28 American Art | Fall 2014 Jacob Lawrence, Taboo, 1963. Tempera on Hardboard, 27 3/4 X 31 7/8 In. Philadelphia Museum of Ar

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Jacob Lawrence, Taboo, 1963. Tempera on hardboard, 27 3/4 x 31 7/8 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of the Zelda and Josef Jaffe Family © 2014 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

28 American Art | Fall 2014 Confronting Taboo Photography and the Art of Jacob Lawrence

Tanya Sheehan Taboo (frontispiece) is one of the many works in tempera that Jacob Lawrence produced during the civil rights movement. The scant writing on the painting notes the vibrant colors and characteristically planar style that the African American modernist used to render his figures. It also reads those figures as two pairs of newlyweds, participating in a double wedding.1 On the left, a man in a black top hat and suit with white gloves and fair facial skin tones stands arm in arm with his bride, a woman with a dark brown face who wears pearls and a white dress, the sharp folds of which cast pink shadows whose color is picked up by her bouquet of flowers. On the right, the bride and groom are arranged and clothed similarly, although there are marked differences in coloration; this man has a dark complexion, while the woman has a much lighter face, and her dress and flowers are predominantly yellow. The work’s title encourages viewers to read the four figures—two “black” and two “white”—as having challenged the taboo against interracial marriage. In 1963, when Lawrence painted Taboo, antimiscegenation laws were still in effect in the United States, particularly in the South, which made the act depicted not only a social transgression but also a felony.2 Read in that context, Taboo celebrates the two couples’ courage in the face of adversity and thus serves as one of many meditations on miscegenation in African American art of the period.3 When I first saw Taboo at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I was struck by something that seemed at odds with this interpretation, something that reminded me of my research on early American photography. I could not help but associate the painting’s horizontal, rectangular frame and pair of arches with the unique format of photographic stereoviews (fig. 1). These rectangular pieces of cardboard, to which two nearly identical photographs were attached, were intended to be looked at through a binocular instrument known as a stereoscope. Seen through such a device, the images on the card appeared as a single three-dimensional picture, offering up spectacular sights of landscapes and peoples from the United States and around the world. Stereoviews were immensely popular among white middle-class Americans between the 1850s and the 1920s but were falling out of favor as a form of home entertainment during Lawrence’s youth. Could the painter have set the figures in Taboo within a stereoview, I wondered? If so, what would it mean to reinterpret Taboo in photographic terms? To begin, it would suggest that we are not looking at a double wedding at all but instead at a picture of a single couple, duplicated and juxtaposed. The shadow depicted on the left edge of each arch is certainly con- sistent with the repetitions characteristic of the stereographic format. So, too, are the

Vol. 28, No. 3 © 2014 Smithsonian Institution American Art | Fall 2014 29 changes visible across the two depictions of the couple—such as the position of the man’s hands and the folds of the woman’s dress—since the component photographs of a stereoview were taken by a camera whose dual lenses were positioned precisely two and a half inches apart to mimic human vision. It was the recombination of those photographs in a binocular viewer that yielded the desired three-dimensional effect. Taboo, therefore, may be a modernist interpretation of this early photographic form—one that, I will argue, was charged with political implications.4 1 Underwood & Underwood, Scholars have only begun to explore the ways photography acted on and through The Stereograph as an Educator, Lawrence’s oeuvre. They have done so by noting similar subject matter in Lawrence’s ca. 1901. Albumen prints mounted on stereocard, 3 x paintings and contemporary documentary photography, especially the work produced 6 in. or larger on 3 1/2 x 7 in. by white photographers under the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the mount. Library of Congress, Depression era. In her recent book Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-08781 for example, Patricia Hills cited the resemblances between the artist’s series The Migration of the Negro (1940–41), consisting of sixty captioned panels, and published collections of FSA photographs that recorded the lives of “ordinary” people across the United States, from Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938) to Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Because of their combination of image and text and their sharp focus on social transformations in the black community, Hills observed a special connection between Lawrence’s Migration paintings and the book 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941), the result of a collaboration between the author Richard Wright and the photographer Edwin Rosskam.5 Press photographs depicting lunch counter sit-ins, efforts to desegregate public schools, Freedom Rides through the Deep South, resistance to police brutality, and other activities associated with the civil rights movement seem to have “triggered” later paintings, as Hills put it. Thus, we can read Lawrence’s Ordeal of Alice (1963, private collection) as conversing with a widely cir- culated news photograph by Pete Harris, which captured the harassment of a young black woman (Elizabeth Eckford) as she and eight others tried to attend Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. American Revolution (1963, private collection), moreover, refers to the famous pictures of police dogs and black protestors taken by the photojournalists Charles Moore and Bill Hudson in Birmingham, Alabama.6 Taboo is certainly part of that story, in which easel paintings and published news photographs contributed to public representations of black struggle and survival. In fact, it was included in Lawrence’s first solo show at Terry Dintenfass’s gallery in New York in 1963 alongside Ordeal of Alice and other artworks that engaged with the visual culture of the civil rights movement. It also belongs to another story, in which photographs repre- sented and functioned within private lives. The stereoview is one of many photographic forms that historians have described as vernacular, a category comprising apparently ordinary objects that belong to the material and visual culture of the everyday. In Lawrence’s world, those objects included commercial studio portraits and amateur snapshots of sentimental value to black families, framed and hung on walls or inserted in albums and viewed within homes; they were honorific depictions of quotidian black life that sustained and celebrated the African American community. Or, in the case of the stereoview, they

30 American Art | Fall 2014 were images produced outside that community that nevertheless exerted an influence on it—fantasies of domestic life that were manufactured for the viewing pleasure of a white middle class. In unpacking the layers of Taboo, the following pages shift the current conversation about Lawrence and photography to ask, how and to what ends did his engagement with photography incorporate specifically vernacular practices? Exploring that question involves looking closely at the largely unexamined references to such practices in paintings by Lawrence, beginning with his rendering of a Harlem street scene titled The Photographer (1942). This essay looks further into what Hills has dubbed the “thick context” out of which his work emerged, a context composed of the “complex interaction of events, of the visual and oral culture of Harlem, of people important to his artistic life”—and, I would add, a framework in which photography played an especially important role.7 My aims are thus twofold: to shed new light on an understudied aspect of Lawrence’s painting; and to expand our understanding of how and why modern African American art has reached across the history of photography.

