Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 00:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects!, where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the exhibits team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. And I’ll be your host. Today I’m speaking with Wendel White, a photographer, educator, cultural worker, and the 2021 recipient of the Peabody Museum’s Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography. We recently opened his exhibition, Manifest: Thirteen Colonies at the Peabody. It’s a powerful photographic engagement with African American material culture, housed in collections throughout the 13 original United States colonies and Washington DC. He explains that his photographs are a response to the collective physical remnants of the American concept and representation of race. Here he is! Wendel White, welcome to the show!
Wendel White 01:14
Thank you. Thanks very much.
Jennifer Berglund 01:21
You started your photography career in high school. Tell me the story of how that began. And how did those early days influence the photographer you are today?
Wendel White 01:31
It was a really a wonderful experience. I had an art teacher by the name of Vernon Maxwell. He was primarily a ceramicist. But for some reason, he really was interested in photography. And at some point, he showed me a documentary film about the work in the life of Dorothea Lange. And I was really fascinated by her work, by the whole period of time of documentary expression during the 1930s. Not sure why that fascinated me so much. And so that really was what drew me into a kind of fascination with photography. And there was a dark room and traditional processes, so film and darkroom setup at the high school. So I was able to kind of make those sorts of photographs that Lange had been making. And that was an interesting, I think, part of photography at that time when I started was that, for many decades, photography hadn’t changed radically, it was still predominantly a black and white medium, it was still entirely an analog medium, and notwithstanding commercial photography and color, and all of that sort of thing. But, you know, the vast majority of museum exhibitions were still all black-and-white photography and gallery exhibitions. So it really was, I felt, this connection to this period of time that was many decades before my life and before the moment that I was looking at these photographs. But I was also just transfixed by that way in which that process unfolded her ideas about the role of photography, and in terms of telling stories, in a sense, and telling stories about people’s lives. And of course, I’ve since then come to have much more complex ways of thinking about that photography at that time. But for a teenager, it was, you know, still quite a remarkable experience. And I already knew about the work of Gordon Parks. And I had looked at the work of Gordon Parks, and was very much on my mind as an African American, especially, I think, as a teenager, for me. We were still in a period of time where there were so few opportunities for African Americans in all forms of life that there was this real sense of attention on anyone that sort of stood out or who had significant accomplishment, whether it was a lawyer or Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, or somebody on a television show, or a practitioner, like a photographer, like Gordon Parks, working for Life Magazine. So all of those things really stood out in a very specific way at that time because they were so solitary, in that sense.
Jennifer Berglund 04:22
Then as you progressed as a photographer, what stories did you become interested in telling about the Black experience?
Wendel White 04:31
By the time I was in my first year of college, we had one of our first family reunions, and I photographed that as an event. And so that was a little bit of a departure from some of the other photographs that I made in the family, but by the time I actually wound up moving back to New Jersey, I had lived in New Jersey, and then I was in New York and Texas. By the time I moved back to New Jersey, I had been working on different kinds of projects, mostly personal introspective kinds of things, street photography. So I was just looking at things, a kind of visual response to the world around me. I did make, I did work on a more extended project in Brooklyn and New Jersey on the industrial landscape. And I made a number of images of that of the industrial areas. Now, many of those areas have gentrified in Brooklyn. So the Guan is a canal and Red Hook and places where nobody lived at the top. But I was making the photograph, they were still in industry. And then out as far as Pennsylvania, to Centralia, Pennsylvania, where the coal mine fires still burn today. And those kinds of places that were very solitary, there was something meditative about that for me. But it was coming back to New Jersey, that I learned about this historically black town called Whitesboro, New Jersey, that I really then turned my camera towards a Black community that I didn’t know well. So I was for the first time photographing, not my family members and people that I knew family and friends, but trying to make photographs in a community setting, using all those skills that I had acquired, and trying to connect and think about what kind of pictures I would make. And so when I started there, that became the beginning of Small Towns, Black Lives, which became really the first book publication of my work and, and large scale exhibition. But I had no idea when I started that it would become a big, long, multi-year project. And it was really