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From her conversation with Saidiya Hartman, I learned about Dionne Brand’s poem, first published in 1990, “Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater,” which is a response to a c. 1920 photograph of a 115-year-old formerly enslaved woman in Los Angeles:

what jumped out at me was how Mammy Prater’s figure in the photograph exuded a weight and patience, a knowledge about a future time when something might be recognized in the photograph. The poem talks about how she waited for her century to turn, until the technology of photography was ready to capture this something. It seemed to me that the statement she conveyed through the photograph was waiting to be understood by us in much later years. It could be understood in her time, but not sufficiently—not in in a way that could repay that pose. Only in the future could that pose be repaid by an understanding of what it took to sit there and be there.

Though the Library of Congress has several photos of her, most of the understanding of Prater today is due to Brand’s evocative poem. The only substantive account of Prater’s story I can find is on author Kimberly Tilley’s blog, Old Spirituals. She seems to recap an uncited 1920 article in the Los Angeles times about a US Census worker interviewing Prater on a farm in Los Angeles, and being shocked by her reported birth year: 1805. The story somehow involves a visit by J[ames] B[radley] Law, a descendant of the Darlington, South Carolina planter who enslaved Prater, who corroborated her stories and claims. The LOC’s photos have the upbeat, patronizing captions of the newspaper: “Mammy Prater, a 115-year-old ex-slave who is still hale and hearty.” “One hundred and fifteen years have failed to dim the keen eyesight of [Mammy Prater] this ex-slave” “Age has not dimmed Mammy Prater’s love for sweets.” Other images from the same shoot circulate in the stock photo archives.

Prater was 35 when the first photographic portrait of an American was made in 1840, a self-portrait by Henry G. Fitz, Jr. of Baltimore, who kept his eyes closed during the long exposure time required of the Daguerreotype process. [It was just discussed on The Week in Art, because it is on loan from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History to a Rijksmuseum exhibition of American photography.]

Prater was 13 when Frederick Douglass was born in 1818. Douglass, of course, escaped slavery and went on to make himself the most photographed person in the 19th century. Isaac Julien’s 2019 multi-channel portrait, Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass, includes several scenes of him making photographs. It’s on view at the Smithsonian through 2026. When Douglass died in 1895, Prater was just 85.

Prater was 60 when Mary Brown was born in 1865. Brown would be photographed 70 years later by Charles Sheeler, while she was dressed as “Aunt Mary,” a fictionalized enslaved cook she portrayed when she worked as one of the few Black performers at the Rockefellers’ Colonial Williamsburg in 1935-36.

When the Works Progress Administration began to gather more than 2,300 first-hand accounts and over 500 photo portraits Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project, 1936-38, Prater would have been 131. By that point, though, was through waiting.

During Kendrick's halftime show a man unfurled a Palestinian flag and was chased off stage and eventually tackled and removed by security.

— Read the book Abolish Rent (@jphillll.bsky.social) 2025-02-10T02:04:22.930Z

The first video I saw of the dancer in the Super Bowl halftime show breaking the choreography and unfurling a Palestinine/Sudan flag is still the most jarring. He runs around unimpeded with his flag, joining the crowd of flag wavers during Kendrick Lamar’s performance, and you can imagine him hatching plan in rehearsal. Seeing the A Minor flags, and Lamar’s mic drop ending where he stands amid a field of Black men in red, white, and blue gear, forming a giant American flag around him, and asking, “What flags are missing? Which flags aren’t being raised at this moment that should be?”

The chill comes from the end, though, where suited security agents tackle him while a grid of focused dancers continue their stepping in the foreground.

The next morning, the AP’s report of the incident, which did not make it onto the main broadcast, said the individual had been detained by New Orleans police while “law enforcement is working to determine applicable charges in this incident.”

[a few minutes later update: no charges, and a lifetime ban from the NFL.]

@jphillll.bsky.social [bsky.app]
Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors, May 2021—

Wayne Bremser has a fascinating tumblr post about William Eggleston’s use of slideshows to exhibit his color photography before he figured out a successful way to print it. Eggleston has been generally credited, along with Stephen Shore, of bringing color photography into the fine art world. But Bremser also gives an important shoutout to Helen Levitt, who was showing her color photos of NYC two years earlier at MoMA—as a slideshow.