Eyes of a Camera

“The streets of Harlem—their movement, the people, the local color, and the sounds— became a bottomless source of visual and spiritual inspiration for Lawrence,” Leslie King-Hammond notes of the artist’s early paintings in the exhibition catalogue Over the Line. “His ability to tell the story of a community visually revealed his capacity for observation and acute attention to detail.” Choosing an apt metaphor for the subject at hand, King-Hammond concluded: “Everywhere Lawrence went, his eyes were a camera, and scene after scene fed his artistic appetite.”8 Other scholars have similarly portrayed the artist as an active spectator of life in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s, noting that the subjects he saw there made their way into his artwork. Lawrence was, of course, not alone in closely observing and documenting his neighborhood, which was undergoing profound social and technological changes at the time. As the literary historian Sara Blair has pointed out, Harlem after 1935 became “a site that afforded charged visual opportunities, spectacles, evidence, found objects, and decisive moments”—moments that were recorded with unprecedented regularity by men (and some women) armed with cameras, eager to shoot.9 Among these photographers were those hired by the federal government to record urban and rural life by seeking out the “decisive moments” in daily life and to share those visions with the middle-class readers of illustrated magazines and visitors to major art museums. So it was in Life and the Museum of Modern Art that Jacob Lawrence would have encountered documentary photographs of Harlem during his early career. Like the subjects of Blair’s study—Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright—and indeed like “virtually every African American writer of national significance during the postwar period,” the Harlem artist produced work at the time that would have been unthinkable without his engagement with these public images.10 Seeing FSA photographs on the printed page and the gallery wall was not Lawrence’s only significant exposure to photography in the 1930s and 1940s, however. Much of his early artistic education was documented by local photographers with whom he would have interacted; among them was James Latimer Allen, who took pictures of the meet- ings of the Harlem Art Workshop at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). At the library, moreover, Lawrence had access to rich visual archives that supported and supplemented his own observations of Harlem—in the Division of Negro Literature, History, and

American Art | Fall 2014 31 Prints (founded in 1925), in the Arthur A. Schomburg Collection (opened in 1927), and in the general research collection. According to Deborah Willis, former curator at the Schomburg Center, the librarian Catherine Latimer maintained a collection of clippings from newspapers and magazines that “contained crucial and interesting visual references” for Lawrence, while the “Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) Photographic File had a large collection of photographs of migrant workers and southern scenes.”11 Scholars have acknowledged the importance of these materials to the early history series that Lawrence created, from The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1938) to Struggle . . . From the History of the American People (1954–56). It is certainly compelling to compare panels from The Life of Harriet Tubman (1940) to published photographs of Tubman, to scenes of lynching printed in newspapers of the 1930s, or to photographs of chain gang prisoners by the FSA photographer Margaret Bourke-White as Hills did in Painting Harlem Modern.12 In her discussion of the 2 Portrait of Jacob Lawrence with Schomburg Center’s history, though, Willis notes briefly that there was much more his mother, brother, William, and sister, Geraldine, 1923. Gelatin available to Lawrence in the library’s photographic files when he was conducting research silver print mounted on postcard there—namely, “studio portraits, snapshots, and street portraits of Harlem families.”13 stock. Courtesy of The Jacob and There are, of course, meaningful differences between “public” and “vernacular” Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence representations of blackness, as Willis explained to readers of American Art in 2003. Foundation © 2014 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Reflecting on her own early experiences in north Philadelphia in the 1950s and 1960s, Foundation, Seattle she recalled being photographed by family and friends, collecting those pictures in an album, and “noting how different our lives were from the televised and published images,” which she remembered as rarely containing images of everyday black life. If the press did illustrate the African American community, Willis added, it “focused on crime, welfare, and the struggle for equal education,” not on familial affection, personal history, visions of beauty, or expressions of joy. Looking farther back at the early years of Life magazine, Patricia Raub supported this personal assessment with sociological research; few of its photo-essays before World War II featured black subjects, and those that did often relied on racial stereotype and expressed a political stance that was contradictory at best, since the magazine wavered between ridiculing and sympathizing with people of color.14 As an artist and a historian, Willis found a way around the photographic invisibility of black realities in the mainstream media through “photographs of the family, pictures that func- tion as biography and autobiography.” These objects became for her “an important way to reenter the past and to comment on societal issues.”15 We can imagine that Lawrence approached vernacular black photography similarly, allowing it to inform his reflections on African American experiences within and outside his history series. Like Willis, and like so many other Americans, his earliest vernacular photographic experiences came at a young age. Some studio portraits of Lawrence and his family, for instance, survive from his childhood in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Figure 2 is one of those images, from 1923, printed on postcard stock and inscribed on the verso with the sitters’ names by a member of Lawrence’s family. In the photo Lawrence (at left) poses with his mother, brother, William, and sister, Geraldine in front of a painted backdrop.