the first of a number of multi-year projects. So it was really foundational for me. And it really has in it the seeds of many different projects that follow. And so I was primarily photographing people. But while I was doing that, I was interested in the landscape, the architecture, the artifacts that I would come across from in different people’s households. And the settings that I was photographing in, I wound up photographing a map, I — in order to tell part of the story — I photographed headstones that were left behind in cemeteries in place, in particular, in a place where there was no community anymore. And so that second set of photographs in small towns, which was Port Republic, really was kind of a predecessor of my interest in the archive. There were five headstones in this little cemetery that belonged to former US Colored Troops. There was no longer a Black community in that area, and so I became really fascinated with — Where did — Why were these black people buried here? I discovered that there had been a community. I traveled to the National Archive to gather up information and, and reconstruct the story of this community as best I could. And so that is this, you know, it really was the foundation of my interest in bringing research into the process of making photographs, so when I started in Whitesboro, I just really was meeting people listening to their stories, photographing the town, in a sense, but when I did the Port Republic photographs, it meant I had to, you know, do some research in order to find out what had happened to this community. And what were these artifacts that were left behind? In this case, the artifacts were just this handful of headstones that had once been part of an antebellum Black community that had been settled there in southern New Jersey. I worked on it for, I think, 13 years, a total of 13. I started in 1989, and it went through 2002.
Jennifer Berglund 09:00
Wow. There’s another project that you worked on that has since become sort of the topic for a class that you teach the Red Summer Project. Can you tell me about that?
Wendel White 09:11
I was an artist in residence at the Bemis Center in Omaha. During that time, I was photographing artifacts and collections. And one of the artifacts I came across was this photograph of the lynching of Will Brown, which took place in 1919. And I gradually started to because now I was really in research mode, I wanted to know more about it, more about 1919. And it — it opened up this whole narrative about these violent upheavals that took place in the American landscape, primarily around 1919, which James Weldon Johnson labeled Red Summer, but were happening throughout that period of time. And gradually, as I started to have interest in this, I started to travel to find out where these events had taken place, travel to those sites, and make photographs. And it started in Omaha. I found out exactly where the lynching took place, which was right downtown Omaha in front of City Hall. And then there’s a famous photograph of — of Will Brown’s body burned in an intersection a few blocks away with a crowd standing around, sort of in a celebratory way, saying, you know, we’ve completed our retribution of this offense that took place, which was not particularly violent. We would think of it today as a mugging. And so I became interested in trying to track these locations down. So I made those photographs. And while I was in the West, I went to two other locations while I was on that trip, and I photographed in Longview, Texas, and I photographed in Elaine, Arkansas, and those sites, then I now have these three sites. And that was the beginning of working on this project that eventually evolved into a set of photographs from San Francisco to New London, Connecticut, and a variety of locations in between, as far north as Chicago, and as far south as Bisbee, Arizona, which is just a couple miles north of the border between Arizona and Mexico, and all throughout the South in particular, and the Midwest, etc. So it’s a very wide-ranging set of events in which black communities were attacked, and individuals were attacked. Also, there are a number of days of — of violence in Washington DC. So the locations of this — these events were both in major cities, but also taking place in — in very rural settings like Elaine, Arkansas, which is a was a farming community, still very small farming community, at the — at the sort of corner of the state in that regard. And I gradually started to bring newspaper clippings into it because I — my research was taking me to newspapers from the period of time to find out initially where these events took place, but then also to find out more about how they were perceived in the popular press. And so then I began juxtaposing these newspapers. And so that became an archival and contemporary process at the same time. So it was both about the images and words that were created in the beginning of the 20th century around 1919, and also about what these places look like, and the way in which they evoke a kind of historical memory for what was taking place during that period of time. And that, then, as you referenced, I was invited to shape that into a class for the graduate program in American Studies at the University where I’m teaching.
Jennifer Berglund 13:13
How do you approach the topic with your students? How do you use it as a learning experience?
Wendel White 13:17
I am always cautious about characterizing myself and you know, in the same as, as a scholar, but people are, you know, often enough pushback on that, too, based on the amount of work I do in terms of thinking about these things and trying to.
