May 7, 2018 Issue

I relish photography writing. This week’s issue contains a beauty by Zadie Smith. Titled “Through the Portal,” it considers Deana Lawson’s transfixing portraits of “diaspora gods.” Smith writes,

Deana Lawson’s work is prelapsarian—it comes before the Fall. Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory, in which diaspora gods can be found wherever you look: Brownsville, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Addis Ababa. Typically, she photographs her subjects semi-nude or naked, and in cramped domestic spaces, yet they rarely look either vulnerable or confined. (“When I’m going out to make work,” Lawson has said, “usually I’m choosing people that come from a lower- or working-class situation. Like, I’m choosing people around the neighborhood.”) Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.

Deana Lawson, "Baby Sleep" (2009)

Smith refers to a number of Lawson’s photos, including  “Sharon” (2007), “Otisha” (2013), “Living Room” (2015), “Kingdom Come” (2014), “Mama Goma” (2014), “Ashanti” (2011), “Nicole” (2016), “Wanda and Daughters” (2009), “Portal” (2017), “Cowboys” (2014), “Signs” (2016), “The Garden” (2015), and “Oath” (2013). Of  “Living Room,” she writes,

In “Living Room” (2015), taken in Brownsville, Brooklyn, all the scars are visible: the taped-up curtain, the boxes and laundry, the piled-up DVDs, that damn metal radiator. At its center pose a queen and her consort. He’s on a chair, topless, while she stands unclothed behind him. They are physically beautiful—he in his early twenties, she perhaps a little older—and seem to have about them that potent mix of mutual ownership and dependence, mutual dominance and submission, that has existed between queens and their male kin from time immemorial. But this is only speculation. The couple keep their counsel. Despite being on display, like objects, and partially exposed—like their ancestors on the auction block—they maintain a fierce privacy, bordered on all sides. They are exposed but well defended: salon-fresh hair, with the edges perfect; a flash of gold in her ear; his best bluejeans; her nails on point. Self-mastery in the midst of chaos. And the way they look at you! A gaze so intense that it’s the viewer who ends up feeling naked.

Deana Lawson, "Living Room" (2015)

My favourite passage in “Through the Portal” interprets Lawson’s use of curtains:

Paragraphs could be written on Lawson’s curtains alone: cheap curtains, net curtains, curtains taped up—or else hanging from shower rings—curtains torn, faded, thin, permeable. Curtains, like doors, are an attempt to mark off space from the outside world: they create a home for the family, a sanctuary for a people, or they may simply describe the borders of a private realm. In these photographs, though, borders are fragile, penetrable, thin as gauze. And yet everywhere there is impregnable defiance—and aspiration. There is “kinship in free fall.”

“Through the Portal” expands my appreciation of Deana Lawson’s extraordinary photos. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: “Through the Portal” is the second New Yorker piece on Deana Lawson’s photography. The first is Doreen St. Félix’s “Deana Lawson’s Hyper-Staged Portraits of Black Love” (“Photo Booth,” newyorker.com, March 12, 2018), a review of Lawson’s recent exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins, in New York City. It, too, is a superb piece of descriptive analysis. Here, for example, is St. Félix’s description of Lawson’s great “Seagulls in Kitchen” (2017):

Looking around her new show, I kept returning to “Seagulls in Kitchen.” During her travels last year, Lawson encountered a man and a woman in Charleston, who were “basically strangers,” the gallerist at Sikkema Jenkins told me. They agreed to have Lawson shoot them as lovers. The title refers to the wall decoration, the kind of sweet ornament that, were the tableau real, would almost certainly be accompanied by a story. The couple’s prom pose, the man plaiting his hands over her soft torso. Tattoos on oiled brown skin are reminders of prior lives; food on the shelf of the present one. Flickers of the couple’s personality are awakened and then drowned out by the eye that posed these subjects just so. 

That last sentence is inspired!