Colony Little, Culture Shock Art

“In front of the lens I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

The young woman pictured in this photograph has stayed with me for years, waiting.

She asked a question to which the answer begat more…

Through that provocation my search for answers led me to women who likely shared a similar inquiry, but deep in the abyss of an archive never intended to see or acknowledge us, there remains a void.

And in the absence of that historical annotation, they created their own citations.

This piece, written for Burnaway, is about that intervention.

I hope that there will come a time when I will have the opportunity and pleasure of meeting Simone Leigh to expressly discuss this photograph. I titled this post an epilogue, but there is much more to say about the image and the work its subject inspires. 

“But in the meantime, in the space of the interval, between too late and too early, between the no longer and the not yet, our lives are coeval with the girl’s in the as-yet-incomplete project of freedom.” Saidiyah Hartman, Venus in Two Acts

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Notes:

• Little, Colony. “The Beauty Remains: Decoding ‘The Wilde Woman of Aiken’”. Curationist, May 2022.
• Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard, p.13.
• Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,”  Small Axe 12, no. 2: pp. 1–14.