Ep 016: Gioncarlo Valentine
A SHOT: So to start, can you describe the photo that we’re going to talk about?
GIONCARLO VALENTINE: This is a photograph of a family in Baton Rouge made in 2018. It features a woman sitting in a chair. She is the mother, and her children are standing around her, and she’s holding a photograph of one of her daughters.
Why were you there?
A friend of mine was doing a residency in New Orleans, and I’d been there for about four days, and I have a cousin who lives in Baton Rouge, and I wanted to visit her. So I went to spend I think it was three or four days with her. And it was, like, really lonely. I thought I would be spending more time with her, but she going to LSU to get her PhD, and I was just in her apartment a lot with her cat. So I was wandering out a lot and felt kind of sad ’cause I’m used to making photographs of people in the city, or in cities in general, and this was, like, a very flat, rural, quiet kind of neighborly community. And I just stuck out very much. So when I would go on my walks, they would be really brief, and I just didn’t feel comfortable approaching folks.
How did you come in contact with this family?
I was with my cousin one afternoon. We were picking up some food. I was actually telling her in that moment about how I was feeling. I was like, “I really wanna make some photographs while I’m here. I feel kinda lonely and kinda scared to go out.” Which is unlike me. And I just felt very strangely, and she was advising me. I look out the window to my right, and there is a full-grown woman straddling a pink children’s Big Wheel in the middle of her driveway. It was just a sight. So I told my cousin, I was like, “Pull the car over really quick.” I was really… It was so strange. I was so afraid to approach this family, which is so unusual, because I saw that the husband was standing behind somewhere, but I just saw this woman and this bright pink toy bike and was like, “Okay, I’ve gotta go over there.”
[My cousin] let me out the car, and I walk over very slowly with my camera. They were both staring at me as I was approaching and making these confused faces. As I got close enough within earshot, the husband yells out, “Officer, we didn’t do nothin’ wrong. We ain’t doin nothin’. We just standing on our front.” And then we all just collectively laughed so much. I gave them my spiel. I was like, “I’m from New York. I’m visiting my cousin around the corner. I just saw you on the Big Wheel. I would love to make a photograph of you.” She kind of looked me up and down, and she was like, “Of course, baby,” and she let me take a photograph. I took the first one, and I was like, “So what’s your name?” And she said, “Oh, my name is Chakakhan.” And her name, her legal name — she showed me her ID — was Chakakhan [Hyams]. It was so perfectly strange.
I made a few photographs of her that day, and I told her very briefly, like, “Oh, I’ve just been feeling a little shy.” And she said, “Around here? Uh uh, baby.” And she grabbed me by my arm, and she takes me across the street, and every person that was outside, she introduced me to. I think she was like, “He’s workin’ for the New York Times. He’s makin’ pictures.” I was like, “I’m not working for the New York Times. I’m just making pictures.” And she just had that energy to her. She connected me to like three or four people in the community who I photographed a bunch and who I photographed in the years since.
That’s this woman in the photo?
The woman in the center of the photo, yeah.
Why do you think that you felt out of your element when you were there?
I think it was really just I was really, truly physically out of my element. I had never been to Louisiana before, and when I was staying in New Orleans, like New Orleans downtown, it’s still the South, lord knows. It’s still very rural and community based, but it still felt very much like a city. There’s an Ace Hotel, so I felt less out of my element there. In Baton Rouge, in this particular neighborhood it was very families, rural, big houses, porches. Like, I stuck out physically very much. I’m like gay as hell, and I was wearing a very flamboyant top at the time, and I just felt very like, “Okay, hey, everybody.” I was just very shy. But also I have a very strong ethic around the way that I make photographs of people. It has to feel very consensual and collaborative at all times. Like, it wouldn’t feel right to just take photos without permission, for me. In this scenario, it felt like because I was only there so briefly for three days, there was no right to make a photograph. That I was going to make an image and then go felt a bit exploitative period. Although I struggled with the desire to make images, I wasn’t going to make them at all. I was just going to walk around and be sad and then go back to New Orleans, where I hadn’t made any photographs other than of the friend that I was staying with.
So how do you go from her taking you around to meet everyone in the neighborhood to taking this photo in particular?
She introduced me to about six or seven people. And I got people’s phone numbers and sent text messages saying I would come back the next day to photograph them. And I actually photographed her over two days. So this image was not made on the first day. This was the image that I made on the second day. On the first day she wore a pink outfit, and she was on the pink bike. On the second day, she was wearing this. So I came back around this day because I don’t think her children were all there when I first met her, so she had gathered a few of her kids, and she wanted me to make this image of her. She was telling me very gleefully about how important the photographs that she had in her possession were because her house flooded during Hurricane Katrina, and she lost everything. But one of the things that she was able to get, as the house was literally flooding, was these photographs, and they all have water damage, and they’re very sacred to her. She had maybe like seven or eight photographs, and then she had a board with a bunch of images on them. And she was telling me the story of how difficult it was to recover after Katrina, and stories of her ex husband. She was just very open. And then we made this photograph before… I didn’t leave that day, but before the end of that day, we made this image.