Jennifer Berglund 13:34
I think that’s fair.
Wendel White 13:35
Extract this information. But I also wanted to come at it and bring something different for the students who were doing a mostly traditional scholarship and the other courses that they were taking for this degree program. And so what I wanted to do was ask them to think about gathering the material doing the research, but instead of putting it together in a strictly narrative form, to put it together as an exhibition, so that each time I’ve taught it, I assign individual students individual sites that took place during the 1919 events, and sort of send them out there to do the research about everything surrounding it. So they find out the histories of the individual people involved and other material that was taking place and the newspaper articles and anything else that might have been connected to it, looking for historical photographs of a wide range of things and bring that together in what I’ve been using is an online application called Art Steps, which allows you to actually create a 3d model of a gallery space. And so they’re able to put all this material on the wall, but they’re also able to add annotations to all of that material, so there’s a photograph on the wall of maybe Will Brown, let’s say, from — from Omaha, and clicking on that photograph will bring up a whole page of text that the student has created about their research. So they aren’t avoiding, in a sense, working with the context that goes along with all of this. There, it’s just happening in — in more multimedia kind of an environment. It also, the application also allows you to add audio, so some students read their presentations as it goes throughout. And it allows for the inclusion of 3d models. And so some students have gone out and found 3d models of various kinds of things that are associated with the events.
Jennifer Berglund 15:43
Like what?
Wendel White 15:44
A common one has been the articles will often refer to the weaponry, for instance, that’s being used by the government, against the population to kind of suppress some of the events, and so that one, people have been able to go out and find, you know, 3d models of early machine guns and things like that, that may have been used. In Charleston, the event was precipitated by a group of sailors that had been in the harbor and created a conflict with the Black community. And so one of the students went out and then found out what — what ship was likely there, being described in newspaper events have been the most common kinds of things that have been brought into the exhibition.
Jennifer Berglund 17:03
So I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about the show that you have coming up at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology as your — as part of your Gardener Fellowship. So tell me about that work and what was the foundation upon which this work was built? And how did you adapt your idea for the Peabody?
Wendel White 17:25
When I was in Omaha, I was working on these images in collections out there, that was a continuation of an experience that I had in Rochester, New York. I had gone to Rochester as a visiting faculty member at RIT, And in having that opportunity to go there, I thought, well, this would be a great time to think about a new project. And the project that I thought about, that I was interested in, was the formation of the Niagara Movement, which then later becomes the NAACP, and which their first meetings took place on the Canadian side of the falls, on the other side from Buffalo. And so — and I also was interested in the fact that Harriet Tubman had a place in St. Catharines on the other side of the falls. And so I thought that there were going to be some landscape-based and architecturally-based images here, that I would be interested in pulling together to think about early 20th century, 19th century and I also was interested in the fact that Harriet Tubman had a place in St. Catharines on the other side of the falls. And so I thought that there were going to be some landscape-based and architecturally-based images here, that I would be interested in pulling together to think about early 20th century, 19th century, and early 20th century Black life. But in doing so, I was also interested in Frederick Douglass because he’s buried in Rochester, and I started doing a little research and I went to the University of Rochester, where they had in their special collection, the first book that Douglass purchased after he became free of slavery, and then a lock of Douglass’s hair. And they were really kind and generous with me and allowed me to photograph and actually, I didn’t, I was unhappy with my first photographs, and they let me come back and photograph again. And so it was a great beginning because I got to sort of think about how I would want to photograph material held in these collections. And so I just basically abandoned the previous idea of the landscape photographs and then spent the rest of the time that I was there as a visiting faculty member, I only I was just teaching one class as a visiting faculty member, you know, looking at various collections in upstate New York. And so I traveled from all the way to Syracuse on — in the eastern side, and all the way to Jamestown on the western side and photographed