the diptych form:

“The diptych for me has more to do with this idea that we tend to think of the photograph as being something that embodies a single moment. And for a long time I’ve wanted to disrupt that notion of a single moment by having multiple moments coexist in within the shape of a single piece.”

The force of these double photographs in The Birmingham Project is to suspend temporality. The portraits — each holding an imagined extension of those lives lost in the Baptist Church bombing, and its wake — don’t document the past or the contemporary moment alone. Instead, they hold within them 50 years of dealing with this tragedy. His images are of the wake, expressed through his documentation of subjects — real and imagined, present and absent — who have inherited circumstances beyond their control; who are bound to a constant navigation of history and its grip on the logics of the contemporary world. It’s in the interstices between each diptych in The Birmingham Project that a certain mist becomes palpable — a melange of broken temporalites, gratuituous violences, classifications and events, imaginaries in every direction, aeresolized and suspended in the air. 

The precise poetry of the diptych form is revealed by what is not documented. The interstice between overlapping compositions posseses the power to illumiate the inherent and the unseen (our Weather, as Sharpe might call it), as fog in a car’s highbeams. This power is not limited to Bey’s meticulous work in response to the single terror of the 16th Street Bombings. Diptychs occur in the wild, too. 




These images are of the wake.







To call back to Sharpe, what is to be done with this overlap? In the unplanned “diptychs” presented here, each image is presented in the wake of its own individual disaster. If Bey’s images recall and hold the ongoing disaster in the wake of the singular event of the 16th Street Bombings, what is the shared and ongoing disaster held by these images of semi-disparate origin? Through the devastating, fortuitous diptychs, time collapses and appears to recycle itself, and the subject of the diptychs remains just beyond reach. Perhaps these compositions, and the endless combinations that could occur in their shape, claim to know not the subjects of
the images themselves — or the whole circumstance of each happening — but the more extensive condition of the anti-black world.




As an artist, I wonder how the photographic — a theater of the real that also possesses the ability to implode space, time, history, and notions of truth through the simple act of juxtaposition — might be used sneakily, even cunningly: towards illegibility and unlearning; imagining non-sensical and fabulated relations and events; shifting the terms of history.

Ultimately, if our goal is to escape the eternal and ongoing modes of the production of an anti-black world — an escape which, ultimately, is not fully possible in real-world terms — might a refusal of temporal and spatial logic offer us imaginative paths to exit? Might photographic logics and their careful undoing be a key to the spatial, the temporal, the chronological, the sensation of knowing — and therefore the logical?

The organic manifestations of overlapping compositions offer a call from the dark. They declare overlapping conditions — across time and space, class, race, gender, and tradition. They utter an argument for solidarity; empathy; resistance — through aesthetics. Images, objects, and even histories reflecting each other are reminders: yes, the anti-black machine is churning, but the work we aim to do has nature and inertia; poetry, power, and potential. The mind need not be the only muscle. ︎

Collectivity and Flatness: Tracking Site and Sight through Spillers and Marriott

Hortense Spillers and David Marriott write about distinct topics in their respective texts, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” and Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity. While Marriott’s subject of study is loosely located around notions of the image and imago — the development of notions of race and hierarchy through publicized documentations of black folk that become a part of the collective unconscious and go on to haunt our modern grapplings with the notion and image of black existence — Spillers dialectic arguments surround the body/flesh and family of the enslaved by tracking the subtle, simultaneous dynamics of their formation and existence in the context of the raced world (both historical and contemporary). These arguments appear discrete primarily because they occur at such different sites: the body/flesh (here used in their most rudimentary forms to describe the locus of one’s experience) and the image (that creation which needs the body to exist; that which is made of and about the body towards an epistemological mission) are divorced not only because of their form and function, but as a consequence of their histories: bodies were carried across the Atlantic Ocean and retain the impressions of their trauma, while images, on their own, did not and cannot.

However, somewhere in the liminal space between Spillers’ and Marriott’s theories, the body and the image meet each other. Namely, their points of connection occur at notions of collectivity, haunting, and flatness. Spillers speaks towards a “collective function” (Spillers 203) and from a “collective past” (210) while Marriott grapples with the imago as a site of collective understanding. Spillers plots the flattened terrain and evaluation of the enslaved body through the lens of a slave ship’s hull to be entangled with the fungibility of the slave; Marriott’s grappling with the image is implied to occur on the flat plane of the screen, page, or poster where images appear. From these overlaps, the black body/flesh and the image of blackness are brought together: their shared qualities further reveal the problem of perception: as an act, it is unable to hold the essence of being. Further, the intersections of their two theoretical positions build a dialectic of site/sight.

“Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” begins with the personal: “I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name.” (Spillers 203). However, Spillers self-address is quickly thrust into the realm of what others might call her; in that relocation, it takes on the form of the collective: “‘Peaches’ and ‘Brown Sugar,’ ‘Sapphire' and ‘Earth Mother,’ ‘Aunty,’ ‘Granny,’ God's ‘Holy Fool,’ a ‘Miss Ebony First,’ or ‘Black Woman at the Podium’: I describe a locus of confounded identities” (203). The poetry of this introduction to her theoretical landscape does more than simply break our expectations of an academic text via its roots in the poetic and personal — it attends to the notions of collective appearance, experience, and knowledge that exist at the site of a black body, as it is both experienced and addressed.

