How to Re-Tell History: A Comparative Analysis of Roaming by Carrie Mae Weems and The Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence
In her essay, Photography and the Practices of Critical Black Memory, writer, researcher, and teacher Leigh Raiford states that “photography stands at the crossroads of history and memory” (119). The truth of this statement is never understood as much as in the photographic practices of Black artists and activists. Photographic practices, since their beginning, have been an agent of celebration and documentation. The history of photography within the Black community is one fraught with pain and joy. From slave portraiture to lynching documentation and their subsequent consumption by colonial society, Black representation within photography is one which, at its origin, confined black bodies “to the frames of the criminal, the pornographic, ethnographic, the comedic, or to the margins of the sentimental portraits of whites” (Raiford 120). Beginning in the 60s and 70s during the civil rights movement, Black artists and activists began repurposing photographs, specifically images of lynching, as a means of remembering and reconstructing the social status of Black Americans. Using the images as fodder for anti-lynching publications, the images served to vilify the white people within them and victimize the Black people, effectively reversing their original sentiments. As such, photography transformed. It was no longer simply documentation of history, but a living and changing memory, given new meaning by the context within which it was read. Since then, the photographic medium has transformed archiving methods and is often engaged by Black artists as a site of memory, one which critiques the claims to the truth presented in photographic canons and that effectively uses the medium’s capacity for documentation “to reconstruct not merely individual and collective selves, but also racial and national histories” (Raiford 112). Carrie Mae Weems employs photography as a way of reconstituting the perception of Black women in imagery, centring them in her practice as a means of calling to attention their invisibility in historical archives. She also uses photography to reframe and reimagine the past and present, delineating the relationality of selfhood and identity within society. In her 2006 series Roaming, Weems embodies the silenced Black female, returning to sites of imperial power as a haunting figure serving to insert herself and emphasize her immateriality within colonial structures of dominance. In addition, her titling and selection of location draw on themes of migration and movement to assert the presence of racialized bodies within a global visual culture. Similarly, Jacob Lawrence’s series of paintings The Migration Series shares an archival nature with Weems’ photographs in its representation of oral histories. Using painting, Lawrence renegotiates the historicity of the photograph as a “truth-telling” medium by tracking the migratory journey of thousands of African Americans using oral histories and lived experience. In doing so, he creates a physical archive of memory within his paintings, further expanding the medium of painting and exploring the construction of Black identity within North America and internationally through themes of movement and migration.
Inspired by African American history and folklore, Carrie Mae Weems’ photographic career boasts incredible influence on the visual culture of North America and the Black community as a whole. Since the early 1980s, her interdisciplinary practice has confronted topics such as family, race, gender, identity, and power. In her 2006 photographic portrait series Roaming, Weems calls into question systems of power present within global architecture. Pictured alone in front of various monuments across Europe, Weems brings to light the structures of dominance that such monuments not only represent, but continually reinforce. In her piece The Edge of Time–Ancient Rome from Roaming, we see Weems in a hauntingly desolate street, standing away from the viewer in a long black dress. By creating “ a visual memoir that looks at freedom and migration, Weems’s Roaming series is a search for countermemories haunting classic European imperial sites” (Altınay 386). At this crossroads of history and memory, Weems can call attention to the invisibilized black body throughout historical archives. In doing so, she does not simply place herself into the archive but contextualizes the visibility (or lack) of Black subjectivity in global narratives, using her physical form to “haunt” images of imperial monuments that recall and enforce a colonial past. Furthermore, her positioning away from the camera presents the viewer with a unique position; one outside of the system of power. Like Weems herself, the viewer is looking toward and into a world from which they removed. Through this positioning, Weems emphasizes the dependence of imperial power on the general populace and its inherent subordinate position. Thus, Carrie Mae Weems’ series Roaming employs photography as a means of reconsidering the documentary “truth”. She inserts the Black female figure into her photographs, simultaneously drawing attention to the erasure of Black bodies within historical archives, and creating a new archival canon that acknowledges the position of “other” that Black people occupy. Lastly, she positions the viewer even further “outside” the dominant narrative by placing them behind her figure, using her own body to lead them, highly aware, into spaces of power with the hopes of challenging them.