32 American Art | Fall 2014 3 Jacob Lawrence, The Photographer, In his early depictions of Harlem we can see traces of his personal encounters with 1942. Watercolor, gouache, and photography, but we also witness invocations of the Schomburg Center’s photographic graphite on paper, 22 1/8 x 30 1/2 in. The Metropolitan Museum of archive—both its documentary and vernacular components. Art, Purchase, Lila Acheson Consider The Photographer, a painting from 1942 filled with apparently commonplace Wallace Gift, 2001 © 2014 The urban activities (fig. 3). These include several forms of manual labor: two men work in Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists a manhole, one loads tagged sacks of goods into a wagon that he will ostensibly push Rights Society (ARS), New York. himself, another wagon (this one horse-drawn) transports a brass bed, and a man in Image courtesy, Art Resource, N.Y. overalls carries a basket on his shoulder. Symbolizing the black professional, two figures in dark suits, one carrying a briefcase, stand in the foreground. Flanking them are the photographer and his subjects: a finely dressed African American family posing stiffly for the camera. The racial identity of the photographer is indicated only by the blackness of his hand gripping the shutter release cable; his face remains hidden under a focusing cloth. It might be tempting to read this figure as that of Gordon Parks, one of the few African Americans associated with the FSA and whose work with the agency began the same year Lawrence executed The Photographer. His apparatus, however, suggests other- wise; it is a bulky box camera that required the use of the focusing cloth, a tripod, and single sheets of film—not one of the portable 35mm cameras then favored by most FSA photographers (with the notable exception of Walker Evans).

American Art | Fall 2014 33 The family’s formal poses for the camera indicate their obvious awareness of the operator’s presence as well as his disinterest in capturing the “spectacles” or “decisive moments” associated with illustrations printed in Life or Look. Indeed, the eight rectangular forms attached to the box camera—samples of the man’s craft, arranged in a fan-like display for potential customers—confirm that we are witnessing a portrait photographer going about his daily business. Lawrence’s figure is an itinerant portraitist who worked in the street and likely specialized in tintypes, or direct positive impressions on thin sheets of iron; he developed his pictures on the spot, as the box of materials at his feet suggests, and his low prices attracted clients of both meager and modest means.16 Here, then, was an unnamed and truly vernacular photographer, a figure with whom Lawrence, living in Harlem, would have been entirely familiar; indeed, Lawrence was probably the subject of a street portrait at some point in his life. However common among Lawrence’s own experiences the scene in The Photographer may have been, the documentary photographic archive still captured his attention and

34 American Art | Fall 2014 imagination. I say this because on many occasions the figure of the African American itinerant portraitist found itself before the lens of Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, and others working for the FSA.17 To better understand the perspective that Lawrence adopted in The Photographer, it is useful to compare the painting to Lee’s Street Photographer, New York (fig. 4). Hills established a connection between the two image makers when she noted an “uncanny resemblance” between another work by Lawrence, Often Three Families Share One Toilet (fig. 5), and a photograph by Lee titled in the FSA archive Toilet in the Basement of an Apartment House Rented to Negroes. Chicago, Illinois (fig. 6) and published in 12 Million Black Voices.18 Although I would hesitate to call the resemblance uncanny, The Photographer and Street Photographer, New York both depict multiple forms of work in a single street scene (photography, boot-blacking, and the pharmacy business, in the case of Lee’s image) and both render a photographic situa- tion. Like Lawrence’s figure, Lee’s portraitist leans over his box camera to look through its lens, one hand reaching toward the apparatus, and one foot positioned before the other. With the exception of the focusing cloth, it is all there: the bag of supplies resting on the ground, the fan of photographs adorning the apparatus, and the formally posed sitter—here a young African American in a suit and fedora, looking much like his older male counterparts in the scene. Distinguishing Street Photographer, New York from The Photographer are the important matters of tone and perspective: Lee looks at life in Harlem through the eyes of a midwesterner on the federal government’s payroll, whereas Lawrence constructs a view of his own neighborhood for others to see. Both scenes were staged, to be sure, and presented as visions of the everyday, but while Lee’s picture seems static and staid, Lawrence’s appears dynamic. To the FSA photographer, the work of the itinerant portraitist was quickly becoming a thing of the past—a relic of working-class black life that required fixing in time. In The Photographer, however, the Harlem of 1942 is a space in which the past mingles with the present and future, as modern trucks roll alongside pushcarts and horse-drawn wagons, together supporting the continuous migratory and economic movement of African Americans. Superimposed on the horse and wagon, the humble operator and his flashing camera do not appear hopelessly of the past; 4 Russell Lee, Street Photographer, decidedly modern in its abstraction, the jagged white form of the flash brings to mind New York, 1935–36. Gelatin silver print from nitrate nega- the latest bulb technology adopted by the press and the federal government’s team of tive. Russell W. Lee Photograph documentary photographers in the 1940s. This strange detail prompts the question: Was Collection, The Dolph Briscoe this local portraitist also Harlem’s truest documentarian, in Lawrence’s view? Despite Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin lacking a clear answer, we do know that the painter developed a place for vernacular photography in his early work and was thinking through the relation between the dif- 5 Jacob Lawrence, Often Three ferent photographic realities of black life. Families Share One Toilet, 1943. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 21 1/4 x 14 1/4 in. Colby College Museum of Art, The Documentary Re-visions Lunder Collection © 2014 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Lawrence was not alone in making reference to, while working against, the tradition Rights Society (ARS), New York of documenting Harlem established by the FSA and adopted in the late 1930s by the Photo League, an organization based in New York City that applied photography to 6 Russell Lee, Toilet in the Basement of an Apartment House Rented to social causes. As Maren Stange has observed, that dominant model “linked photo- Negroes. Chicago, Illinois, April graphic coverage to statistical and economic data, seeking to produce a thematic, even 1941. Black-and-white print from scientific, whole.” Among its critics were the brothers Marvin and Morgan Smith, who photographic negative. Library of arrived in Harlem in 1933 and spent the next three decades picturing in positive terms Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA / OWI Collection, daily street life as well as rendering in their portrait studio adjacent to the Apollo LC-USF34-038617-D Theater the likenesses of black celebrities, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Billie