So what’s your setup for when you’re taking a photo like this?
Just surveilling the scene for a minute to see what feels organic. I definitely felt like, although it physically doesn’t resemble an “American Gothic” image, that was the vibe I was getting. From all of the photographs that I made with them, it felt very much like this is a typical black family. And in honoring a typical black family with a portrait, I wanted to make something that felt classic and kind of honest. I had my Mamiya Rz67 [Pro] ii, handheld. I think it was about 5:30 [pm] so the sun was a little low, and I backed up a bit, and I just took a few of these frames, yeah.
How quickly do you take this?
Not quickly. There were a lot of frames on this roll. I think I walked away from this day with four rolls. When it’s portraits that don’t feel like passing — like street portraits, which are kind of like, “Oh, I just wanna get a photo or two” — I try to be very pointed with all the images that I’m making, but there were a lot that day. I think each image on the contact sheet is a different thing. This was one of the last three. So it didn’t take terribly long, but it was an afternoon’s work just hanging out with them and documenting them.
What do you like about taking your time?
I’m just always so afraid to do more harm to our legacy as black folk. Moving quickly, just you can’t think things through. And standing in a moment and kind of watching, and being in communication… We were talking. This woman reminds me so much of my mother that it was frightening, so we were talking a lot about that and the similarities between the two of them. So I was also enjoying, but it was really intentional to just be quiet and just kind of let them play football and talk about their upbringing and talk about the food she was going to cook me. She was about to make me some crawfish. That energy, I just wanted to be present for it. And being present feels very important, but I also don’t ever want to be moving too quickly because there’s an arrogance to moving very quickly, I think, with photography, especially when it’s pointed toward people you don’t have an existing relationship with because I think you end up continually pillaging and continually making images that are for you solely, not for the other person. There’s no say. There’s no repositioning. People can’t tell you how they feel about what’s going on in the photograph. People can’t tell you, “I don’t like my hair like this,” or “Let me readjust my pants.” Moving too quickly makes me feel really very anxious and kind of afraid of doing harm and a harm that’s kind of irreparable because the image exists. You know, if I’m back in New York City, I develop the film and I go, “Oh, this is what I have,” I can’t re-do it.
What thought did you have to how everyone is arranged in this frame?
I wanted her to feel surrounded by love. I wanted her to hold a photograph because she was so excited to show me some of them, so I think that the other two photographs in this moment, or in a similar composition, she’s holding different photographs. I also had this “American Gothic” notion in my mind. I know that it physically doesn’t resemble that painting, but it felt good to position them this way. She’s the heart of the family. She’s kind of the central force of the family. Yeah, I wanted her to be centered. I wanted her to be seated and relaxed. I wanted everyone to feel a bit confrontational but also a bit piercing. Like, I love the power in her face. It almost looks like she’s quietly bragging about her family. I love that so much because it really is her energy.
Is that direction that you told them you wanted, or did you hope that was what they would give you?
The seriousness of the faces was direction that I gave. I was like, “No smiles and stand around your mom.” That was the extent of the direction. So everything that they did was of their own doing.
What’s the significance of the photograph here?
When I returned from Baton Rouge, I reached out to Chaka to give her family the photographs. They didn’t have… It was a lot of runaround. I don’t think that they were terribly tech savvy, or the people that I was speaking to in the family weren’t terribly tech savvy. So Chakakhan gave me an e-mail for someone. I e-mailed the photos in a WeTransfer. She didn’t know how to work the WeTransfer, but she said the daughter’s e-mail would work. I e-mailed it to the daughter, and I just never saw anybody download the link, so it kept expiring. And I started to print out the photographs, but I got really busy. And about three months later, Chaka died.
At the end of February 2019, Chakakhan was drinking, and she collapsed in her living room and hit her head. Afterward, she was fine. She continued her night, and she went upstairs and went to be next to her boyfriend, and she had a seizure in her sleep and she died. I did not know this, and I felt a lot of guilt and shame around it because she was, first of all, one of the most beautiful people I’ve met. She really did not have… She could have just said yes to the photograph or no. This woman stopped two days of her life and walked me around her neighborhood and let me photograph her at her husband’s job, at the Popeyes across the street. She just prioritized showing me around safely. She was so kind. And it was so unexpected, as death tends to be so often. I was bothered by the fact that I didn’t get to give this family these photographs and that one of the people she introduced me to messaged me on Instagram, and they told me that she passed. I just was destroyed because she also reminds me a great deal of my mother, and my biggest fear is my mother’s passing. She wrote me a little note with her phone number that I still carry in my wallet. She was also the first person, or one of the first people to die who I photographed, which is something that is central to my work but had not really happened up until that point.