Much like Carrie Mae Weems, Jacob Lawrence’s painting practice often depicted African American histories, asserting the presence of Black subjects in historical archives through the representation of oral histories and contemporary life. His work The Migration Series consists of 60 painted panels, each accompanied by individual captions. Tracking the mass movement of African Americans from 1916 to 1970 from the southern states to the northern states of the US, Lawrence’s work speaks to American legacies of racism, migration, and community. During his research for this work, Lawrence not only accessed archives of material information available to him through the 135th street branch of the public library (now the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture), but also oral histories from members of his community (Lawrence et al 161). Growing up in Harlem, he would hear tales of people “coming up” and would bear witness to families helping new arrivals establish themselves in the North. As such, The Migration Series is heavily influenced by oral history traditions, becoming “a textual performance brimming with personal stories about the momentous experience of migration; differently put, it is a text of remembrance” (Lorensen 572). This series of works is a living memory, constructed not as a historical painting, but rather as “auditory witnessing” made up of stories from within the community (Lorensen). Furthermore, although The Migration Series is grounded in the moment which it depicts, it functions not only as an archive of a single event but crosses temporal boundaries to encompass “a past that reaches far into the forced dispersal across the Atlantic Ocean as well as back to the racial metaphysics and practice of slavery in America” (Lorensen 581). As such, the panels take on new meaning for each generation as an archive of memory, one that functions as a tool “that makes visible what has been obscured, what has been excluded and what has been forgotten” (Scott vi). Furthermore, throughout the series the colours of each panel work to create a “migration palette” which serves to connect the stories being told with the lived experiences of the migrants Lawrence was surrounded by in Harlem (Lorensen). In the last panel, number 60, Lawrence paints the migrants facing the viewer for the first time in the series. Accompanied by the caption “And the migrants kept coming”, Jacob Lawrence completes his series with an arresting change in direction. Facing the viewer is a train platform of migrants, each seeming to gaze out from the painted surface without so much as a single facial detail. This sudden change in the orientation of the story transforms the viewer from an observer, watching the migrants travel in profile, to a participant. In much the same way as Weems’ orientation implicates the viewer in relations of power, Lawrence’s chosen orientation of the migrants in his final panel necessarily calls to attention the viewers’ involvement in the great migration and the lack of material archives of self-determined Black stories.
While Carrie Mae Weems’ series of photographs titled Roaming and Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series employ different mediums and techniques, they each achieve the same effect in different ways. Both works draw attention to the invisibility of Black subjectivity within the archive, explore the power relations that affect every person’s selfhood, and suggest a new method of history telling which acknowledges gaps and strives for relational historicity rather than a universal one. Firstly, both Weems and Lawrence’s works make visible the erasure of Black bodies within colonial historical archives. Weems does so by figuring herself as a haunting, a ghost of those silenced and made invisible within material records, particularly during the time of slavery and throughout its lasting social resonances. Also, by turning her face away from the camera, Weems refuses to identify herself, making herself into a vessel through which Black silences can be embodied. In contrast, Lawrence uses materiality to draw attention to those same spaces of silence within cultural archives. By giving physical form to oral histories and ancestral knowledge, he is at once creating an archive for Black histories and showcasing the lack of material records of self-determined history-telling from the Black community. Like Weems, he uses an undefined subject lacking individual identity to allow the migrants to embody those personal stories being re-told. In choosing not to give their subjects facial features, Weems and Lawrence leave their forms open to be anyone and become anyone. Secondly, both Roaming and The Migration Series call attention to structures of colonial power in two completely different ways. Weems’ work presents us, very forcibly, with the physical embodiment of imperial power; architecture. Towering structures encourage viewers to feel and see their position to the power of the state. Weems understands architecture to be, “in its essence … very much about power” (Altınay 455). She emphasizes this relationship by dramatizing it. Surrounded by nothing but space she stands alone in front of a looming city or vast monument, and her inability to affect such a gargantuan structure is immediately made clear. Lawrence uses a much less subtle technique to outline structures of power in his paintings. He very clearly defines the affective power of the state using the captions which accompany each panel. In the second panel, the caption reads “Migrants were advanced passage on the railroads, paid for by northern industry. Northern industry was to be repaid by the migrants out of their future wages” (Phillips Collection). With a simple sentence, Jacob Lawrence makes obvious the migrants’ dependence on the state to construct their own lives. While Weems uses very striking imagery to illustrate the dominant power structures which affect our lives, Lawrence does so in a few concise and straightforward sentences. Finally, both Weems and Lawrence, in their own ways, are suggesting a new method of story-telling and recording history. Carrie Mae Weems employs photography as a way to pose questions about the validity of material records, particularly photographic practices, and the canon of their “truth-telling” abilities. In her series she purposefully places Black female subjectivity in conversation with colonial structures of power within a documentary format, allowing her to critique colonial archival methods. Within this critique is a new method of historicity, one which acknowledges the shortcomings of past archival canons and proposes a new hermeneutic practice that is relational in its understanding of history and identity. Likewise, Jacob Lawrence’s series of paintings The Migration Series takes the silences within which Black people exist and are made non-existent and presents those embodied silences as a truth. Not only are most of his panels based on oral histories and lived experiences, but they embody generational knowledge in the most simple form; as primary colours and basic shapes.
In conclusion, while both works employ different materials and methods, Carrie Mae Weems’ Roaming and Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series call into question archival methods and their implications within Black histories and for the construction of individual and collective Black identity. In doing so, both artists subvert colonial systems of power, by validating ancestral and embodied knowledge, as well as the lived experience of those most marginalized by colonialism. Thus, they employ Black memory and Black bodies as a tool “to make sense of history, declare lineages, clarify allegiances, and mobilize constituents” (Raiford 119).