From where does this collectivity stem? This notion of the multiple where one might expect the individual is scratched at by Spillers’ engagement with misnomers — all of those names, trickled down from the font of cultural production and its subsequent fictions, are pulled from the conception of what she (Spillers, a black woman and a black person) is imagined to be. Those misnomers are directly connected to the imago that Spillers conjures — that of a black woman whose character and image appear in the various plots of the world, from the intimacy of “Brown Sugar” to the pageantry of “Miss Ebony First,” to the playful truth of “Black Woman at the Podium,” (if Spillers wer


Collectivity, in Spillers’ argument, has been formed in the wake of the conditions of captivity, and is inseparable from the fungibility of the slave in the context of the occupation of space during Middle Passage. A slave, she argues, was not understood by the particularities of his/her being, such as gender, age or even individual size, but instead by the generalized space which each slave occupied in the hull of a ship. She employs the mathematics of the flattened dimensions of the slave: “‘Every man slave is to be allowed fix feet by one foot four inches for room, every woman five feet ten by one foot four, every boy five feet by one foot two, and every girl four feet six by one foot,’” (214). Here, it is not the individual characteristics of each slave used for the accounting of space, but instead some numbers ostensibly pulled from the median of a range of heights and widths. It is this meticulous equating which makes clear the methods by which slaves, regardless of biological sex, age, condition, or size become interchangeable with one another, — so much so that “‘five female [slaves could be] reckoned as four males, and three boys or girls as equal to two grown persons,’” (214). The equations of this fungibility go beyond undoing the gender of the described enslaved people — they determine that, as interchangeable objects, all black bodies must somehow speak for one another. Further, those misnomers, a present manifestation of those interchangeable bodies on the ship, are born/e from “deep in the collective past,” (210). The collective to which Spillers calls is historical and eternal, social and personal, but above all, formed against the blueprint of a ship’s floor in square-footages, is categorically flat.

Beyond the hull of the ship, collectivity is found in images: the imago is a locus of collectivity through and from images. In the context of psychoanalysis, the imago refers to the unconscious and pre-formulated mental image of someone. Here, and in Marriott’s text, the imago takes on a social meaning: the collective unconscious image of something, someone, or a particular condition. David Marriott engages the imago of blackness; he refers to the “black imago” (Marriott 4) which is aligned with the “disquieting phantomality [or ghostliness] of the black body.” When encountering a black imago, “white [spectators are] haunted by the image of Africans which they themselves have created as the ghost of ahuman naturality [in other words, the quality of non-human being],” (4, emphasis mine). Images of black people are so aligned with death and dying that their imagos are inseparable from one another. To be imaged or imagined as black is to take on a ghostly quality and conjure those narratives of death enacted at the hands of white slave-traders and masters during and after Middle Passage. Like Spillers’ collective bodies, this ghostly imago, which reappears upon encounter with black people and images of them, is also one-dimensional, like the images through which it manifests — found in flashes across CCTVs, in print, and on digital screens (and in the immaterial realm of the unconscious or the imaginary). Just as images (and the imagos to which they are connected) are omnipresent, they are intangible and wholly imaginary. Those initial “terrors of colonial slavery” which haunt public images of black people and reappear in documentations of their deaths (see: televised frames of Rodney King’s beating or the livestream of the shooting of Philando Castille, accessed in real time from phone and computer screens) “remain unseen, lastingly virtual, ungraspable,” (5). All we — the viewers of images (and mourners of the violence and death employed and experienced across the Atlantic Ocean) — have is the imago: that which we are told has happened; that which is eternally rediscovered and re-employed in the universe of black images. In their inherent and active recollection of the sometimes fatal violence of captivity and transport, the nascent point of the black imago can also be found in what Spillers calls “deep in the collective past,” (Spillers 210).


The black imago and the black body/flesh, both formed from collective notions of the past and flat in their conceptualization, fail to get at the truth of black existence or embodiment. However, they address the dynamics of the black person in conversation with the world: how blackness is conceptualized even before it is projected onto bodies in the an anti-black world; how, in turn, the concept of blackness as it is perceived to be embodied conjures death and violence from a collective past. In that sense, black individuals, as they are perceived by friends, lovers, or passersby, are always at the whim of the collective notion of their existence. Those rectangles of occupied space are projected through an onlooker’s eyes and onto black flesh (as it exists, via Spillers, in contradiction to the dimensional interiority of the theorized body and towards the tracking of harm). This forms, alongside the notion of blackness as flatness, a dialectic of sight (the act of one looking at and naming a black person as black) and site (the locus of violence upon the body, or the flat floor of a slave ship): upon being seen, the body and flesh of a black subject recall, through the universe of the black imago, the violence and fungibility which was formed by the square footage occupied by enslaved people in forced transit from one continent to another. From the ratiocination of sight and site, we can begin to understand the problem with perception: where can aliveness be found if the sight of black skin conjures sites of violence? These terms in the context of one another offer us a foundation for further questioning: I imagine a discourse about the larger failures of image and language to describe black experiences. From the consequences of sight and site, I also imagine a location or production of jouissance in the context of the death and violence engaged with the black imago, and consequently, the black flesh onto which it is projected. If the residue of gratuitous violence, both in its presence in the everyday and in its historicity, is all we have on the flat surface of the image or the flesh, how might we find joy in the unseen quality of our dimensional realities? Further, what are the nuances of that haunting which follows the black imago into the present — and might those nuance provide a guide towards reimagining embodiment and being?

Works Cited:

“Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, by Hortense J. Spillers, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 203–229.

Marriott, David. Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity. Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Reynolds, Crystal Mikell. “A Brief History of the Miss Ebony Pageant at Indiana State University: 1970 to the Present.” Indiana State University , Indiana State University , 2018, www.indstate.edu/sites/default/files/media/student-affairs/pdfs/a-brief-history-of- miss-ebony-by-dr-crystal-reynolds-2018.pdf.