Alphabet People

I was admittedly nervous before my talk at ICP a few weeks ago; public speaking is not my milieu. I get so anxious and that reduces me in ways I don’t much enjoy and won’t acknowledge here. However, the lead up to the conversation was lovely. The Tuesday before, Z and I drove up to Lafayette College to show the film and talk with a few students. D made that experience an encouraging one and guided the question & answer portion with great care and consideration, as is his way. The drive up was stunning, peak autumn foliage and excellent conversation. I finally got to listen to the new Blood Orange record in full and learned about a golden-throated musician named Raveena who Z attended NYU alongside and whose last album was very sensual and well arranged. Z moved to Chicago this summer and it has felt, at times, like not only losing a limb but knowing that your limb is out there, living and perhaps even thriving, in Chicago of all places.

I’ve only watched our film a half time. During the premiere last year, nearly a year ago today, I sat in the audience of DOC NYC, surrounded by friends… and rattled out of my mind. I was so anxious throughout the first few minutes until I noticed my baby sister, who was sat beside me, crying her eyes out. I understood her tears to be, at least in part, about her fractured relationship with my mother, and so I became consumed with those complex thoughts and feelings and disassociated from the experience. Since then, I haven’t really been able to watch it or to stomach the sound of my voice. But it’s fine. I am me, so I get the gist.

At ICP, when the film concluded I walked out, looking absolutely dynamic, as I am wont to do. It was fabulous. Casey Gerald was the perfect interlocutor: pure, unbridled brilliance. I knew he would make me laugh and he did. I knew that some question he’d pose would act as a trip wire and bring me nearly to tears and it did. We had a sold-out crowd and wonderful questions. What Casey wanted, seemingly more than anything else, was for me to feel loved, valued, and important and I did, many times over.

Riding on the 1 train with J, him in his long, walnut brown houndstooth top coat, the collar popped so high it covered a part of his face and made him appear as if he were on his way to solve a mystery, and me with my 20-hour-old black wool coat, the coat of my dreams, cinched so elegantly under the breast that I was nearly mobbed by aging white women eager to tell me how beautiful I looked. And I felt it, every bit as beautiful as I was, as we were. Elegant, chic, casual, sophisticated, mysterious, and that was all I wanted to feel on this balmy New York night, making my way from Bedstuy to Lincoln Center to see Peter Hujar’s Day. I’d been waiting all year for the release and all month with my tickets. A movie, based on a slim book about one of the greatest photographers who ever lived and the minutiae and brilliance of a single, random day in his glimmering life. J, too, was excited, having no real knowledge about Hujar or his essential photographs, but being a fan of Ira Sachs, the film’s director. It was one of those New York nights that people write about, that maybe one day, we would write about. Everything tilted just slightly toward nostalgia, a moment in our lives fixated on becoming a memory.

J told me that one of his friends, someone I know and adore through virtual distance but have never met, was recently diagnosed with Thyroid cancer and J was attempting to write about it. I winced. Two weeks prior, after getting an ultrasound for a lump that had been growing in my neck over the past couple of years, my doctor urged me to get a biopsy because it might be cancer. “I don’t want to scare you,” she offered, “but you should take this seriously.” I nodded in newly uninsured but offered no expression.

“Why aren’t you reacting?” she asked.

“Because I don’t really…. Care?” I responded with a confused uncertainty. Silently she looked at me, obviously perplexed.

“I don’t think I would do chemo,” I offered through the silence.

“Well, thyroid cancer isn’t really treated with chemo. Most doctors don’t even consider thyroid cancer an actual cancer because of how easy it is to treat and because it doesn’t spread quickly. It’s extremely rare to die from it.”

I paused and retorted, “I would get the lazy bitch of cancers.”

My doctor, a tame, elegant, enthusiastic white woman that I truly adore, laughed the kind of unvarnished laughter reserved for OOO boozy weekends. In fact, mid-laugh she caught herself and furrowed her brows in an attempt to reel the laugh back in, but it was unsuccessful.

J, legs crossed elegantly beneath his topcoat, spoke tenderly about his friend B and his family, the concern that they felt for B’s recovery, B’s own worry that he wouldn’t be able to photograph the same after his treatment, that somehow he would be losing something, destabilized. I held my own possible cancer diagnosis in my mouth until J finished speaking. I hadn’t told anyone yet and I didn’t want to pile on to J’s obvious sadness about B. Eventually I let it slip, before or after the film I can’t recall. When the words left me, they rearranged J’s posture; he wiped his eyes as if he’d both been knocked over by the information and as if he’d made some kind of embarrassing faux pas. We didn’t talk about it much more after that.

I thought about S from the stage, which surprised me. His birthday was a few days ago and though I’ve been firm about placing boundaries of impenetrable silence between us, I missed him. Given the level of vulnerability the night required, how much of my heartmeat was exposed in that slim library inside the International Center of Photography, it made sense. A tiny bit of him seeped through, like a spirit, his matter reduced to extreme thinness as Emerson would say. I couldn’t see who was in the crowd, but I could hear certain voices, E’s bass-filled laugh trilling through the silence, the sharp affect of my lovely sister F, mmm’ng musically to any sentence that landed for her. But the faces were hidden in the shadows necessary to place a spotlight.

