Autograph ABP is a charity that works internationally in photography and film, cultural identity, race, representation and human rights. ABP stands for the Association of Black Photographers.
Originally based in Brixton, ABP moved to a new, purpose-built gallery and offices at Rivington Place in Shoreditch in 2007. It is here that the ABP gallery is currently hosting two FREE exhibitions of photography by black photographers.
Devotion: A Portrait of Loretta by Franklyn Rodgers
For some years photographer Franklyn Rodgers has been taking large-scale portrait photos of the most important person in his life, his mother, Loretta. More recently he has branched out into taking portraits of Loretta’s circle of friends and family. To quote the man himself:
Devotion – A Portrait of Loretta represents the connectivity between faith, family and friends, echoed in the wider social experience assigned to them in their time and location. It is a meditation on strength, resilience, fortitude and the ability to endure. It is an idea through which the connectivity it brokers opens up the reconfiguring of survival, rooted firmly in the legacy of a cultural matriarch. To pay homage, both as Loretta’s son and as an artist, in recognition of a way of thinking that represents a coping mechanism to collectively overcome, forgive and conversely transform: a process of creation through a different lens. Evidenced over time in the cultural landscape that now defines our nation.
The photos are enormous and capture a staggering amount of detail.
Loretta Rodgers, 31 January 2006 by Franklyn Rodgers
Friendships
As the director of ABP, Dr Mark Sealy MBE, puts it:
Loretta and the devoted network of relationships that are presented in the exhibition could, if we so choose, unlock the face of our own humanity. ‘Identity is not only a departure from self; it is a return to self’ (French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas) This unlocking process, however, only becomes possible at the point in which we fully recognise the civil responsibility we have for both Loretta and her friends. The underlying theoretical question with which Rodgers’ photography works presents us fundamentally concerns our understanding of what it means to actually look into the human face.
Installation view of Devotion by Franklyn Rodgers
Confrontations
It is certainly true that the size of the portraits, and the way they are cropped very closely so as to be, literally, in your face, is almost forcing a response, coercing you to engage somehow, forcing us ‘to unlock the face of our own humanity’ maybe.
Mrs Iris Simms (2013) by Franklyn Rodgers
Care
Probably the portraits are a mirror and you project onto them your own concerns. Because I cared for both my parents as they died, and have been the main carer for my children, these enormous portraits trigger emotions of care and concern in me. These women look as if they have lived. They look as if they have suffered. I found myself uncomfortably moved by them. Unsettled by their unrelenting gaze.
Sealy again:
Through his photographs of his mother Rodgers invites us to enter the sacred realm of human recognition. In his hands the camera is repurposed as a device that aids the case for greater safekeeping and care across the human condition.
Installation view of Devotion by Franklyn Rodgers
Technical fluency
But maybe that’s just me, my life experiences, which I’m projecting onto them.
On the technical front, I am astonished at the pin-prick clarity of such enormous prints. Having recently seen the vast photographic prints by Andreas Gursky at the Hayward Gallery, and the massive photos by Alex Prager at the Photographers’ Gallery, I realise that we are living in an age when photos can now be blown-up and printed on an enormous scale without losing – in fact, enhancing – a tremendous, an almost intimidating, clarity of detail.
But whereas Prager’s and Gursky’s photos are almost entirely staged to capture large groups of people or (in Prager’s case) bizarre scenes, Rodgers’ photos obviously have a completely different feel. I wouldn’t call it ‘intimate’, they’re too big for that. But about as close up as you can get to a human face. And determined to capture every pore and blemish of the skin.
Looking again, I realise that all the faces are completely expressionless. I think it was at the National Portrait Gallery’s 2017 exhibition that I noticed that not a single one of the 70 or so portraits on display showed a single person smiling, let alone laughing i.e. it’s a common trope or convention of 21st century portraiture, to remain completely expressionless..
Maybe smiling or laughing immediately limits a portrait, because the viewer knows what mood the sitter is in. Smiling or laughter defuse the tension between viewer and portrait. Whereas depicting blank unsmiling portraits makes the face so much more powerful, inscrutable and mysterious.
What, you find yourself asking, is this array of senior citizens thinking? About their experiences of being black in Britain? About the nature of identity in a society mediated by images? About what’s for dinner? Who knows.
Time
As T.S. Eliot wrote a hundred years ago, ‘Time is time and runs away.’
Sealy again:
The act of photographing his mother’s face also marks Rodgers’s awareness of time moving uncontrollably fast. This sense of temporal dis-ease creates the conditions of having to act in the present and take responsibility for the now. Rodgers’ photographs of his mother and her circle of friends are therefore an invitation to look into their faces as part of a self-reflective journey to one’s own humanity, because, ultimately, it is only when we can recognise all the Lorettas of the world that we can then recognise ourselves.
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Loretta Rodgers, Crown (2013) by Franklyn Rodgers
It’s a room full of intense, brilliant and powerfully questioning portraits.
Related links
- Franklyn Rodgers: Devotion – A Portrait of Loretta continues at Autograph ABP until 7 July 2018
- Franklyn Rodgers website
- Autograph ABP website
Other blog posts about photography
- Franklyn Rodgers: Devotion – A Portrait of Loretta at Autograph ABP (June 2018)
- Shirley Baker: Personal Collection @ the Photographers’ Gallery (June 2018)
- Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive @ the Photographers’ Gallery (June 2018)
- Tish Murtha: Works 1976 – 1991 @ the Photographers’ Gallery (June 2018)
- Killed Negatives @ the Whitechapel Gallery (June 2018)
- Work in Process @ the Photographers’ Gallery (May 2018)
- Under Cover: A Secret History Of Cross-Dressers @ the Photographers’ Gallery (May 2018)
- Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize @ the Photographers’ Gallery (May 2018)
- The Great British Seaside @ National Maritime Museum (May 2018)
- Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins @ the Barbican (April 2018)
- Andreas Gursky @ the Hayward Gallery (April 2018)
- Post-Soviet Visions @ Calvert 22 Foundation (March 2018)
- Illuminating India @ the Science Museum (February 2018)
- Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2017 @ the National Portrait Gallery (January 2018)
- Syria: A Conflict Explored @ the Imperial War Museum (May 2017)
- The Radical Eye @ Tate Modern (March 2017)
- Malick Sidibé @ Somerset House (January 2017)
- Don McCullin (March 2017)
- Shaped by War by Don McCullin (2010)
- Unreasonable Behaviour by Don McCullin (2015)
- Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century @ the V and A (June 2016)
- Beard @ Somerset House (March 2015)
- Performing for the Camera @ Tate Modern (March 2016)
- Unseen City: Photos by Martin Parr @ Guildhall Art Gallery (March 2016)
- Peter Kennard @ Imperial War Museum London (May 2015)
- Salt and Silver @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
- Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern (March 2015)
- Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s @ the Barbican (November 2012)
