Facing history.

Any event, no matter how intimately or historically crucial, becomes an event only through its ability to be conveyed, recorded and remembered.(1) This simple truism is further complicated the more such events become difficult or traumatic. Even when witnesses convey their experiences, the evidence they provide depends on a contemporary listener to translate their testimony, especially if much time has passed. Issuing from two distinct perspectives that bear out these relations to events, two recent exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum examined the difficulties of witnessing and conveying the ineffable pain and occasional dignity of life for African Americans in the period before, during and just after the abolition of legalized slavery in the United States in 1863.

"Hidden Witness: African Americans in Early Photography," an exhibition of 68 prints, was selected from both the Getty's photography collection and from a remarkable collection of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes amassed by Jackie Napolean Wilson of Detroit, whose own family history closely resembles the story told by the photographs. Wilson's grandfather was born a slave on a plantation in Spartanburg, South Carolina between 1853 and 1855; the date remains imprecise because, like so many other crucial rituals that mark human existence, birth dates of slaves were not recorded. Recent interest in the Wilson collection apparently prompted Weston Naef, the Getty's photography curator, to investigate the museum's archive of some 1500 prints. The findings: only 30 photographs contain traces of African American life during and immediately after the antebellum period. The Getty's holdings are, of course, prominently featured in the exhibition.

To his credit, Naef invited Carrie Mae Weems to design an installation that made direct reference to the early photographic collection. Her brilliant response was housed in the Getty's "interactive gallery." Another institutional inspiration took the form of the museum's education department's introduction of "visitor response books" within Weems's installation, composed of individual, stiff white pages in a notebook, feigning the style of family photo albums. Most pages, which were delineated in an oval shape, were inscribed with the text, "Does one image evoke a particular memory for you?" and on the back, "Add your thoughts, memories, and histories to our album." Other pages instructed visitors to: "Share a story about your family in our album" and asked "What are your reactions to the photographs in "Hidden Witness?" As seemingly innocuous insertions within the exhibition, these books turned out to be sites of emotional testimonies, family remembrances, insights and outpourings that merit their own study.

The existence, coherency and legacy of the phenomenon of the family album is often taken for granted. But when a people's family and cultural history is marked by violation, disruption and erasure, no such recorded lineage can be assumed, underscoring the poignancy of simulating some notion of the family album in the context of these two exhibitions. The first set of photographs presented in "Hidden Witness" bears out this familial tear within the legacy of African American history. Gracing the entrance wall are three emotionally charged daguerreotypes from the 1840s and 1850s, depicting what the Getty labels "Madonnas," otherwise known as the institution of the "mammy." The mammy was a woman entrusted with the care of her "master's" most precious commodities, his children. Mammies were not permitted a legal, biological family of their own because their attention would have been divided by their doubled maternal duties. In addition, mammies' natural "livestock," borne from relations with whom they considered their legal husbands or sometimes as the result of being raped by their owners, carried a good price on the slave owners' commodities market. Their children were as a rule wrenched from them and sold off like cattle. The tenderness given by these women to their owners' children was a complex and despairing blend of love. These portraits initially functioned to honor the children pictured, and thus to bolster their fathers' status and the patriarchy of slavery. The mammies were merely props. Their stories are silenced within the fetishized, locket-like daguerreotypes. It is impossible to look at these portraits today without wondering what psychic strategies the women created to survive the violence of their institutionalized lives and to summon the strength to maintain some form of autonomy from the owners' control.

These "mammy and child" double portraits are perhaps the most complex and disturbing of all those in the exhibition, partially because the women are pictured in the presence of the material evidence of their bondage. Yet the child and the woman/slave are enveloped in a photographic fiction of domestic bliss worlds apart from the male arena of commerce and aggression not pictured in the exhibition. Few of the other portraits and group scenes belie the tension of this double lie. Most of them importantly fulfill the role of portraiture as garnering respect around its subject during a time when dignity was a hard-won state of affairs. Such is the case in the handsome portrait of the two dapper Freedmen of Color taken by William A. Pratt, c. 1850. In Giving Attribute, maker unknown, c. 1855, the doubled historical ground of past enslavement with newly-found selfhood is rendered through ironic allegory. The young man pictured wears a visibly oversized outfit and holds a dead skunk. According to Wilson, this portrait of self-naming, of reborn attribution, is a form of provocation and affirmation directed at the man's former owner.