American Art | Fall 2014 35 Holiday. While much of the pair’s street photography was in dialogue with Lawrence’s Harlem paintings, if not also an inspiration or model for it, King-Hammond has observed a specific connection between Lawrence’s Street Orator’s Audience (1936, Tacoma Art Museum) and a photograph by the Smiths titled Street-Corner Meeting, 125th Street (ca. 1938).19 Compositionally divergent, these two representations of a soapbox or street corner speaker, a common feature of Harlem life at the time, nevertheless share an implicit critique of the outside photographers who peered into the black community, captured its subjects unaware, and labeled them social documents. Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava—two photographers with whom Lawrence developed important relationships early in his career—likewise avoided reducing their African American subjects to unfeeling statistics. Working in 1942 under the guid- ance of Roy Stryker, the head of the FSA’s photo unit, Parks began by studying closely the Depression pictures and research produced by Lee, Evans, Dorothea Lange, Jack Delano, and other well-known FSA photographers. These, along with his personal encounters with racism in Washington, D.C., reportedly motivated him to begin photographing Ella Watson, a black woman who cleaned the government offices where Parks worked; it was there that he posed and shot her close-up in what he later described as an “unsubtle” way, holding a broom and mop against the backdrop of an American flag that conjured Grant Wood’s American Gothic.20 Although he continued to use elaborate lighting schemes and formal arrangements to charge his 7 Gordon Parks, Washington, D.C., pictures with a political message, the hundreds of photographs he subsequently took of Mrs. Ella Watson, a Government Charwoman, with Three Grand Watson avoided rendering her as a static icon and instead sought to eschew stereotyp- children and Her Adopted Daughter, ing through a deep study of the subject’s life outside her place of work. More than a August 1942. Black-and-white decade later, DeCarava conceived of the pictures he contributed to Langston Hughes’s print from photographic negative. The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955) in comparable terms, imagining that they functioned Library of Congress, Prints & 21 Photographs Division, FSA / OWI as “a collection of single photographs of Negro people.” In adding text to the photos, Collection, LC-USF34-013432-C Stange has argued, Hughes constructed a “conscious mock- and anti-documentary” that “subvert[ed] at every point the possibilities for the kinds of representations [he] disparaged as superficial, caricatured, or sociological.”22 One way in which these black photographers pushed back against the muckraking strain of American reform photography was by incorporating personal details, such as family photographs, that suggested insider knowledge of and access to the everyday, private lives of their subjects. In one of Parks’s photographs of Watson from 1942 taken in response to American Gothic, for example, we see Watson sitting in the kitchen of her humble Washington, D.C., home (fig. 7). A subtle smile appears on her face as she is surrounded by three young grandchildren, the empty bowls beside them indicating that they

36 American Art | Fall 2014 have just eaten. The reflection of Watson’s adopted daughter is visible in the dresser mirror in the next room; that dresser also holds a framed portrait of two figures standing together in their best clothes, identified as Watson’s own wedding portrait. The details of this photo may symbolize abstractly urban poverty’s destruction of the patriarchal family unit, but they also speak to the bonds of feeling across generations of a particular black family.23 The historian Nicholas Natanson has observed that Parks’s images of black city life are generally successful in this respect; as an African American man, he was often trusted by his subjects and thus allowed to take “close-in, low- angle” shots in intimate interior settings. Yet those images remained carefully orchestrated, like all FSA photographs. Natanson notes that we know from the existence of other photographs taken inside Watson’s home that Parks “shifted the portrait of Watson and husband to various points around the bedroom mirror . . . in order to intensify the juxtaposition with Watson’s daughter reflected in the mirror.”24 Like other objects on the dressing table, which changed position in different photographs of the scene, the framed picture was clearly a prop that carried an important social message for Parks. Such photographic props were also important for the white FSA photographers whose work had inspired Parks. Russell Lee made use of vernacular portraiture, for instance, in the FSA’s first major documentation project that focused on an African 8 Russell Lee, Family on Relief. American community.25 Begun in 1941, this series produced numerous images of Chicago, Illinois, April 1942. poor black families in Chicago that were supported by the New Deal’s relief funds. Black-and-white print from photographic negative. Library of Among photographs of a dilapidated bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom (see fig. 6) in Congress, Prints & Photographs an apartment occupied by what seems like a dozen members of one family, we find Division, FSA / OWI Collection, several tender pictures of children playing the piano and violin, a baby being bathed LC-USF34-038791-D in the kitchen sink, and a young man in a fedora holding a child on his lap. In the last of these images, a framed arrangement of studio photographs hangs conspicu- ously on the wall above the two figures on the sofa (fig. 8). Natanson has argued that this detail makes the picture “less predictable” than others in the series, given that the photographic tableau is “lovingly displayed” and that it contributes to an “intact- family theme.”26 We see in the young man and child as well as in the photographs above them multiple generations of a single family in one space, appearing content and respectable. The stamp on the frame contributes to that notion, its fragmented let- tering indicating it was purchased at the Goldblatt brothers’ department store, which catered to Chicago’s middle class. That the frame appears worn and the photographs fit uncomfortably within it, remind us that this family aspired to, but had not fully achieved, economic prosperity. Vernacular photography plays a significant role in another set of FSA photographs of black Chicago; shot by Jack Delano, these depict 102-year-old Mrs. Ella Patterson. She is described in the FSA captions as “the oldest resident at the Ida B. Wells Housing

