March 22, 2021 Issue

I like this sentence: “It’s demeaning, to be served this ham, but no amount of recoiling changes the fact that ‘Ginny & Georgia’ is mirroring a mode of cavalier speech on social media that compresses the ineffability of identity into a checklist of outwardly visible bona fides: what one eats, where one was raised, how well one twerks.” It’s from Doreen St. Felix’s capsule review of “Ginny & Georgia,” in this week’s “Goings On About Town.” That last phrase – “how well one twerks” – makes me smile. I have no intention of watching “Ginny & Georgia.” But I love St. Felix’s writing. Three of her pieces made my “Best of 2018: newyorker.com”: “Deana Lawson’s Hyper-Staged Portraits of Black Love,” March 12, 2018 (“Flickers of the couple’s personality are awakened and then drowned out by the eye that posed these subjects just so”); “The Eerie Anonymity of a Show of African-American Portraiture at the Met,” July 19, 2018 (“The images are corralled into common memory, a process that risks degrading the subjects’ vital and specific personhood”); and “The Photographer Who Captured How Whiteness Works in the American South,” December 1, 2018 (“Looking at the stiffened old black couple standing on opposite ends of their doorway, emanating all the vitality of a Victorian corpse portrait, I wonder what alchemical effect Fox Solomon has on her black subjects in their black spaces. It’s one that seems to be built not on trust but on more candid, and more revealing, forces: secrecy and distance. The saxophonist clutches his instrument and glares, judgy, wary. Fox Solomon’s scenes telegraph the well-earned feelings of prejudice that blacks had toward photography and its threatening ability to reduce them to totems”).