I think a lot about death in my photographs because when I was really getting started and I was trying to be a fashion photographer, what took me out of the desire to be a fashion photographer was realizing there was just more important work to be done. And that was around the time that Freddie Gray was killed, and I remember seeing Freddie Gray’s obituary and just being angry because I know that that was the best picture that family could come up with — this distorted, maybe a Boost Mobile, like it was a mobile phone… It was just horrible quality. And it was the first time I really sat down and thought about how frequently I’ve seen obituaries in the community with bad photographs and that people who are living through kind of the extreme difficulties of poverty do not go to get portraits taken of their families often. And there are plenty who do. Like the Macy’s in Mondawmin Mall in Baltimore, you know... Not Macy’s, but the photo booth places still exist. And black and brown people still people those spaces. But more often than not, I find that we don’t tend to that history as much. So I’m always thinking about the way that a photo has a second life or a third life. But death is always just something I’m meditating on, and this was really the first time it came for one of my photographs, in this really unexpected way.
How does the photo feel different to you now than when you first saw it?
I don’t feel the guilt that I felt when I first saw it. I had sent the photographs home to her family, and then I came back down there about two months later, and I brought them more of the photographs and printed them out so that they had them physically. And I spent a great deal of time with them, and they wanted me to photograph them the second time that I came, and I was kind of persistent that I didn’t want to. But one of the daughters was like, “Honor my mama.” I was like, “Say less.” So I made some portraits of them. It feels like this photo is about honor now and not so much about something that I should have done more quickly, that I should have mailed prints to this family. It really does feel like honoring this mother who hadn’t been photographed in a real way since she had, like, a 1990s updo, which was one of the photographs that she loved. She was like, “This was the last time I was lookin’ my best. My hair looked good.” She was telling me about how significant this image was of her that was 20 years old, 20-plus years old, and I made this photograph of her that I hope that she would have loved and that her family loves. Yeah, it feels like it’s about honor now, that it was no real coincidence that this person kind of shot out at me as we were driving down the street.
It’s interesting. And part of it is because I would imagine this is a detail of this image that you really want to be able to express about it. When I asked you about the significance of the photo, I was actually meaning the photo that she’s holding. But it shows that that’s what’s on your mind when you look at this.
Yeah. The significance of the photo she’s holding is one of her daughters that was not there, Yonna. She wasn’t there that day. I think she was on a different side of town. She was working. When I did come back, I met Yonna after she had passed, and Yonna has kind of been the connective tissue between the family and I. And I don’t think she had seen the photograph actually. When I went back to visit, even though I sent them the photos, Yonna hadn’t seen her holding the picture of her, and I didn’t know that that was who she was. So I’m like, “Yeah, she’s holding this photo here,” and she’s like, “Oh, that’s me!” I was like, “Oh, okay.” I had no idea. So I felt like the photo was still giving and telling different stories for me and then for the family. And I photographed them I think three times since then.
I’m curious because I don’t know if the idea was put in my head because of the e-mail that we’d had about you saying this was an image that dealt with death, but my first response when looking at this was that it was a memorial photo for the person who was in the image because they weren’t there. Do you see that at all, or is that just…?
I think because I knew the intention… I think because I knew that she was showing an image of her daughter who was just physically not present, I read it as, “Okay, she’s making sure she’s here in the photograph.” I would be very curious to see what the daughter feels about that element in the photograph. Outside of the surprise of it being her, after she’s lived with this image, I wonder what that feels like to her, but it doesn’t necessarily feel like a memorial to me. But I definitely can see the connection. I never would have thought of that ever.
What are the challenges of entering into a setting like this and photographing this family for the days that you did? Maybe not challenges. Just, like, things that you’re concerned with, that you wanna make sure you get right. What’s going through your head?
I think that the young boy’s shirt being dirty looked great because he was a young boy outside playing football in the grass. But I also had to be worried about going to the South and photographing a black family in a way that maybe made them look poor or unkempt. Because there’s already a history of that, right? The desire to make an “American Gothic”–reference photograph or one that honors the traditional black American family, in my mind, is about presenting them as they are and seeing the beauty in that. But I’m always concerned about how that can also lend itself to larger narratives. I think I was mostly worried about, “Do you feel your best? Do you wanna go put something else…?” I asked Chaka a couple of times… The son that didn’t have on a shirt, I asked him if he wanted to put on a shirt. Everybody was fine. People were how they were. I want people to look their best, but I don’t want people to perform for an image, and I think that this is a great example of that.
I made another image of a young boy back in New Orleans. I saw him. I was at the playground, also kind of low. The trip was really emotional for me. And I was standing there at the park, and I was looking down the street, and this young boy in a white button-up shirt, black slacks, black shiny shoes was dragging his little sister in a red wagon to the corner. And he would walk to the corner, and then he would walk back down. And he would walk to the corner, and he did this like 10 times. I was really sad, so I didn’t have the energy to run over there and look for this person’s parent and go, “Can I make a…?” You know, the whole thing. I just watched, and I let that picture go, and I felt a lot of guilt around it.