American Art | Fall 2014 37 Project,” apartments administered by the Chicago Housing Authority in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side. Like Lee’s photo of the family discussed above, all three of Delano’s compositions adopt a strongly vertical format that draws the viewer’s eye up to a photograph hanging on the wall. In one of these, the photo is a bust portrait of a finely dressed woman, described as “a picture of her [Mrs. Patterson’s] daughter,” while the other two show “an old picture of her family taken about fifty-five years ago,” or about 1887. Figure 9 depicts Patterson seated beside one of her grandsons and beneath this enlarged “family” photo, in which we can discern rural blacks standing in front of a dilapidated cabin. Those figures echo the multiple generations visible in Delano’s picture, but with an important difference: if Patterson’s grandson represents the family’s future, that future is one of urban respectability. These efforts to bring images of everyday black life into dialogue with mainstream documentary visions were important models for Lawrence as he set about painting vernacular photography into his oeuvre. As I will argue, the artist in many instances adopted the strategies of the FSA photographers by using family photos as containers of old memories in the present and the seeds of hope for the future. Nonetheless, he was self-conscious about these strategies, seeking to lay them bare in his paintings. While Parks and Delano 9 Jack Delano, Mrs. Ella Patterson, worked to efface the artificiality of their scenes—discouraging viewers, for instance, the Oldest Resident at the Ida B. from seeing Ella Patterson’s old family photo as a stereotypical view of southern life Wells Housing Project, Chicago, Illinois, and Her Grandson. She selected by Delano as a meaningful prop—Lawrence did just the opposite, demonstrat- is 102 years old, March 1942. ing for his viewers how a commercial photograph could be made to speak about and Black-and-white print from pho- for black life. tographic negative. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA / OWI Collection, LC-USW3-000105-D Painting Photography

It is hard not to think of Ella Watson and her family in relation to a painting by Lawrence made in the same year titled Virginia Interior, in which two framed portraits sit on a mirrored dresser (fig. 10). This abstracted view of a room (possibly the only room) occupied by an African American family captures both the physical dilapidation and emotional warmth of the space through the portraits on the dresser, the peeling wallpaper and stained ceiling, a comb with missing teeth, a brass bed whose covers have been turned back, a calendar on the wall featuring an idyllic view of a house nestled among trees, and an alarm clock that reads precisely 4:00. The black mother

38 American Art | Fall 2014 10 Jacob Lawrence, Virginia Interior, and child visible in the open doorway further call to mind the multiple-room view and 1942. Gouache on ivory wove open back door in Parks’s photograph (see fig. 7). It appears that Lawrence’s subject paper, 22 x 23 in. Art Institute of Chicago, Mary and Earle Ludgin was woken in the early hours of the morning by her crying child and left her bed to Collection, 1981.1182 © 2014 The swaddle and console the baby in the hallway of her apartment building. No one else Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence occupies the space within or outside the “interior”—no one, that is, except for the Foundation, Seattle / Artists figures paired in the framed photographs. The date of the painting encourages us to Rights Society (ARS), New York see these dark, abstracted forms—probably the outlines of two vignetted portraits—as enduring shadows of a marriage broken apart by war. The calendar becomes significant, as it marks the time since the man of the house went to war and until he might return.

American Art | Fall 2014 39 Two paintings that Lawrence com- pleted after his discharge from the U.S. Coast Guard in 1945 used framed family photographs to comment on African Americans’ home-front experiences of World War II. In The Lovers (fig. 11), a couple embraces on a boldly patterned sofa surrounded by a collection of ordinary objects: two plants, whose vitality may reflect that of the couple’s mutual affection; a table on which we see evidence of smoking and drinking; a record player that fills the room with its music; and a frame containing two studio portraits. Hills has speculated that the man is a “returning service- man like Lawrence” and described this scene as a “touching moment of courtship, love, and the promise of family life.”27 The portraits are integral to that promise; whether or not they depict the couple themselves, they portray a pairing of figures (their outlines reveal them to be male and female) and thus symbolize a productive and preserved union. A framed portrait reappears in Casualty—The Secretary of War Regrets (fig. 12), panel 11 of Lawrence’s War series. That the imposing figure standing over a photograph of a soldier is clothed almost entirely in black and set against a sea of blood red suggests that she is in mourning, the subject of the photograph having become a casualty of war. The picture preserves the soldier’s likeness for his loved one, while serving as a body on which she can project her feelings for and memories of him. If we pull back from the portrait to regard the painting as a whole, we see that Lawrence set the memorial scene in another frame. While the artist was fond of organizing his spaces with doorways and windows, as in Virginia Interior, the mottled color and floral design in the exterior borders of Casualty connote decorated wood and are reminiscent of the materials and designs then used to frame studio portraits. Read in this way, the painting depicts a photograph within a photograph, demonstrating Lawrence’s use of vernacular photography as a conceptual and compositional device well over a decade before he painted Taboo.

