Beauty and the face of change

By Sarah Milroy   From Thursday's Globe and Mail

A Hamilton photography exhibit explores how African-Americans learned to express self-worth

To see oneself as beautiful is to be empowered - a state of mind that was hard to come by for African-Americans in the aftermath of slavery and discrimination. The current exhibition Posing Beauty in African-American Culture at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, tells the tale of how black Americans, from celebrities to unnamed citizens, came to express their own sense of self-worth, preparing themselves for the camera's gaze. Notably, the show gathers the work of the many black photographers too long overlooked, as well as the work of white photographers who took on black subjects across the divide of race. Organized by Deborah Willis, a professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, the show opens up a new field in the history of photography.

The argument over beauty can be heard in the earliest moments of the struggle for black equality. Writing in 1926, the Harlem Renaissance poet and playwright Langston Hughes declared: "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. ... "

But how would that beauty be defined? One of the most historically significant works in the show is Edward S. Curtis's portrait A Desert Queen, taken in Seattle in 1898. Curtis, a white American photographer, is known to Canadian audiences principally for his staged portraits of the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast, and he has been much criticized for imposing cultural stereotypes on his photographic subjects. In this show, we observe Curtis up to his usual tricks. The woman's bosom is half unveiled to the camera and she's costumed in a traditional African headdress and heavy ornamental jewellery. You can't help but wonder who she was, and how she came to sit in front of Curtis's lens.

The new century brought a proliferation of images of black men and women out test driving the new-found trappings of upward mobility. In 1932, James Van Der Zee, a black New York photographer, created a striking image of a fashionable black couple clad in their matching raccoon coats, posing with their luxury car. African-American photographer Eve Arnold brings us a view of the black debutante ball at New York's Waldorf Astoria, shot in the 1960s, the gauzily clad girls arranged in prim rows alongside their suitors. As Willis's catalogue explains, an industry sprang up around black coiffeur and fashion, with magazines and newspapers arranging beauty contests for the "modern Negro woman," implicitly rewarding black women who complied with white beauty norms.

With the sixties and the civil-rights movement, though, the tide turned. The crimping iron was out, the afro was in. Posing Beauty includes a number of photographs from these glory days, like Anthony Barboza's image of two couples stepping out in Harlem, the women in hot pants and thigh-high boots, the men in dandy attire, sporting their fedoras.

Male beauty has a place here too. The black celebrity photographer Todd Gray captured Michael Jackson in a quiet moment in 1981, his face yet to be deracinated by plastic surgery. Shooting in the 1970s, white Berkeley photographer Stephen Shames photographed Huey Newton at home, bare-chested and holding the album cover for Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. Behind him, a leafy tropical plant spreads its branches. A Black Panther newsletter lies folded on the table. In the background, a white length of chain emerges upward from behind his head, suspending something that we cannot see, but the eye registers it a ghostly echo of the lynching rope. For all his well-muscled virility, Newton appears here as a vulnerable figure stranded between cultures.

Willis includes just one video work in the show, but it's a doozy. The Teenth of June, Part 1 (2006), by black Californian artist Lauren Woods, is an extraordinary document of American racial anxiety, marking a moment not to be found in the history books. Reformatting seven minutes from the conclusion of the Miss Texas pageant of 2006 - the first year a black woman won the crown - she has added a horror movie soundtrack. We watch the elimination of the final contestants until the moment of truth, when the final white and black contestants stand hand in hand all a-twitter, waiting for the axe to fall.

When the black girl wins, however, all hell breaks loose. Woods slows down the footage here to scan the horror and incredulity on the white contestant's face as she turns to flee. The winner's face, however, flares in a momentary convulsion of triumph. This has been a long time coming. Before the obligatory tears of dainty gratitude and displays of simulated self-effacement, you can't help but love her for sinking her teeth into the moment.

Posing Beauty in African-American Culture continues at the Art Gallery of Hamilton until May 9, then travels to Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Mass., the Newark Museum in New Jersey and USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles. Deborah Willis will speaking about the show at the Art Gallery of Hamilton at 7 tonight.