The impetus was a show at David Zwirner LA of Eggleston’s “Last Dyes,” the vintage prints using a long-discontinued dye transfer process. Dye Transfer is a whole journey in itself; for me the culminating color achievement of the dwindling print technology was early Liz Deschenes’ monochrome photos. I have not seen a Liz Deschenes slideshow.

Eggleston’s Slideshows [bremser.tumblr.com]
Previously, related: Apparently, Bill Levitt’s Sister Was Something of A Photographer
Later, related: Liz Deschenes showing new dye transfers at the George Eastman Museum

A Stanley Brouwn show does not happen every day, and even when it did, odds are you weren’t supposed to tell anyone about it.

But next week, Portal 5 in Tribeca will open a stanley brouwn: in a certain direction, organized by Timothy Y. Hill, of Jonathan A. Hill rare booksellers.

[a few days later update: greg.org hero Jack Murphy wrote about his visit to the show, which sounded like a banger.]

373 Broadway, Suite 511, the Tribeca Spaces Bldg below White and above Ricky’s. You want me to draw you a map? email timothy.y.hill@gmail.com for an appointment.

Speaking of photographs of perfume, in the early 2000s artist Erik Hanson was making sculptures of music. The first one I saw was at White Columns; it was blue stalagmites. Hanson dripped plaster into a stalagmite for the duration of each track on a David Bowie album. The two album sides were made on separate boards, which were then joined, facing each other, into a little box-like cave.

After the study I saw at White Columns—I think it was Ziggy Stardust—Hanson did a show of Bowie’s discography as little caves at Derek Eller. They were elegant, esoteric sculptures whose process was evident, but whose system was embedded in the titles. I’m left writing about sculpture because I can’t find any images online. Hanson made spiral drawings and other sculptural forms with the same durational strategy; the resulting work indexes the artist’s subjective experience of listening—or of making while listening—to a song. The body of work, then, becomes a catalogue of formative musical experience: playlist as autobiography as form, like the 2003 cascade of sculpey flowers above, Disco Songs I Liked When I Was A Punk DJ.

This, along with Chris Rusak and Amelia Konow’s Lumen Prototypes, make me think back on the systemic works of Steve Roden. He would devise a scheme, seemingly but never arbitrary, more or less mathematical, subjective or convoluted, and set it in motion to produce one thing from another: text into sculpture, city into sound. One thing I’d forgotten him saying about his 2009 project in Philadelphia, Nothing But What Is Therein Contained, is the importance of intuition within the parameters of the system, as the point, even. And I’d forgotten it in 2009, too.

Both perfume and photography involve chemical processes. And I think in their Lumen Prototypes, fragrance and photo conceptualists, respectively, Chris Rusak and Amelia Konow are exploring what a photograph of a fragrance could be.

At least that’s the sense I got from the little unique silver gelatin print, and the zine containing evocative essays from the artists, and Rusak’s newly released conceptual fragrances, which I just got as part of his yearlong Analog/Context project. [They’re also sold separately, and at larger scale, above.]

They chose lumen prints, an intricate chemical photographic technique that, like cyanotypes, are made in daylight without a camera. What I think is happening is that Rusak and Konow are capturing the visual expression of fragrances—either composed or in constituent parts, I am not sure, and they’re not saying. They’re both abstract and not: they clearly show traces of their making, or of their subject/materials: liquidity, flow, absorption, dilution, evaporation, color, density.

But that visual record still doesn’t reveal what anything smells like, what the experience is of the fragrance(s), the unfolding over time. That gap resonates with the herculean poetic struggle to explain a perfume—or a picture—in a way that approaches the sensory encounter with it. And even though I don’t know what fragrance I’m looking at, they’ve nevertheless made a picture of it.

Chris Rusak & Amelia Konow: Lumen Prototypes [chrisrusak.com]
Amelia Konow [ameliakonow.com]
Previously, related: Chris Rusak, HOME; Incense Sensibility