40 American Art | Fall 2014 11 Jacob Lawrence, The Lovers, 1946. Gouache on paper, 21 1/2 x 30 in. Private collection. © 2014 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

12 Jacob Lawrence, War Series: Casualty—The Secretary of War Regrets, 1947. Tempera on compo sition board, 24 1/4 x 16 3/16 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger, 51.16. Artwork © 2014 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © Whitney Museum of American Art

13 Jacob Lawrence, Photos, 1951. Watercolor and gouache over graphite on paper, 23 x 31 1/8 in. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Milprint, Inc., A Division of Philip Morris Industrial, M1971.1 © 2014 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo, John R. Glembin Lawrence’s most explicit meditation on photography in the immediate postwar period came in 1951 with Photos (fig. 13). Although it has received little critical attention by modern scholars, this painting is nothing short of extraordinary in terms of the range of vernacular photographs of black subjects that it displays and the complexity of the conversations it stages among them. Richard Powell has offered the following assessment of Photos as a representation of “black reality”:

In Photos, Lawrence portrayed his subjects in a manner that, without the fanfare or masklike qualities of many of his works, was comparable to mainstream images and identities. Photos countered black invisibility through depictions of African Americans experiencing life’s many milestones (i.e., births, weddings, graduations, etc.) and through the idea of the photograph-as- irrefutable-evidence. These pictures of African American normalcy carried Lawrence’s earlier inquests into community life to a higher, more challenging level of cultural representation.28

Looking at the abstracted rendering of photographs in the painting, we can see the details on which Powell’s observations are founded. There are, for example, three bust portraits in oval frames in the upper left, below which Lawrence includes a double frame that unites a portrait of a bride with one of a groom, anticipating the subject of Taboo. To the right, we see a larger picture of a wedding party, in which (possibly the same) bride and groom take center stage. Around them are photos of a naked infant on a pink blanket, a child in a christening gown, a girl dressed for her first communion, a couple with a young child standing by a tree (likely a studio backdrop), and the bust of a woman wearing a necklace. Lawrence encourages viewers to interpret these posed photos, along with the studio portrait in the lower left corner of the composition, as depicting the progression of a single family over time. Each of the remaining frames in Photos contains a single figure: on the left, a young ballerina balancing on pointe and a decorated

American Art | Fall 2014 41 soldier; on the right, a man in a graduation cap and gown, a boxer posing with gloves raised, and a man in a suit leaning on a piano. Powell presents Photos as distinct from Lawrence’s contemporary paintings that explore theatrical performance; these include Vaudeville (fig. 14) and, from 1952, Tragedy and Comedy, Billboards, and Makeup. While it indeed lacks the “fanfare or masklike qualities” of these other works, which depict comedians, minstrel performers, and other entertainers, Photos nevertheless ponders the expression of public and private black identities. We can easily imagine the photos of the boxer, the ballerina, the graduate, and the pianist existing outside the collection displayed here—beyond the context of the African American family whose lives are documented on the walls of its home—and circulat- ing in print media as emblems of black achievement in sports, the performing arts, and education. Yet they are also clearly linked to the other private pictures in the painting, not only through the fact of their inclusion in the overall arrangement but also by means of repeated formal elements. The same variety of flowers appears in the pianist’s photo and in several of the studio pictures, for instance, patterns of pink, yellow, black, and white recur across the frames. Photos thus reverses the order of things adopted by Life magazine’s photo-essays and FSA photography; instead of using a publicly disseminated image of an African American subject to stimulate viewers’ ideas about blacks’ private lives, Lawrence forces us to create images of public success from personal, private portraits—pictures that aim to honor and uplift rather than simply stereotype. Powell identifies in Vaudeville a related 14 Jacob Lawrence, Vaudeville, 1951. concern with public versus private images of black performers. It portrays two black Egg tempera on hardboard, 29 7/8 comedians (possible references to Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham and Tim Moore) not as x 19 15/16 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithson “shallow buffoons” in a world of “slapstick humor, off-color jokes, and malapropisms” but ian Institution, Washington, D.C. as introspective individuals capable of deep interpersonal feeling—in Powell’s words, as Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, “vehicles of culture, truth, and, most significant, compassion.”29 1966 © 2014 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Given the persistence and depth of his engagement with everyday photography in Seattle / Artists Rights Society paintings dating to the mid twentieth century, we can see how Lawrence may have envi- (ARS), New York sioned Taboo as another meditation on the medium’s public and private faces. On the one hand, the formal poses of the figures closely resemble those associated with vernacular wedding portraiture, which memorialized for a family a symbolic moment in their lives; on the other, the stereographic format of the composition evokes a widely reproduced and disseminated form of photography that, as we will see, spoke to a mass audience precisely through its ability to reduce subjects to generic types. In this way, Taboo thinks through the relationship between different forms of vernacular photography and their multiple, often competing, images of black life.