in different collections. I went to Buffalo and Jamestown and made photographs and collections there. And that really became the foundation of me beginning to think about, okay, I would like to make photographs of the record of Black life as it exists in the archives of various institutions. And so that set me off on that project. I then proposed to do that, to continue that for the Bemis center. And as part of my artist residency, I had known and this is where my artistic life connects with my cultural worker life. I had been in Omaha, as part of a conference for the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, all the state humanities councils come together. And so I had been there. And that’s when I learned of the Bemis center and learned of some of the material and began thinking about I don’t know whether I had it in mind or not, but that Malcolm X was from Omaha, and all of these kinds of things that sort of collided for me in my mind and made me think that there would be material there that I would be interested in. And I did some preliminary research, and I knew there were collections and that the collections had information about Black lives. So I really got a chance to spend three months there looking at different collections. And I wound up traveling from Des Moines, Iowa, out to Grand Island, Nebraska, so and photographing all the way in between. That led other small projects in different places, photographing in collections. And then when the opportunity came and I was nominated, initially, for the Robert Gardner fellowship. And part of that nomination was to submit a proposal for what I might do with the fellowship and how I would work on it. I had been already thinking about the upcoming 250th anniversary of 1776. I had been involved in another project with artists doing some preliminary research material related to that. And I thought that this would be an opportunity to create a specific set of images for Manifest around the 13 original English colonies, and the degree to which that was going to be another inflection point in our history, in terms of thinking about defining race, defining the roles of the different so-called races within American society, primarily Black and White, and the continuation of slavery, a range of different things are happening at that point. And I thought that would be particularly interesting with this sort of upcoming anniversary, but also as a way of reflecting backward on the 1619 project and thinking about how that particular inflection point is thinking about the origins of enslavement and the attitude towards the use of enslaved labor as an economic tool in the United States. And then, this moment a century and a half later, in which the United States is now, you know, forming a civil society in a very specific way and further addressing that question. And in order to keep that whole society together, it obviously everybody knows that it was essential to say, Okay, well, especially for the southern states, you will be able to continue using enslaved labor. So I thought that was going to be an opportunity to then look at these collections within those 13 colonies. So from New Hampshire to Georgia, looking at what sits inside some collections, and it’s not meant to be exhaustive, but it is meant to touch on each of those locations. And in addition to what are now 13 distinct states that — I also include Washington, DC, which takes a little time to form — but I had the opportunity at the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, to photograph for Smithsonian Magazine, a number of objects that were going to be on display in the new museum. And so, along the way, we thought, you know, that should be part of it. It sits within that and it also is a kind of interesting pivot point to be thinking about these colonies and then the civil society that gets formed around a nation.
Jennifer Berglund 24:52
Tell me a little bit more about your process, and specifically how you approach photography within museum collections.
Wendel White 25:01
One of the things that has been really important to me is that I wanted to really convey something about what the experience was like, because that was the piece that was overwhelming almost to me back in Rochester at the University of Rochester was sitting at the table and having a piece of Frederick Douglass body in front of me on the table and having this book in which he inscribes the story as he passes it on to his son, about this particular book and why it was important to him and all the weight that that carries, especially in the context of education and the idea, simplistic idea, but nevertheless idea, that for most enslaved people, in most places, learning to read learning to write was illegal or not permitted, or any one of those things that essentially was a tool for keeping people from advancing themselves and becoming too capable of independent thought, in that sense. And that we know that didn’t work. But nevertheless, it — I feel like any, the books and the narratives and the writing are all part of that experience. So, in making the photographs, I want to find ways to replicate it and experience, but at the same time, I’m interested in a series of ideas about these objects. And I wanted to set them apart from the kind of photograph that