Black Is Beautiful

All children have a hunger to see themselves in the world, and as a black child of the mid-20th century, I was starved for positive images of African Americans. It wasn’t enough to see them in the flesh--that occurred daily in my largely segregated neighborhood. I wanted to see them captured in printed or moving pictures, believing these images bestowed a certain validity and legitimacy to their existence.

When it came to black women, what little imagery I saw in the ‘50s and ‘60s was confusing. In movies, there was Hattie McDaniel, who appeared in myriad Mammy-to-maid guises in films of the ‘30s and ‘40s. African Americans’ relationship to McDaniel was complex. She was both harshly reviled (did white people think we were all like that?) and grudgingly respected (after all, McDaniel did get paid).

As for print media, black-owned magazines--particularly those published before the 1970s--presented equally iconic and simplistic photographs of the saintly mothers of the civil-rights movement or of saucily clad centerfolds. All of which could leave a black girl, growing into womanhood bracketed by the civil rights and women’s movements, uncertain of just who and how to be, especially in relationship to her own body.

How much easier it would have been for me--and perhaps other young women of my generation--to have had photo historian Deborah Willis’ and photographer-writer Carla Williams’ “The Black Female Body: A Photographic History” as a cultural and visual Rosetta stone. For in their exhaustive culling and pairing of historical and contemporary photos with insightful commentary, Willis and Williams contend that “the history of [the black female] image is deeply rooted in representations of our mostly unclothed bodies.” It is an idea that is revelatory yet implicitly understood by every black woman who cringes at the gyrations of Lil’ Kim or Tweet on video or has weighed in on the debate surrounding the sexual mores of Leticia Musgrove, the character portrayed by Halle Berry in “Monster’s Ball.” Clothed or unclothed, Mammy or Lil’ Kim, the damage that negative representation does to the psyche of black women and those who view the images is immense and subject to heated debate even today.

Fully conscious of the pitfalls of once again “objectifying black women by re-representing exploitive and derogatory images” from the past, the authors include the images with an overarching aim: to reveal how three aesthetic categories--the naked “National Geographic” or “Jezebel,” the neutered black female or “mammy,” and the noble savage--intersect and are intertwined throughout our cultural history.

To achieve their objective, the authors have included in Part 1, “Colonial Conquest,” images as early as the 1840s taken by photographers who were primarily European and whose work reflected not only the burgeoning popularity of the daguerreotype to capture ethnographical and anthropological “specimens” but also the use of the medium as a chronicler of popular culture.

Most notable among these early images are the infamous 19th century “Venus Hottentot,” which caused a sensation in Europe, and several mid-century representations of nude African women that, while clinical in their composition, also forced the sitters to strip to the waist or pose completely nude for the camera’s examination. These yield to more salacious images, including a group portrait of women working in a brothel, a nude photograph of a disturbingly young girl taken by the American painter Thomas Eakins and a pornographic 1850s nude study that is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Were these women exploited? Certainly, contend the authors. Even when they were paid a pittance for their cooperation, they had no control over their image. Willis and Williams make this perfectly clear in assembling text and images that provide not only a visual but social context to those who produced, and therefore retained power over, the photographs and those who were subjected to the process.

The second part of the book, “The Cultural Body,” considers how representation of black women evolved from being a photographer’s object to the women exerting newly found power over how they would be portrayed. An early example is the American abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who kept careful control of her official mid-19th century photograph at the same time as the black-woman-as-object photos were being produced by Europeans.

The authors also include early 20th century entertainer Josephine Baker and writer Zora Neale Hurston, both of whom understood the power of their image to shape perceptions of themselves and their work. As Hurston wrote to photographer Carl Van Vechten about her photo session: “I love myself when I am laughing. And then again when I am looking mean and impressive.”

Other photographs that are part of this evolution include a bracing collection of black women at work, including arguably the most famous, Gordon Parks’ “Washington, D.C., Government Charwoman (Ella Watson).” Holding a mop and broom, Watson stands squarely facing the camera, wearing a simple polka-dotted housedress, the pattern echoed in the Stars and Stripes behind her.

Black women’s relationship to, and control over, their representation was also part of another cycle of photography that forms the third part of the book. “The Body Beautiful” incorporates majestic, compelling pictures of the “New Negro” combining “black photographers’ input and the sitter’s self-image to form critical responses to the negative image of blacks some 60 years after the abolition of slavery.” Emerging from the works of historically significant photographers such as James VanDerZee, Prentice H. Polk and James Latimer Allen as well as contemporary artists Chester Higgins, Fern Logan, Cynthia Wiggins, Clarissa Sligh, the late Roland Charles of Los Angeles and the authors themselves, are images that, while sometimes challenging, offer a self-defined and controlled black beauty that stands in stark contrast to the passive and slave-like images of earlier times.

All of this is not to imply that white photographers were not without sensitivity in portraying black women, or that black photographers or sitters were incapable of debasing their art or themselves. “The Black Female Body” gives ample examples of both. Yet the overwhelming feeling one gets while viewing the haunting images and reading the thoughtful text of this handsome keepsake is how agency over one’s representation can influence self-image and self-esteem in the broader psychological and sociological realms, not just when one is in front of the camera. Which is a message women of all generations and colors can benefit from equally.

Lil’ Kims of the world, take note.