Then the next day, the boy came back with his sister in the red wagon. This time he had on a hole-y shirt. Now, I didn’t notice the hole-y shirt. I just noticed he was wearing his street clothes. I asked if I could meet his mom, and then I walked him, met his mother. She was very sweet. I photographed her, him and the baby. And then I was like, “Could you walk back to the corner?” and I made some specific photographs, and then I started to realize that his clothes had holes in them. And I was like, “If you had gotten the photo yesterday of this boy in his Sunday best after church walking with his sister down the street, that would have been a photo that felt like it was a different conversation.” This was a young boy in a shirt that’s hole-y in the middle of the South. I always have to walk very lightly, tread lightly when I making images of my folks, and then because I’m not from the South, I also don’t want to project anything onto Southern ideas that I have. I don’t wanna make any stereotypical photographs or aim for anything stereotypical or ask anything because I think of the South when I see a certain thing. I’m always thinking about how to make sure I’m not adding to something negative.
Is there anything about this scene that surprised you, specifically this photo?
The little boy’s hands on the chair surprised me after I developed the photograph. I can be patient, and I can be slow, and I can be intentional with the larger thing, but I am not the person who, before I press the shutter, I scan every edge of the frame, to be like, “Upp, somebody’s collar’s up! Upp, your lip a little chapped.” I don’t do that. That’s not natural to me. So my patience comes into waiting for the moment or composing the photograph, but then sometimes I will miss a detail. And I liked and was slightly conflicted by how posed the young boy’s hands felt because he was rolling around in the dirt moments ago, and then he sitting in a photograph giving you some of this. But I do, I love it. He’s very sweet, and it feels like a part of his character now that I’ve went back. But at the beginning, I was surprised by his hands.
How much do you think about how the subjects are regarding you when you’re taking a photo?
It depends on where I am, and in this scenario, I’m challenged by that usually. I was really challenged by it in the South. People offer you a kind of seriousness and reverie based off of where you’re from, and I was from New York. And they offered me a level of seriousness and respect because of the publications that I’ve worked with, and when the son and the daughter looked at my Instagram, the other daughter that’s not pictured here, looked through my Instagram, they had seen some stuff that that made them feel like I was more serious as a photographer, not maybe a hobbyist. And then my Mamiya Rz67 ii commands attention at all times. It’s an enormous camera, doesn’t look like any other camera. It just calls for your attention. Sometimes I feel like that makes people who I’m photographing treat me differently that they would if I was just a person around the way making images. And I’m just very interested in what that person would have been treated like, what are the images that they would have been given. I think that because of that, the workaround is that I have to establish a relationship with them so they can think, “Oh, that’s just Gio.” Once I get back to that place, I feel really good in making images, but she was introducing, “He work for the New York Times. He doing a story for the New York Times.” I was like, “Girl, I’m not doing a story for the New York Times. I’m a freelancer with…” I was trying to correct people and their expectations, but that kind of lifted me up to this thing, which gave me access to them. And I’m always afraid for the ways that people who are disenfranchised offer their access up. And offer a lens into their lives. I’ve seen it happen almost always to the detriment of black and brown people’s stories being manipulated because they offered usually some white photographer an access to them. Then the white photographer went back to his regular life and did what he wanted to do with those images. And that maybe didn’t lift them as highly as they should have been lifted.
How important is it to you that you actually spent the amount of time that you did with them?
Now? Oh, my god. Because at the time, spending two days felt like… You know, I was only there for three, so it didn’t feel like too much or too little. The first day I was only able to spend about an hour or two with Chaka and her family because the sun was setting pretty quickly. And then I came back the next day during high noon. So I was with them for the fullness of the day. So when this image was made, I was with them for a long time. And just having a really long day with them was nice. It does feel like the best work that I love that I revisit that I’m pleased with. It’s the work where I got memories out of it. And it’s hard to get memories when you just interact with them for like 20 minutes, 10 minutes. And I have some just beautiful memories of this woman who kind of bumped against my life very briefly, but in such a profound way.
So there’s eye contact with the camera in this photo, but I’m curious: Do you consider yourself a part of this image?
I wish I was more a part of the image. I wish that there was some reflection. I do feel like I am a part of the photograph. I’m really literal. I’m often too literal. So I would have felt much better if, like, in this window… I always look at the window with the shield, like, “I was just right there. I could have just leaned over to the right a little bit more, and I would have gotten a little bit in the photograph.” But I do feel that I’m in it. But I think it’s just… I don’t know if the viewer would feel it. Most of the reason I love this photo and I’m attached to it is because of my own personal narratives, which I guess is always the case with photographers, but yeah, I do feel deeply embedded in the photograph, in a few ways.
Well, what do you think we can learn about you from this photo?