the archive might make as descriptive evidence of the thing in the collection. So we know, sort of, what those photographs look like, whether they’re really beautifully professionally made, or they’re just made by somebody who they just stick a camera in their hand and say, let’s take a picture, they’re meant to be clear, sharp, detailed photographs of the object and with varying levels of quality, they generally accomplish that whether they have a professional look to them, or they just seem functional in some way. And I wanted to make a photograph that had a much different set of layers to it, and one of those layers is that I wanted to create something that evoked the passage of time, my relationship to the object as something that has come out of the past, that I would experience, a way of seeing the object, a way of thinking about the almost always partially obscured narratives of Black life in the United States, the way in which we learn these things all the time. I was just watching the news and learned about a woman who was a lawyer and a prosecutor in New York that helped take down some of the early mafia mobs in New York in the early 20th century. And I felt like, I don’t I didn’t know anything about this. And she was sort of like the only woman in her law school and all of these other kinds of things that just were remarkable about her and the only woman working in the law office in the prosecutor’s office at the time. And the only Black woman, of course, but it just was, you know, is for many of us, I think, an ongoing experience of Oh, there’s another story that was hidden from us. I think the wonderfully titled, story of Hidden Figures in terms of the idea that these women had these roles that and, and the story was hidden from us, in a sense, and were, in a sense, hidden at the time. And so that’s the same kind of experience that’s ongoing. And so as I go from collection to collection, sometimes I’m seeing things that I know a lot about, but sometimes I’m seeing things that I don’t know anything about. And so it’s both of these things, and I want that quality to be very much invoked in the photographs that I’m making. And so that’s a way of thinking about why they look the way they look. The result is I use shallow focus. And the shallow focus results in only one part of the image being in focus. And part of that is also a suggestion to the viewer, that there’s more to know about this thing, and that I’m kind of leaving that piece up to the viewer. I’m also interested in the physicality of these materials, not just the content of them. So, the life that the object has lived, in a sense, so this object has lived some sort of life, and the experiences of the object being held being transferred being stored in a basement somewhere, eventually being put in a public collection. Everything that’s happened to it creates an appearance in the object. And so I wanted to spend more of my energy looking at the appearance of the object, how does it, you know, what is it that makes that characteristic specific? So the result is, as I say, I isolate the objects and put them on a piece of black velvet. So they all are, they’re no, they’re not in their individual collections. They’re in my collection, essentially. And every one is against this black background. But I title every one with the name of the collection and the location of the collection that the object sits in. So there’s no mystery about where the object is, I’m not interested in withholding that information, essentially. So each one is this particular object located in this collection or library, in this city and state, so that is the format that I’ve used for titling my works. And all of that, I feel like, creates a rich, layered way of thinking about these objects and the opportunity to address both the painful and aspirational aspects of Black experience at any point in time in our history. And that’s another important piece of it. Unlike Red Summer, where I had a very prescribed timeframe I was looking at, in ultimately, looked at 1919 to 1923. With Manifest, there is no prescription, so I will make photographs of things that I find from the earliest moments of Africans arriving in the New World, so to speak, to the most contemporary kinds of things that exist in collections. And so there’s a photograph of the ceremonial coffin that was used after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. And there are early Bible pages, actually, that were used to record the population of free White and enslaved Black people in Newport, Rhode Island, written on a Bible page, brought over from England, published in the 16th century, so the whole possible range of what I could come across, but I don’t and but it’s not prescribed in any way, so I just sort of look for the things that I can encounter, and hopefully make the point that all of these are interconnected.
Jennifer Berglund 32:38
When this exhibit opens and people are able to see this work, what do you hope the audience takes away from the exhibition?
Wendel White 32:47
I think, and this is something I wound up at, sort of late in the process of putting the book together, which is now actually up on the co-publishers website as being available for preorder, so I’m very excited that we’ve gotten…
Jennifer Berglund 33:03
And the name is?