42 American Art | Fall 2014 Modernist Experiments

Looking back and forth between the two sides of Taboo, the viewer detects obvious differences in the skin tones of the figures, which are accompanied by color changes in their dress and setting. But there is something more at work in the rendering of the “black” faces. While we might simply call it a play of light and shadows, the faces recall the effects of a photographic negative, in which the visage of a light-complexioned sitter appears uniformly black and the eyes, nose, and mouth are outlined in white, precisely as we see in Taboo. A dark-colored face would undergo just the opposite reversal—that is, dark outlines would unnaturally frame a “white” face, as seems to be the case of the bride on the far right of the painting. However, if Lawrence is presenting us in Taboo with two “photographic” images, one positive, the other negative, he does not tell us which is which. Are we meant to read the left side of the painting as containing “positive” representations of a racially white man and a black woman, and the right side as containing their “negative”? Or do I have that backward? When searching for models for this kind of photographic play—a meaningful manipulation of dark and light, negative and positive, black and white—we would do 15 Carl Van Vechten, Portrait of well to consider the photographers with whom Lawrence developed connections after Jacob Lawrence, 1941. Gelatin silver print. Library of Congress, his time at the Harlem Art Workshop. Among these was Carl Van Vechten, whom Carl Van Vechten Collection, James Smalls has described as “black America’s most notorious white supporter and LC-USZ62-114410 patron of the arts.” Van Vechten portrayed numerous African American celebrities as “dignified and beautiful” and thus “counter[ed] the barrage of stereotyped racist images of African Americans that had been popularly disseminated throughout the United States.”30 He experimented formally in his photographs by manipulating light and shade and by staging interactions between differently raced bodies or between positive and negative values. Van Vechten’s portraits of Lawrence, the earliest of which date to July 1941, were almost certainly made for publicity purposes, just when the young artist’s career was beginning to soar. Yet they also contain evidence of formal experimentation. In figure 15 we see Lawrence posing in profile against a geometrically patterned backdrop and dressed in a short-sleeved collared shirt, the whiteness of which sets off the darkness of his tie, pants, and skin. Shadows play across the backdrop and across his body, producing a mix of dark tones and highlights on his face and arms. Van Vechten was fascinated by illuminating black skin, working to expose and undermine the fact that photographic technologies assumed a white body before the camera’s lens. Thus Lawrence, like the objects he was made to hold in his hands for this portrait, became for Van Vechten both a technical challenge and an artistic opportunity. Smalls has argued that Van Vechten’s modernist experiments, such as his privately made series of black and white male nudes, always carried both formal and political meanings, especially issues of identity formation and desire. Throughout that series, Smalls observes, Van Vechten “uses black-and-white photography to pattern black and white bodies in stark poses or situations of alternating harmonized and polar- ized tension—opposites are made to attract”—much as they are made to do in Taboo.31

American Art | Fall 2014 43 Lawrence was also well acquainted with DeCarava’s preoccupation with light and shadow on the streets of Harlem in the 1950s, evident in such photographs as Sun and Shade (1952).32 To be sure, this bird’s-eye view of two children playing in the street, divided vertically by a shadow, sets up and explores stark tonal contrasts. Like Van Vechten’s homoerotic photographs of male nudes, DeCarava’s experiment had a political dimension, one that asked viewers to consider the ramifications of placing the two boys on either side of a black-white divide and casting a harsh light on the one pointing his toy gun toward that line. Hills has proposed that Lawrence’s street scenes of the period were inspired by these and other explorations of black and white made by DeCarava at the time, singling out the painting Street Shadows (1959, The Museum of Modern Art, New York) as a pertinent example.33 Taboo can be read as another. Like the work of Van Vechten and DeCarava, Lawrence’s composition embodies a politically inflected modernism, its reversals of light and dark articulating ambivalence about the “true” racial identity of its subjects. The idea that every figure in the painting is potentially a negative image of him- or herself suggests that race is not only a matter of perception but primarily one of illusion: blacks easily become whites, whites become blacks. Races mix and identities remain unfixed. Reading Taboo in the guise of a stereograph supports that view. Consider what would happen if the two sides of the painting were conflated into a three-dimensional image: the “black” groom would overlap his “white” counterpart, and the same would occur with the bodies of the brides. (Note that the dark red and yellow background elements in Taboo would also combine stereoscopically to yield the orange-tan color of a conventional stereoview.) Our minds would construct, then, a virtual mixing of the races—what some in 1963 deemed taboo and others envisioned positively as the reality, if not the very foundation, of modern life. The stereographic character of the work projects that blending outward, literally filling the viewer’s field of vision and necessitating an active confrontation with the scene in all its dimensions. This possibility in Lawrence’s painting brings to mind the reading of 12 Million Black Voices put forth by the cultural and literary historian Joseph Entin. There he ascribes to Wright a belief in the “intersectionality of black and white identities,” a belief that allowed blacks to form the basis of white Western civilization and whites to see themselves in blacks as if looking into a dark mirror. “If whiteness is formed in opposition to blackness,” Entin observes of Wright’s conception of racial subjectivity, “it is also formed in conjunction, even collaboration, with it; if the white gaze subjugates African Americans, it also establishes a resemblance, a ‘tie that binds.’”34 In terms of investigating racial “intersectionality” through modernism, a more contemporary model for Lawrence’s Taboo would be Romare Bearden’s exploration of photomechanical processes, beginning in the 1950s with his photographic reproductions of famous artworks and culminating in a multimedia series in the 1960s that he called Projections. In both sets of work, Bearden made use of a photostat camera, which created two black-and-white reproductions of an image: one positive and one negative. Bearden became fascinated by what the photostat could do to masterpieces of Western art, as the creamy white bodies that populated the paintings of the Dutch, Italian, and French masters transformed before his eyes into dark-skinned figures. Bearden created his Projections by making collages of found materials, often photographic in nature—clippings from photo-essays in magazines or selections from his archive of photographically reproduced art. The photostat process then translated these collages into enlarged, seamless, black-and-white photographs. Lee Glazer has inter- preted the Projections as, on the one hand, “signifying continuity and tradition in African American culture” through the repetition of subject, form, and technique across the series

44 American Art | Fall 2014 16 Romare Bearden, The Burial, as a whole, and on the other, “signifying 1964. Photostat on fiberboard, on received images and revising them.” 11 7/8 x 3 5/8 in. © Romare Bearden A work like The Burial (fig. 16), Glazer Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y. argues, takes that gesture of appropriation a step further by adopting the strikingly vertical format of a particular Associated Press photograph of Birmingham mourners reproduced in Newsweek in 1963.35 The points of connection between the photographic experiments that scholars have identified in Bearden’s art and those I am attributing to Taboo are many. Both artists reached across the histories of photography—mobilizing both personal photographs and what Glazer calls “received” images, including the stereotypical and degrading—to construct new, politicized images of black identity. What is more, photography is the medium on which the artists constructed these new images, literally and metaphorically. Just as Bearden built his Projections on an accumulation, recombination, and formal mimicry of photographic forms, Lawrence overlaid his vision of interracial marriage in Taboo on the photographic stereoview. Significantly, the latter projection involved retrieving the stereoview format from the grip of the popular white imagination, which had filled its double frame with racial stereotypes since the mid nineteenth century.