Nothing new. If you know my work, all the people who know me have heard my testimony. I’m a photographer really interested in preserving, not revolutionizing, not making the most original, newfangled work that feels like, “Oh, look at these lights, Look at these color gels. Look at all this new stuff.” I’m interested in preserving the everyday and doing it in a way that still feels like it gets down to the nitty-gritty. I think for people who don’t know me, maybe this will be kind of their first dalliance with that idea, or maybe you’ll get that feeling, and then you’ll look into my work and go, “Oh, this is what he does.” But for people who know my work, which is the people that I usually interact with when talking about photographs, nothing new. I hate that there’s nothing new maybe, but if I were to die, this would be a great photograph to memorialize me. This is perfect. This is literally me. This is all of the work that I want to put into the world. It looks just like this. It does exactly what this image in my mind does.
What does this image do?
I hope that it lifts. I hope that it centers. I hope that it captures an authentic beauty, kind of an effortless beauty in a grace. I really get transfixed by Chakakhan’s style. One of the things that makes me emotional about the photograph is that she really has won in so many ways. The pride that she took in her family and the way that she talked about her children and the happiness with which she was playing football with them in the front and just running around and enjoying watching her children, she won. In a lot of the photographs, her face is just covered in pride. And that is strange. Although it is a thing that the photograph does and a thing that I maybe would hope for, something about it feels a little extra strange. Because pride is not a thing that I always get from an image of a person, like a portrait I make on the street. But I always feel that way about this photograph.
How important is the setting to this image? How important is the fact that the image is outside?
It’s not important. I mean, I went into their home briefly. Every time that I’ve gone there, I spent time in the home. Maybe in this image it’s not that important, but it became important over time. The last time that I went back, they were expecting us to come in the house. Now this was during the pandemic. We went back for a road trip for the New York Times, and they had opened the door and, like, went in the house once they saw me, and they thought I was coming in, and I was like, “Oh, no. We’re shooting outside.” I’m not the kind of genius that’s like, “Yes, I wanted them outdoors. The continuity between…” I was just like, “It’s a pandemic. I’m not coming in your house.” But I think because of that conversation, through every time that I photographed them, it’s always outdoors. It’s always next, physically attached to their homes. I think that there’s something there. I won’t be dishonest and say I’ve spent much time with what that is. So maybe in part there is relevance to the fact that we’re always outside.
I also think a lot about front-facing photos in the South. Like, I pitched this whole story around this: Porches. When I think of the South, maybe unfortunately in some stereotypical ways, the images that I see are people sitting on their porch. But going to Louisiana and actually walking through neighborhoods, people are sitting on their porch all day. Especially elders. So sitting right in the front of your house shows, again, a pride in ownership, a pride in, you know, “This is my home. I’m responsible for its upkeep. I’m responsible for the family that you see.” Gordon Parks’ work, like the Kansas project that he did, the cover, most of the work, people are on their porches. Living your life spread out on your porch is something that a lot of black people in the rural South love. It’s a part of their history. So maybe my training was something I considered, but I did not intentionally go, “Let’s be outside.” I think that my love of the photograph also is because it looks like it could have been a part of those conversations around the importance of people sittin’ on their porch in the South.
I’m struck in this photo by the differences in engagement among the boys. The two younger boys are both very intensely staring at the camera, whereas the two older boys each kind of have this pose that they’re giving, almost. What do you think about the differences in engagement there?
I believe that the young boys, the authority of the mother saying, “Come over, and take this photograph,” versus the two older boys, who were, like, on the phone leaning against a car before I pulled them over… And they were very sweet, but they were reluctant. I was also a stranger that Chaka had kind of brought into their orbit that day. You know, I’m also queer, and these are straight men, so there’s some spaces between us. And I remember the reluctance. I made a beautiful photograph of the both of them leaning on the car before I called them over, and I think that they came over to humor me. And maybe what you’re seeing is them humoring me, them humoring Chaka, whereas the young boys still feel like, “Do as Mama say.” And they run over there and do what’s been told. So I think there’s a little bit of that resistance maybe. I also love the tongue. It was very intentional. He held it there for a while. That’s what he wanted to give. I remember when I first thought about the image, I was like, “It feels like that was maybe a mistake,” but he held it there for a while.
In a sense, he’s ignoring your direction?
Yeah, he is.
And you like that?
I love it, yeah. I do. I think it’s honest. It’s like, “I don’t want to do this.” I have a lot of photographs, specifically of children, who don’t want to be photographed, and the parent will be like, “Oh, come over here, and get in this photograph,” and they’ll get in it reluctantly. They’re not gonna be perfect. They’re gonna show you that they don’t wanna do the thing. I love that.
One basic element of this image is that it’s a photograph of a photograph. What effect does the picture that she’s holding have on the image?
