 |
Manifest | Thirteen Colonies. By Wendel A. White.
 |
Photographs by Wendel A. White
Radius Books, Santa Fe, NM, 2024. 298 pp., 235 images, 9½x11¾".
“So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat’s where Ah wuz s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So Ah ast,’where is me? Ah don’t see me?’
“Everybody laughed…Mis Nellie, de Mama of de cillun who come back after her husband dead, she pointed to de dark one and, ‘Dat’s you Alphabet, don’t you know yo’ ownself?’
“Dey used to call me Alphabet ‘cause so many people had done named me different names. Ah looked at the picture a long time and seen it was mah dress and mah hair so Ah said:
“’Aw, aw! Ah’m colored!’
“Den dey all laughed real hard. But before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like de rest.”
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
 |
| Memoir and poems of Phillis Wheatley, a native African and slave, 1834. Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA. By Wendel A. White |
It’s safe to say Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is a major literary accomplishment, a work whose merits are well understood and defined within the traditions of American literature. Despite that, I think Hurston is an underacknowledged writer and intellectual. After studying at Howard University, she received a scholarship to study Anthropology at Barnard with acclaimed professor Franz Boas. This was unprecedented, given that she started her graduate studies in 1925. After Barnard, in 1928, she continued her graduate studies at Columbia University, where she developed her field work on folklore in South Florida. In addition to her groundbreaking field work, Hurston also channeled a great deal of her anthropological studies into her art. Their Eyes Were Watching God was revelatory in so many ways, including her phonetic use of the colloquial language of former slave communities in the American South.
 |
| Baby Dolls, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC, 2016. By Wendel A. White. |
Thinking about Zora Neale Hurston is a great entry for looking at the new work by photographer and academic Wendel A. White, Manifest: Thirteen Colonies. Like Hurston, Wendel developed his work with both the discipline and insight of an academic anthropologist and the skill and wisdom of an artist (some histories are better told in metaphors). Manifest, both an exhibition at the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and a new publication with Radius Books, is a collection of photographs made in the archives of institutions found in the original 13 American colonies — New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The photographs document the histories of slavery and racism as represented in collections and vaults across these states (plus Washington D.C.), and include early photographs of African Americans, slave collars and shackles, Civil Rights era paraphernalia, locks of hair, books, slave ledgers, combs, and simple tools. The pictures are composed with a rigid formalism, using some of the most basic elements of photography to create rich visual expressions and metaphors. The result is an incredible ethnology, full of clear descriptions of unique and telling objects, and created with a profound love of photography.
 |
| Tabletop Voting Machine, 1955. Delaware Historical Society, Wilmington, DE. By Wendel White |
Published by Radius Books, the monograph Manifest: Thirteen Colonies is luscious. The pictures are printed glossy, but on matte black pages. The production shows a great attention to detail, with rich black tones (essential for this book) but without sacrificing luminance. It also includes essays by Ilisa Barbash, a curator of visual anthropology at Harvard; Cheryl Finley, an Art Historian at Cornell; Leigh Raiford, a professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley; and White himself. Also reproduced are conversations with Deborah Willis, Brenda Dione Tindal, and White. These contributions are essential because they clearly situate White within a pantheon of elite academics and curators, those in positions that define history. They also help to fully articulate the significance of the archives and institutions that helped define race in the United States. The text, all printed on a soft, white paper, breaks the book into clear, digestible sections while also helping to guide our understanding of the pictures.
I do believe it is important to note the academic nature of Manifest: Thirteen Colonies, not as a qualitative assessment, but to better understand the intentions and visual vocabulary found in the photographs. This is also a clear distinction from Hurston, who deliberately developed her work in a more vernacular language. White instead presents his photographs with a rigid approach to studio photography, using basic attributes like light, depth of field, and an ambiguous, empty space to define his pictures.
 |
| Ambrotype of Frederick Douglass, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC. By Wendel A. White |
The cited passage from Their Eyes Were Watching God can offer deeper insights into White’s photographs and the archives where he found them. Hurston describes an incredible phenomenon that anyone working in photography must reconcile at some point (I believe a real study of the photographic history means looking at colonialism and slavery, both issues rooted in the early practice of the medium and too often ignored); photographs don’t show us difference, they create it. White’s voice is much more academic than Hurston’s, but still developed from the same idea. By working so proficiently within the institutional paradigm, he is able to document and undermine it, utilizing a new authority to tell stories and histories about the institutions that propagated and archived slavery, racism, and hegemony.
Purchase Book
Read More Book Reviews
 |
 |
