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.
I Am Now You, Mother by Marcia Michael
In I Am Now You – Mother Marcia Michael (b.1973) ‘visualises the act of matrilineage through the body of her mother, Myrtle McKnight.’ In practice, this means she has taken photos of herself and her mother, naked and clothed, sometimes alone, sometimes together.
According to the introduction, Michael:
uses photography and oral history to retrieve lost and reimagined narratives of her matrilineal ancestry, creating an intimate dialogue between mother and daughter in order to visualise history from her mother’s memory.
In the artist’s words:
My desire is to recover a visual and aural narrative of my matrilineal history and reunite the present with the past. The body is testament to the refusal to forget. The body, my mother’s body, is all of my histories.
The introduction again:
Adapting call and response as a visual methodology, Michael’s call for historical understanding is met by her mother’s response permitting the search to be mediated through her body. The resulting visual conversation is unsettling in its revelatory rawness, and affirmative in its courageous offering: a ‘dialogue of matrilineage’.
In practice, it is the photos of Michael’s mother’s naked body which are most visually interesting. She’s no longer young and she is quite big, but these are – as I see them – big pluses. A lot of the youngish women artists I go to see take photos or videos of themselves naked (for example, Aneta Grzeszykowska, in the review of Calvert 22 I’ll publish tomorrow). Indeed Michael includes one striking photo of herself reclining in an armchair stark naked in this exhibition.
But most of us are not young and trim, and get quite sick of being bombarded by images of svelte young things in movies, adverts, on the internet, on TV, and even the art world.
Even in the art world, realistic depictions of the older human body, or of fat people, in less than pristine condition, looking less than ‘buffed’, ‘ripped’ and ‘hot’, are relatively rare, photos even rarer. (This is part of the reason I immediately loved the paintings of Jenny Saville when I saw them at the Sensation exhibition 21 years ago.)
So while I quite liked the obvious visual comparisons and connections which Michael’s draws with her mother – like the double portrait in the painting below, wearing the same dress – hopefully you agree with me that the really visually interesting part of the work is the central shot of their bare bodies, skin against skin. It’s not rude or provocative. It is, in purely aesthetic terms, a really interesting composition of curves and contours, a study in human flesh, such as artists from Rubens to Freud have made, shot in a wonderfully intimate way which captures the play of light and shade on brown skin.
In purely visual terms, it is a fascinating and entrancing composition.
And then it has this added layer of meaning, which is that it is the juxtaposition of the bodies of a mother and her grown-up daughter. If you have children of your own, it comes freighted with all kinds of added meanings and memories of your own cuddle time with your kids, evocative of that childhood intimacy, but also marking the distance from it which adult bodies have travelled.
Many of the photographs’ titles include the Latin Partus sequitur ventrem – ‘that which is brought forth follows the womb’.
This historical law, which decreed that the social status of the mother is inherited by the child, shapes the mother for Michael as both maker and marker of history.
Some of the works – triptychs or juxtapositions of three images – really drill down into the notion of the body, exploring all the strange and plangent postures it is capable of. I was particularly troubled by this one. As in a religious triptych the left and the right panels are in one style, and act as introductions or pointers towards the central one whose importance, here is emphasised by the way it is in colour, contrasting with the outer panels’ black and white.
Both types of image are unnerving. The one on the right is in shadow and hard to make out, but the image on the left is well lit and this makes the marks on the back all the more striking and obtrusive. What are they? I happen to be reading about slavery in a history of America so thoughts of whippings and beatings sprang to mind, but these marks cannot possibly be caused by anything like that. Can they? What are they?
And the central image of the two female bodies, intimately linked, entirely stripped of any sexual or sensual connotations, become studies in the shapes the body makes, and – again – almost abstract studies of light and shade, light falling on the central thigh and the buttock above it, contrasting with other darker shadowed areas of the image.
What does each of these images do to the mind and the imagination, what do they say? And how much more are your reactions complicated by their placement next to each other?
All the wall labels, the introduction and Michael’s own statements emphasise the theme of the mother and the handing down of identity from mother to daughter – no doubt that was the conscious aim of the project. But the impact of the images, on the viewer less limited or restricted by this perspective, is much bigger, much weirder, much more puzzling and uncanny.
Remembering You Remember Me
There’s also a video, projected onto one wall, titled Remembering You Remember Me. (In this installation photo, you can see the triptych or single photos of Michael and her mother on the left-hand wall, and then how the right-hand wall is covered with a blown-up photo of woodland, trees and tracks; and how it is onto this backdrop that the video is projected.)
Installation view of I Am Now You – Mother
In this video a very old, white-haired Myrtle McKnight is presented in five simultaneous streams next to each other, in each one each retelling the birth of her child.
The words, and the sounds we all make when speaking (the ers and ums) create a powerful and disorientating effect. It reminded me of some of Steve Reich’s early minimalist works where tapes of human speech are spliced and repeated with variations to produce unnerving and challenging sounds.
Here, the many voices of Myrtle McKnight, set against each other, create a more troubling effect, an unearthly, sometimes angular and discordant, strangely poignant sense of the fragility of human identity.
Related links
- I Am Now you Mother by Marcia Michael continues at Autograph until 7 July
- Marcia Michael’s website
Books & Boots 