Apparently an effect that I didn’t presume, that maybe the viewer would think that this is a different kind of honoring that she’s doing of her daughter. I never would have thought about it in the ways that you received it, which I always love to find. I love however people come to a photograph, like whatever things you place on it, whatever things you take away from it. It just shows that, you know, it’s not as basic as, “Oh, it’s just a photograph. Nothin’ else going on here.” That that photograph that she’s holding causes you to think about this image for longer than three seconds, which is people’s attention span especially when it comes to photography, is very special. I think that this conversation will make me think differently about this photograph that she’s holding now. And I really wanna spend some time with what that means. I don’t wanna apply a kind of faded language to anything. But here is a woman who died three months later holding an image of her daughter in a way that feels like it’s honoring her daughter, who maybe had passed if we didn’t know the context. What is that saying? And I really must ask Yonna, “What does that say to you? Do you ever think about this image any longer than just looking at a picture of your mom holding a picture of you?” Because it does feel in the tradition, in our community and kind of out of our community, of people who are holding images of their loved ones who have passed away.
How important do you think it is for someone who’s viewing this image to understand the context? Like, if you could put someone in the idealized situation of how they would see this, would you want a long caption to exist next to it?
Yes, and I’ve not ever really made images in this way. This a newer. Like, in the last three years I’ve started to make photographs that I feel like you just kind of have to know the story. Instagram has been a great platform for sharing context with limited but a lot of fullness. I love telling the story of this woman, and then the people get shocked that she died so soon after because that’s how it felt to me. It felt like here is this glorious, lovely, very fantastic funny woman who I was excited to get back down there and see in a few months, and she died. And she died in a ridiculous way that didn’t really rise to the occasion of her grandness. I do think some photographs I’ve made, especially this one, they just can’t exist properly without the context. But I’m really into however you come to it. I want it to be seen with the context, but I wanna hear more of what people think of when they see this photograph. Is it something that would stop you in your tracks? Is there something that you would feel like is deeper about the image on its own without any context whatsoever? I like all the angles. I just think if this is an image meant to honor her, context is needed.
So what’s your relationship with death?
Oh, lordy. I don’t know. It’s complicated. We have a nasty back and forth, it seems. I haven’t… Knock on wood. I’m going to knock on wood this whole thing. I haven’t had a lot of close family deaths, and I’m so grateful for that. But I experienced a lot of social deaths, friendship deaths. I had a friend when I was 12 who took his life. We were both 12. And that was a different kind of indoctrination into death. I had an uncle who died of AIDS. I’ve written about him. Aaliyah died when i was 11, and Aaliyah is probably the most central figure in my world. She is the most central person to ever exist in the world to me. My whole identity is kind of wrapped and rolled in this person and was so before she died. My femininity, my ideas on womanhood and feminists and beauty, all of that came from my mother, and it came from Aaliyah. When she died, it was just that first experience. My uncle dying when I was 7 was just not the same thing. Aaliyah dying was like, “Oh, shit. This is something else.” This is a person who you would never think of as being able to die, so death came to me so young and was such a particular energy of young people who I loved very much and admired very much kind of being taken away from me. And when my friend took his life, it kind of indoctrinated me into a lot of mental-health stuff around suicidal ideation and feelings that that’s an option. At 12 years old, you think that people are killed, or they die naturally in their sleep. That’s it. That people, children, could go, “I don’t wanna live here no more. I’m going to take my life,” was so… It was transformative. It changed who I was as a person. I think at my core I’m still dealing with a lot of feelings around death and youthful death and unexpected death.
And then as a photographer, so much of my work is rooted in honoring people who have died, in the contributions they made to the world as artists and the contributions that they made to the world as black people just sitting on their porches, and that those things need to be treated with some kind of equal balance. Like, when I photograph celebrities now, it is important to me that you, a lot of the time, don’t get the context for photographing celebrities. Like on my Web site, there tends to be no names for the magazine that it was shot for. It’s just a person. And if you come to this person and you know who he is, great, and if you don’t, he’s photographed the same way I would photograph this little baby on the corner — treating people with love but treating them equally.
At the core of that work is a protection of our history, which is rooted in death. It’s a protection of the legacy of photographers and artists who I walk in the same path with like a Dawoud Bey, who is alive — thank the lord—and James Baldwin who is a profound influence on my work because so much of his life was photographed. So much of the grand things that he did was documented with a seriousness and a beauty. Yeah, I really think if honoring black people is at the core of my work, then death has to be at the core of my work too because so many black people’s lives have been constantly taken, and if my work is about fighting against that or challenging those histories, death has to be tied in it.
Is that something that’s on your mind with an image like this before the context that it eventually takes on?