I was scared that S would trample this special moment, then heartbroken that he didn’t.

The film was a staggering artwork, what Sachs described during the talk back that followed as an “art film” and a “free film.” Ben Whishaw was a minor miracle in his transformation into Hujar. I can’t quite articulate how well he embodied his pain.

I’ve always felt directly connected to Hujar. He was a generation before me and was a student of my hero, Richard Avedon. Hujar was a bad businessman. Like me, he struggled with money. Like me, he was often felled by the rejection he faced and his perceived neglect by the art world. Like me, Hujar juggled his personal work, mainly portraits of friends, lovers, and community members, with editorial work and commissions. Whishaw played the roiling discontent and staggering, continuous heartbreak perfectly. Rebecca Hall was flawless as well, controlled and quietly emotive in her turn as Linda Rosenkrantz. The way she simmered with worry for Hujar and his tendency to neglect his health felt honest in a way so few actors get right.

When Sach’s previous film Passages came out I was leveled by it. I saw the film five times in five different states. Each time I watched it I was taken by a different actor and the power of their performance, but I was always brought back to Franz Rogowski, a narcissist and a hell raiser of epic proportions. I reached out to Sachs when the film came out, half from the impulse to offer my praise, as if he needed it, half in an attempt to connect with him because I thought that he had something to offer me as an aspiring director and all around artist. Seeing him on the stage that night, hearing about his early days in New York in the 1980’s, all of his favorite thinkers and artists dying of AIDS, I was again moved by his brilliance. But I was moved by something else too.

I was moved to irritation that somewhere in me was still that young artist eager to be seen by someone older and more successful, someone who seemed to have it figured out. The ease with which this white man spoke about being able to get this low budget film made speaks directly to his having accomplished something in his 40+ years in New York, but what did I think he could offer me? What advice could I really find there? As people fought to ask him questions about his strange choices in the film, like offering the audience reminders throughout that we were, in fact, watching a movie, by showing lighting stands, boom mic poles, and clapboards on occasion, I thought about the ever present impulse to be seen by someone who we believe has some grand wisdom for us, some answer, some key, when the reality of this life, of maintaining a career as an artist, is to focus on YOUR WORK and to focus on building relationships laterally instead of vertically. Why romanticize being seen by Ira Sachs or someone like him, when less than 24 hours ago we showed a film, made by someone I love more than anything, who saw me, and saw me so deeply that he wanted the world to see what he saw. What could the vertical seeing offer me that sitting in that library, surrounded by friends and lovers of my work (and a few new comers to it!) could not?

When people have asked how the talk went, I often return to the feeling most available to me throughout and since, the feeling of both shock and reminder. I was shocked by how much genius was in that room. Truly. Yes, there were a couple of literal MacArthur geniuses and Guggenheim girls in the house, which was deeply affirming, but the untapped, under-resourced genius knocked me out as well. My sister F in particular really floored me. She had a score to settle it seemed, the score of being my mirror, of lobbing grenades of love and brilliance from the audience and exploding my brain with challenging affirmations. And this went long into the night, well after the talk concluded.

Her question, both to me and the institutions (including the very institution that we were sitting in) was:

“What’s taking y’all so fucking long to do a exhibition on this artist’s work? What’s taking so long to send the book deal? Because it’s evident that the time is nigh. One of the most brilliant. So the lack of institutional support for artists that are living today and are so incredible, it’s insulting, the shit that money goes toward. But my question for you is what would you do with that opportunity, would you take it? How would you lean into it, since we’re manifesting things?”

My answer was honest: I think I would eat these opportunities up, but am I following through enough? Am I proposing enough exhibitions, sending out book manuscripts, etc? There’s a yes/and to this answer that could fill a whole book. But the question lit a fire in me.

Later that night, F dropped another nugget in response to me saying that I hated answering questions on the spot because I rarely feel like I’m articulating myself adequately. “Don’t be afraid to be in first draft in public. You can always revise but there’s something very generous and inspiring about watching a person work through something unperfected in real time.” I was stunned by this, genuinely. I’ve read variations on this over the past year. Watching Anne Carson’s Louisiana Channel conversation with Linn Ullmann, this resistance to performing perfectly in public was touched on briefly and in a few different ways. And a few days ago, while reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Nelson recounts watching a seminar with Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss (where Krauss drags the living shit out of Gallop for, in her estimation, foregoing her genius in exchange for motherhood). Nelson praised Gallop because she, “…was onto something and letting us in on it before she fully understood it. She was hanging her shit out to dry: a start.”