Much of what the portraits show in "Hidden Witness" can only hint at the violence beneath their surfaces. They are testimonies of personhood and historical testimony within the genre of traditional portraiture. As a photographic collection, they attest to a tortured and sometimes achieved struggle for human decency, normalcy, even wealth.

Weems's installation disrupts the serene surface of honorific portraiture in order to reveal the multiple paradoxes between the seen and the obscene. As with her methodology in general, she confronts stereotypes without dehumanizing the people pictured. In reference to the Wilson collection, Weems has said that "we see documentary images that provide us with a kind of truth. However, later photographers discovered that photographs could be what you made them, that they could lie, exaggerate and sometimes get closer to the truth."(2) The strategy in her installation is fueled by her desire to "implode Weston's [the curator's] show."(3) Like many contemporary photographers who work between the ledgers of art and documentary, Weems is not attempting to discount documentary but to infuse it with renewed meaning. She went about this reworking in her installation through predictable yet surprisingly powerful means.

The visitor moved from the large, hushed and darkened space of "Hidden Witness" into the small, brightly lit gallery where Weems's installation was located. The condensed space was filled with photographic reproductions - enlarged, toned in red and placed in black circular frames - of African Americans from slavery into the twentieth century. Some of these were direct references to "Hidden Witness." For example, Weems reproduced Thomas Martin Easterly's portrait, Southern Man with His Daughters and Their Mammy (1848), tinged it red and printed text over the bodies of the sitters that reads: "Your resistance was found in the food you placed on the master's table - ha." This direct form of address lifts the images out of the neutralized approach to history endemic to the early photographs. Weems's direct address is unrelenting. It is printed above the head of an older female slave, "You became a scientific profile"; over a woman's nude breast, "a negroid type, an anthropological debate"; and over a frontal portrait of another woman, "and a photographic subject." The brutality and honesty of this form of address is enveloped by the installation's opening and closing images. Weems reproduced the likeness of a young, regal tribal African woman and printed both images in blue. The first face turns toward the exhibition and reads: "From here I saw what happened." The closing image turns back toward its double and reads, "And I cried." Weems's use of the first person "I" in order to address a "you" insinuates itself into complex relations that are embedded in oppression; it is also a call for empathy. It is a "you" that acknowledges its subject's pain, humiliation, bitterness and resistance. It is not an accusatory "you" that blames, but one that calls on the subject to account, to testify. The "you" excludes the falseness of a universalized "us" and relays its address to a specific African American audience. However, the "them/us" separation of insiders and outsiders is reintroduced into the dialogue as the necessary witnesses.

The naming Weems engenders in this installation also brings into relief the nomenclature of photography as an act of stigmatizing, especially when the pictured remain nameless. She dramatizes this point in two horrific photographs: a close-up of a man's back after a brutal beating and a view of a woman sprawled out naked touching her genitals. These two interrelated extremes of a tormentor's control over the other's subjugated body beg the familiar yet crucial question of how to represent victimization without revictimizing the victim. Many visitors acknowledged this dilemma and responded in the photo album books: "Your installation was gut-wrenching, unlike "'Hidden Witness.'" I couldn't step back from these images. They are so visceral. And yet, the room seems like a safe haven." Another person wrote, "Your pictures made me cry. I am afraid for my Black daughter. Thank you for catching and soothing the pain in my heart through your photographs."

It is possible that Weems's installation would not have been as powerful without the opportunity to see the compelling range of portraits that preceded it. The provocation of her poetry and her explicit intervention within the neutral voice of documentary objectivity became all the more effective because these approaches so dramatically shifted the narrative form in which the historical collection was presented. The after effects of viewing "Hidden Witness" would not have been as powerful without Weems's resonant shocks. An eloquent stream of words left by one of the exhibition viewers in the response books seems to sum up the exhibition: "A rumbling - spiritual rumbling, which presses and tears into the soul, eyes that don't disengage. Heart, fear, pity, blood, dirt, cruelty, fat, sexual warmth, big dicks, hate, goodness, grace, amazed, uplifted trajectory of head, strength rooted in the bowels. God is here found."(4)

NOTES

1. Quoted from the Getty Calendar announcing the exhibitions.

2. Ibid.

3. Quoted from a review in the Los Angeles Calendar by Suzanne Muchnic, February 26, 1995.

4. I wish to extend gratitude to the students in my spring semester 1995 "Critical History of Photography" class at the University of Southern California for seeing this exhibition with fresh eyes.

ANDREA LISS, a Los Angeles historian and critic of contemporary art, teaches at the University of Southern California.