Yes. In making an image meant to honor a family, “meant to honor the family” means that it is an image that they will have, that they will feel honored and loved in the image that they will treat as an object in their homes that they wanna live with for hopefully generations, and that is attached to the fact that at some point that generation will die and pass that image on to, you know… A lot of my historical references of images are from my grandmother’s china closet, or from the spaces in her house where she had hundreds and hundreds of photographs. The fights that we’ve had up until recent years of her not trying to hand over photos because she’s just like, “I’m gonna keep these.” I’m just like, “You just… They’re in a book. Gimme the photos. Stop being stingy.” Again, if at the core it is about documenting people in a way that makes them feel loved on, for them, that they can pass this image down and spend time with it... The version of it for me is that, like, if the world sees these photographs that they feel classic and that those photographs somehow live forever, which I think is the hope of a lot of photographers, that they make some images that become definitive of a time, that become definitive of a kind of experience. I do think about all of that whenever I’m making photographs, about what does it mean to honor. What’s the long-game? What’s the second life? When you make an image, and you think about something as important as the “American Gothic” or an American ideal family, time is very relevant in that photograph. History is very relevant in that photograph, and so death is very relevant in it.
So we talked quite a bit about how you wanted to portray Chaka in this photo and what you wanted to capture of her. Where do you think you succeeded in this photo, and if you can be self-critical, where do you wish you’d done better?
I think this photograph is a success. I don’t think that I would have wanted to do much better. I will say — the negatives first — I wish I had brought my camera down just a lil’ bit and got a lil’ bit more ankle, lil’ bit more sock, a little less window. I frame… I have this weird feet thing. Lord knows. Anybody who knows my work can tell you this feet thing where I just cut people off at the ankles. I don’t know how I learned to do this, but it’s so hard to find shoes in my work. Now I’m training myself to be like, “You’re doing commercial work. You’ve gotta get the shoes. The shoes are what you’re sellin’” — like, tryna do better. But for the most part, I always leave a little bit of room above the head. You can try to find a reason there. I don’t know what the reason is. It’s insane. So I always can look at a photo and go, “I could crop this in a little bit,” or “I could tilt it down.” So I do wish I had gotten a little bit more of the the shirtless young man’s socks. I think it succeeded in honoring this lady, man. I really do think it succeeded in showing, in my eyes, a beautiful black woman who was proud of her family in front of their home.
What about this photo feels familiar?
Oh, my god. Every detail. The statement around like the typical black family is about familiarity. It is about kind of an accurate representation of just what everyday black life looks like. How low this man’s shorts are so you see a certain amount of underwear, that’s familiar. It is familiar to see Chaka with this wig, with this parted wig. My mother has had this wig, has this wig, probably. A lot of black women have had this wig. It’s the kind of shake’n’go “We gotta run to the store” wig. It’s not the “I’m ’bout to go do actual things in the world.” It’s just like the casual “I just wanna throw something on my head” wig, which I love, which we talked about. We talked about hair a lot. So much of this feels reminiscent of summers. Again, I didn't spend any time in the South growing up. This was my first time really going there. But it still feels like summer in Baltimore. If I told you this image was in Baltimore, I think you’d be hard pressed to prove me that it wasn’t. And then there’s familiarity in, to me, what feels like a classical composition for a photograph like this. It feels reminiscent of a lot of people’s work. I love when my spiritual guides in photography are in my mind when I’m making an image.
What do you think Gioncarlo 10 years ago would have to say about this photo?
”It’s not Vogue Italia. It’s not Vogue. What is this? It’s not Vogue.” I was in a different place, honey. I knew Gordon Parks’ work 10 years ago clearly, so I would have loved this photograph. I wouldn’t have believed that I made it 10 years ago, nor would I believe that I would have a desire to make an image like this 10 years ago. But I think that if I saw it, I would think it was beautiful. This woman reminds me of my mom. I can’t stress that enough. So I think my first thing would have been this woman reminds me of my mother. And by way of that, these boys around her could be me and my brothers. So I think the familiarity of that would have jumped out to me 10 years ago. I just wouldn’t have known myself to make images like this 10 years ago.
What changed?
I was never really brainwashed by whiteness. I think a lot of black people talk about what woke them up with the implication being at some point they were really indoctrinated and invested into whiteness. I don’t think that I’m any more or less invested or indoctrinated into whiteness than I was before. I was always like, “Yeah, I wanna shoot in Vogue, but I wanna shoot black people in Vogue.” Like, there’s no point where you can go back in my portfolio and be like, “See, back in the day I was only shooting white people because that’s how I thought…” No. It was black people, period. But “I wanna get into Vogue” because Vogue has such a history. I love history. I love the idea of my name going next to the names of the people that I admire and that make me do what I do.
So I think that what changed was understanding that we are actually in a very dire situation, as black people, and that something as small as photos is not that small at all. I think that it does feel like enough to dedicate my life to preserving our history and our culture. And that took a long time to get to, that that’s it. That’s all I wanna do for the rest of my life, and I’m just fine with that. I think that there’s a lot more to that sentiment as well. But I don’t know. I just feel very strongly that there was a moment where I was like, “Well, Vogue doesn’t want us there.” And I know that now, and I’ve worked for Vogue on multiple occasions. And every time that I do it now, I have a deep conversation with myself where like, “Yeah, I’m photographing black people for Vogue and brown people...” Like I photographed Bronx Pride for them, which was really a treat. I was so honored to photograph Bronx Pride. I wasn’t honored to photograph it for Vogue. I was just like, “Okay, that’s an assignment. That’s cute.” We have worked so hard we have worked ourselves to death trying to get into white arms, to get into white spaces, for white people to go, “You know what, you’re good enough to come to Vogue,” and now we get in there, and we see what it’s actually like and just like, “Oh, no, girl, this was a waste of time.” And I don’t want to waste my time. It’s so limited.