For me, as I think at some point in the evening I explained, my insecurities and self-doubt power so much of my apprehensions, not least of all for public speaking. I often feel like my ideas are basic and underdeveloped. Sometimes they are, but the work of this life, I am learning and hopefully accepting, is that it is okay to try, consider something, and change course–for my ideas to start off as elementary and eventually progress toward something more bold and considered.

The last of F’s nuggets (clearly she was the star of that evening for me) was her criticism of these institutions as absolutely late. “These people, these institutions have no idea what’s hot. They are not at the parties, they are not doing the studio visits, they have no clue what is actually happening in the streets, with artists with no ties to academia. They are tired and late!” She said so much more on this, and I’m paraphrasing a bit, but this was the nectar I drained from her brilliance and passion.

I sat with this for days after. So much of it boils down to the tried and true do your work. Yes, we must focus on our work and build community rooted in collective care and sincerity. And this reminder of what I already know left me a bit shocked that I’d forgotten it or lost touch with its urgency. Lessons like this need to dangle at one’s neck like a pendant or be tattooed across one’s flesh like a mantra, especially for artists.

After the film, J and I sat across from the Paul Milstein Pool and Terrace across from Lincoln Center and talked passionately about our experiences of the film. I was nearly mobbed by the blue haired, Upper West Siders praising my chic diva coat and business bob, so I was especially winded. J expressed a sense of astonishment about the kinds of people who orbited Hujar’s life, the glamour of it. The morning visit from an editor at Elle Magazine, phone calls with Susan Sontag and Fran Leobowitz, a shoot for the New York Times with Allen Ginsburg, dinner with Vince Aletti.

J mentioned that when he was younger, because he moved so many times, he struggled to maintain close friendships and he never imagined that he would be friends with shiny people, successful artists, writers, and thinkers, as has become his life. “I never thought that I would have a community like this. I never thought that I would get the chance because I always felt so disconnected. That’s why when I was in that room (ICP) last night, I was like how the fuck did I get here?”

I was warmed by this, and I too felt stupefied by the brilliance that was in that room.

And that’s where my head has been, how I’ve processed this remarkable moment in my career. We get so caught up in romanticizing the big names of the past, the stars of the art world and the literary world, that we look past the brilliance of the artists, designers, musicians, and thinkers living and fighting alongside us right now. I am guilty of this.

A simple day in the life of one of my photography heroes was glamorous and inspiring, in the same way that seeing pictures or hearing stories about the friendships between James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Nina Simone, Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Toni Morrison is glamorous and inspiring. We fantasize about these great minds, what their conversations must have entailed and how chic they all were, but they were exactly like us; they just had to get there. They were artists struggling to stay fed, inspired, and in many cases alive in the face of White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy, just like us. This isn’t new information but the beauty of that night and several nights that followed was a much needed reminder.

Thank you to everyone who filled that room with their questions, presence, and love. Here is a link to the conversation in case you missed it.

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Some language I’m loving

“Love is not just the right measure in a partnership; love is a way of encountering the world. If you encounter the world with respect and love, you add to it.” J Wortham, explaining a tarot book’s description of the Nine of Cups.

“Community is fool’s gold,” writes theorist Todd McGowan. “We invest ourselves in community to escape the problem of alienation, but this problem returns with a vengeance when we experience our failure to belong to the community.” Raksha Vasudevan

“…there’s an ongoing custody battle over cultural capital and to assert ourselves as sovereign artists, we’re going to feel like orphans for a while. We’re going to have to abandon institutions, academia, industry, labels, brands, and see, if left with only ourselves, if we still love to make the things we’ve grown accustomed to making for the love of money or accolades or praise or because that’s just what you do when they ask, in their euphemistic and territorial terms. As someone who knows I will still love it, my question to myself becomes, what will I do to keep that love true, uncompromised, irreducible to acquisition, even as I am acquired and distributed like an asset of my enemies’?” Harmony Holiday

“By taking a photo, I remained a writer, even if I couldn’t write.” Katie Bennett in her essay, Self-Portrait at Six Months Pregnant featured in issue 10 of Brink Magazine.

“I miss the whirlwind of life that was the last two weeks.” J.

“There is no justice outside of the fight for it.” E.

Yesterday it was announced that Viola Fletcher, affectionately known as “Mother Fletcher” died at 111. She was the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre. She was a living monument, a lightening rod for justice until her very last breath. She is but one example of the true atrocities that have befallen Black people in this country at the hands of white people and their ongoing obsession with hatred, violence, and destruction.

I included the above image of Mother Fletcher with her eyes closed in my ICP slideshow, because it lives in my head constantly. I was so taken by her skin, the rich, dense, sagging lines, a body losing its elasticity. When I sat with the images, printed them, and stuck them to the wall, I got lost in the roadmap of her face, how the lines resembled the cracked desert floor of the Danakil Depression. This is what 109 years looked like and what could be more beautiful? She was kind and she seemed well loved. During our time together, between frames, she would sneak playful smiles and winks at me, letting me know that she was present. I’m so grateful that our paths crossed and so honored to have been asked to photograph her.

Talk soon.