"KEEP IT REAL"

Street Photography, Public Visibility, and Afro-Modernity

The observer thought he was seeing. Changed into the observed, he enters into an "astonishment" which is not accompanied by any representation. The experience of the gaze is a surprise without an object. The gaze of the other excludes the possession of an image. It deprives of sight, it blinds.

—Michel de Certeau, "The Gaze: Nicholas of Cusa" (1987)

We [black people] don't have no fucking wealth.... I'm not talking about rich, I'm talking about wealth. I'm talking about the white families that own all the Similac and own the color blue.... Wealth will set us fucking free. Wealth is empowering. It can uplift communities from poverty.... It's not all white people's fault that black and brown people don't have any fucking wealth. Maybe if we didn't spend all our money on rims we might have some to invest. Black people, we love rims.

—Chris Rock, Never Scared (2004)

I first saw the street photographers in Atlanta in 1996, during the African American spring break event known as Freaknic. They had set up makeshift photography studios along the main site of the annual Sweet Auburn Festival. They lined their booths with brilliantly painted backdrops against which they invited passersby to take Polaroids. Three years later I encountered the photographers again, but in New Orleans. They had built and were operating (until the police arrived) temporary photography studios in a vacant parking lot near a route where a black Mardi Gras krewe filled an overcast day with a trail of music and color. Young men and women in particular enthusiastically posed before the photographers' lenses and created another space of performance at the parade. In contrast to the comparatively modest surroundings in both locations, the backdrops, which floated like clothes hung across the horizon line of the urban landscape, portrayed either landscapes of leisure or high-end consumer products. In the street-side studios, grand entryways of majestic mansions gleamed (fig. 1.1), sports cars sparkled against shimmering lakes and on tropical beaches (fig. 1.2), the lights of Times Square electrified the night sky (fig. 1.3), and monumental dollar bills, diamond rings (fig. 1.4), and silver watches "bling blinged"—to use a term that appeared on one backdrop portraying a single glimmering timepiece (fig. 1.5). Also on that day in New Orleans, the image of local rapper Juvenile of the Cash Money Millionaires, a group emblematic of a flashy black urban culture, stared from one of the backdrops, his visage appearing among the other symbols of wealth.

Since the mid-1980s, street photographers, who are with rare exception men, have unfurled their backdrops across black urban communities in the United States. Not confined to any single geographic location, street photographers erect their portable studios at festivals, music concerts, strip malls, sporting arenas, parties, parking lots, storefronts, and other venues throughout the country. They are particularly popular in black metropolitan areas on the East and West Coasts and in the South, but street photographers also operate in Jamaica. It is difficult to overstate the ubiquity of street photography in contemporary African American urban communities or to overestimate the large number of street photographs created yearly. One photographer from Atlanta, aided by three assistants, boasted of netting over $25,000 in a single night at a concert by creating an estimated three thousand photographs. Not surprisingly, the potential profits to be earned through street photography have inspired the genre's growth.

This chapter examines the history, aesthetics, and economics of street photography, as well as the closely related genre of club photography. It demonstrates how black urban populations use these contemporary picturing practices to present, indeed to emblazon, their images of personhood, prestige, and pictorial immortality. The chapter explores a broader history of the painted backdrop highlighting the street photograph's distinguishing characteristics. Street photography is characterized by the public process of posing before dazzling hand-painted backdrops. The resulting images emphasize the visual registers of painting and photography, of fantasy and the real. Street photography studios are sites where conceptions of Afro-modernity are projected and developed. Michael Hanchard uses the term "Afro-Modernity" to characterize "a particular understanding of modernity and modern subjectivity among people of African descent." He explains: "At its broadest parameters, it consists of the selective incorporation of technologies, discourses, and institutions of the modern West within the cultural and political practices of African-derived peoples to create a form of relatively autonomous modernity distinct from its counterparts of Western Europe and North America." Afro-modernity entails, too, the negotiation and appropriation of concepts of time by African diasporic individuals and groups. Street photographs offer sites where contemporary Afro-modern subjectivities are formed through the selective use of photography and visual technologies. The practice of street photography, in particular, reveals how black urban communities, while very aware of what constitutes social and economic status in modern society, participate in what I term a visual economy of light, in which they generate and circulate distinctive approaches to photography, public visibility, the performative moment, memorialization, the spectacle of consumer culture, the real, and death. The backdrops spotlight, for one, an aesthetics of prestige in black youth culture: how certain formal, optical characteristics of luxury goods, as they are represented, convey value. Specifically, light, as it emanates from commodities or as it shines from the mirrors fastened on some backdrops, is intrinsic to the visual production of wealth in the photographs. But the shiny world of commodities is not simply a visual substitute for the material things pictured in the street photographs. The photographs, what and how they picture, are precisely about and representative of the reconstitution of "the real" and "the artificial." Among the work considered in this chapter is that of the late contemporary artist Charles H. Nelson, who set up his own version of a street photography studio in 1999 in public and gallery spaces from Atlanta to Harlem, through which he examined the formal, social, and cultural aspects of this visual economy (fig. 1.6).

Street photographs also reveal particular approaches to time—to the past and future—through their form and subject matter. This chapter outlines, for one, how the preference for the Polaroid in street...