So yeah, I think that changed: just understanding that I can do whatever I wanna do with a camera. I can make images like this for the rest of my life. And people will climb all over them when I’m dead and be like, “Oh, this is great. This is fantastic,” if I don’t work for publications now. It’s a challenge every day to turn down jobs and to kind of always be arguing with editors and pushing back and being blacklisted because of this kind of like, “Well, I don’t actually need to work with y’all.” But I also live in the most expensive city in the country, and how do I balance that out? It’s a challenge.
What do you think you’ve learned that’s given you the instinct to take this photo specifically?
Something around confrontation. Maybe that confrontation is not a bad thing. This image always strikes me as a bit confrontational. If I didn’t know the context of it and I didn’t know who made it and it wasn’t me 10 years ago and I just came across this photo, I would have a very positive reaction to the level of confrontation in the image. If you told me that as soon as I made that photograph, the people were like, “Why are you making a picture of us?” — like, if they were yelling at me to not do what I’m doing — I think that there’s a world in which you could maybe believe that with some of the face expressions, even though they do feel a bit posed. My work has become increasingly confrontational as it’s directly facing history, like the intention of making the work is that these people will be entered into history by hook or by crook, as my grandmother would say — not by hook or by crook against their own will but against the canon, against white supremacy trying to keep them out. I don’t know how else to explain it, but I think when I look at this photograph, I would say that confrontation is not a bad thing. And I had to learn that as a photographer, that a confrontational image from a people who deserve to be confrontational can be very powerful.
Where do you see confrontation in this image?
Every time I look at this photograph, I stare at the boy in the middle. Like, I look at him so intensely. He feels protective. I can almost hear him saying, “Why are you making this image?” Which, I’m into. You know. I’m cool with that.
It’s interesting that you’ve talked about how you wanna work in a way where there is the consent of “I’m gonna take your picture. You’re gonna allow me to take your picture,” but you still liked the fact that they might not want you to.
Yes, I’m humored by that especially with young people. If it was just him alone, I would never take the photograph, or make the image, excuse me. Yeah, I think with young people, specifically in a situation like this, it makes me laugh because I have been that young person who didn’t want to take the picture but is like, “Okay, whatever,” and I gotta get in position. And then in watching this unfold, the mother called for the two younger children to come as they were having a wonderful time playing football in the front, and they had to stop enjoying themselves to come stand for this photograph. And stand still while I loaded this old-ass camera that they didn’t know what it was, that they were tryna play with and I wasn’t letting them play with it. There was a whole world around the image that made this boy in the middle’s expression kind of fit his reluctance also, but his reluctance isn’t like the older brother’s reluctance, which is playful and “Come on, get it over with.” His is like, “Mommy made me do this thing, and I really didn’t wanna do it,” which reminds me of my youth. And it reminds me of the kind of youth that we should be working to protect. And for him to feel protective, I dunno. I love it.
To close our conversation, what’s something unrelated to photography that’s been feeding you creatively lately?
I’ve been going for walks a lot. I found out in November that I was diabetic, and that was the day before Thanksgiving ironically. And it was really challenging, and I had to take a look at the way I was not moving. I was catching Ubers every single place for two years and not getting on the train anymore and not getting any cardio. Pandemic, wasn’t going nowhere. I just stopped moving my body. So after this news, I had to change my eating habits, but I also had to move my body. So I’ve gone on walks a lot. A lot of my friends have been converging here to just go with me on walks. When I go by myself it’s actually my favorite now. It’s freezing, but I’ll go out there for, like, two or three hours, and I’ll sit in the park, and I’ll read Baldwin — usually Baldwin, or the script that I’m working on. So going to the park and sitting and reading and being quiet and just watching. Sometimes I bring a camera, and sometimes I don’t. I guess that is related to photography a bit, but I rarely make pictures. It really is just about sitting. I also try to just not do anything. I feel it’s so odd for me to just sit and watch. It feels like people are going to perceive me as a creep. So I’ve been really practicing that and just kind of accepting, “Okay, people are going to think this is weird,” because they do. People are just watching me, and I’m just lookin’ out, lookin’ at the kids playing basketball, lookin’ at people walking their dogs, lookin’ at the cars drive past and how nice it is to just kind of sit. I’ve been in New York for almost seven years, and imagine that I’ve never just sat and looked, ever.
Interviewed on February 11, 2021.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)
Links:
Gioncarlo Valentine
”Gioncarlo Valentine: The Beautiful Confusion” by Luis G Santos