Wendel White 33:04
The name is Manifest: Thirteen Colonies at Radius Books. In putting it together, I wrote a very short essay, almost not even an essay about what I was doing and why I was doing it. And late in the process, I went back and made a revision because one of the things that happened in putting the book together and putting the exhibition together was that I really recognized and I had been thinking about this, I think, but I really recognized that I was creating a particular iteration of images, and that the museum comes back to me next year, and said, Let’s do this, again, I would probably have a different set of images that I would select from the larger body of work, right? So from the Thirteen Colonies piece, there are 3 or 400 images that you know, I made. And then we whittled that down to about 200, some images for the — for the publication, and 46 images for the exhibition. So each of these is a version of what I’m thinking at the moment. But all of them are versions of both which images resonate for me in terms of the ideas within the images, conveying a sense of the breadth of the project, so I wanted to certainly have images that were reflected the early history of what I had encountered, as well as the more contemporary moments. I wanted to have photographs that represented the range of types of material. So I photographed shoes, I photographed a cornerstone from a church, I photographed the you know, the Zealy daguerreotypes. I photographed other daguerreotypes, I photographed books — a lot of books — and a lot of other material: clothing made by enslaved people, a corsage that was reserved by a significant educational figure, college president in South Carolina, and the collection at the College of Charleston. They don’t know what the particular event was. And so that’s a wonderfully anonymous, but yet clearly connected to some sort of joyful or celebratory event in some way. And that it — this little dried flower corsage has lasted all the time that it took for me to get in front of it and take a photograph. And so I want those really small kinds of tender experiences to be combined with also the significant painful experiences of photographs of the — the equipment in the form of collars and shackles that were used to control enslaved people, a shard of stained glass from the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. All of those kinds of things are really important. There are lots of other images that could serve that purpose, but it’s important, from my point of view, to allow for light and air to fall on the wound so that it begins to heal, so that we begin to address it. So we could ignore the wound and then it just festers more. And I think, unfortunately, we are at a moment where there is a tension within the society, which is, we will get better if we just ignore the wound on one side. And there’s the idea that we want to address the wound on the other side. And in all of that, I also am concerned with the notion that in Black life in the United States, there’s been so much painful parts to the history, that we have to be careful, in a sense, that we don’t obliterate the joy, right, and that we only talk about the painful parts. And so that’s what I hope that I was able to sort of bring together is both the sadness and the celebration of what these various archives represent. And there are a wide variety, of course, you know, made photographs in libraries, in museums and historical societies. And they’re all very different. They’re all very different kinds of experiences, in terms of encountering this material. And often at the end of the day, you know, it’s very tiring, especially if I’m at a collection. Yeah, photographing things that are very painful. And I noticed the Wall Street Journal had an article about the — the Mutter Museum today and the struggle that they’re going through with, you know, accepting donations and re-evaluating. And that’s another place where I photographed. It could be seen as one of the most painful places that I photographed, but I can’t say that absolutely. Sometimes a document, a bill of sale for an enslaved person is just as painful as looking at a skull that somebody’s written the word Negro on, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a physical thing in the sense of a part of the body, it also is painful to know that, you know, just we did these business transactions, or I came across an insurance document at Duke University for an enslaved person. And so, when you think about it, if you are thinking of enslaved people as property, like any other property, you might buy insurance. And so, you know, this was from a Connecticut insurance company that was insuring enslaved people in North Carolina, for a plantation. And so that really reinforces the sense of property in that not only did you buy a person, but you buying protection for the fact that something might happen to this property in this way. And so it’s not life insurance. It’s property insurance, right? Yes. Yeah. Distinction, right?
Jennifer Berglund 39:14
When was this? What…
Wendel White 39:15
I think it was — it was 19th century. So it was already nine. It was 19th century? Yeah.
Jennifer Berglund 39:22
So slavery would have been illegal in Connecticut. And it’s the Connecticut insurance company that’s insuring enslaved property.
Wendel White 39:32
That part wasn’t illegal. Just as you know, I’m in New Jersey, and New Jersey, voted against the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, because the factories in North Jersey had, as their primary customers, all of the plantations in the South, right? So they were very tied from a business point of view. And there were still some enslaved people in New Jersey, I think up until the 1830s or so, even though it’s phased out, but it was until the end of this person’s life or whatever, there were all these little caveats about the way in which slavery ended. But, certainly, there were no more new people newly being enslaved. But the population and the emphasis was, wait a second, but our businesses depend on those businesses. And so there was a kind of an allegiance to the South in many parts of New Jersey.
Jennifer Berglund 40:38
Wendel White, thank you so much for sharing yourself and your work with us. I am just so excited to see your show. And I hope everyone out there takes the opportunity to visit the Peabody Museum and see what you have accomplished.
Wendel White 40:53
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.
Jennifer Berglund 41:01
Today’s HMSC Connects podcast was produced by me, Jennifer Berglund, and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture. Special thanks to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and to Wendel White for his wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you’d like today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you in a few weeks!