(Re)building the Joke

In Taboo, then, Lawrence was rewriting social history and photographic history. A vernacular photographic format marketed to white bourgeois Americans through the first decades of the twentieth century, the stereoview helped construct the identity of that particular social group, educating consumers about normative conceptions of race, class, and citizenship.36 It became common for the major distributors of stereoviews in the United States to sell scenes of ideal domestic life staged within commercial studios— scenes that included white children happily modeling the actions of their parents, who were often enjoying themselves outdoors, relaxing in their drawing rooms, courting, or involved in countless other varieties of heterosexual and middle-class pastimes. Other scenes delighted viewers with derogatory images of African Americans picking cotton, gorging on watermelon, and engaging in uncivilized or plainly stupid actions, accompanied by captions that caricatured black dialect. Among the most popular of these stereoscopic visions at the turn of the twentieth century were those that featured weddings. Cards with white subjects were frequently

American Art | Fall 2014 45 sold in a set that featured different moments in a couple’s union. Under wood & Underwood marketed several series of cards around 1900, for example, that began with images of the bride preparing for the ceremony, culminated in the wedding rite (fig. 17), and ended with the married pair “alone at last.” They also sold a series with a decidedly less earnest tone titled “Is Marriage a Failure?” that traced through eighteen stereoviews the progression of a man and woman’s relationship, from the moment they were “pierced by Cupid’s dart” to their “realization” that marriage was any- thing but a romantic affair. The black wedding scenes produced by American stereoscopic firms, such as the one seen in figure 18, deliberately caricatured white fantasies of courtship and marriage as blissful and bourgeois. Captioned “Honey does yo lub yo man,” this view was restaged and republished numerous times in the United States between the 1890s and the 1910s.37 At first glance it appears to offer a genteel depiction of a Christian country wedding, complete with elegant white dresses for the women and suits for 17 Underwood & Underwood, the men; the deacon administering the ceremony reads aloud from a book of prayers or The Wedding March, ca. 1900. vows, while the groom holds his bride’s hand tenderly in his own. The materials tacked on Albumen prints mounted on stereocard, 3 x 6 in. or larger on the wall behind them, however, tell another story. Amid the collection of printed genre 3 1/2 x 7 in. mount. Courtesy, scenes, which include Richard Norris Brooke’s A Pastoral Visit (1881, Corcoran Gallery American Antiquarian Society of Art) and other images of happy and hardworking rural folk, are two notices written in caricatured black dialect: “De lawd lub de churfel giver” (The Lord loves the cheerful giver) 18 Griffith & Griffith, “Honey does yo lub yo man,” 1897. Albumen and “Lebe yo razzer at de do deakon jones,” with the final s written backward (Leave your prints mounted on stereocard, razor at the door, Deacon Jones). While the poor spelling generally indicates an imagined 3 x 6 in. or larger on 3 1/2 x 7 in. lack of education and intelligence among the black churchgoers, the reference to a razor mount. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, specifically portrays the deacon as an urban “coon,” a degrading stereotype associated with Photographs and Prints Division, gambling, petty violence, laziness, and other good-for-nothing behavior. The conspicuous New York Public Library price tag on the groom’s lapel extends that stereotype to him: there he is, putting on airs, in a store-bought suit that he may intend to return after the ceremony.38 White viewers were thus encouraged to read the scene, its caption, and their notion of blackness as an affront to Christian virtue and to the sanctity of marriage. Significantly, any potential threat to the social order the stereoview might have proposed was framed, and assuaged, by humor. Lawrence explored the subject of Christian nuptials several times before undertak- ing Taboo, including The Wedding(fig. 19) and Wedding Party (1953, The Thompson Collection). Recall that Photos (1951) also included references to wedding portraiture. In each instance, Lawrence portrayed both members of the couple as African American; the

46 American Art | Fall 2014 19 Jacob Lawrence, The Wedding, tone was solemn and the depiction nothing short of honorific. This choice of subject and 1948. Egg tempera on hard- mood subtly challenges popular American stereotypes of marriage as a specifically white board, 20 x 24 in. Art Institute of Chicago, Restricted gift of institution and celebrates notions of black love, fidelity, and spirituality. Taboo takes this Mary P. Hines in memory of challenge further by combining the conventions of black wedding portraits with those of her mother, Frances W. Pick, comic stereography. This combination can itself be understood as a comic gesture, sub- 1993.258 © 2014 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence verting and disarming the assumptions about blackness that inform “Honey does yo lub yo Foundation, Seattle / Artists man.” A second reference to and redeployment of racial humor is evident in the manipula- Rights Society (ARS), New York tion of positive and negative photographic images in Taboo. I have argued elsewhere that the racialization of the positive-negative process became a feature of photographic humor in the nineteenth century, as the earliest practitioners of photography and popular writers on both sides of the Atlantic remarked with great frequency on the comical absurdity of the medium’s reversals of black and white. While such humor articulated and managed whites’ anxieties about the new technology’s effects on embodied social identities, Lawrence’s Taboo pokes fun at precisely that gesture, exposing its racist foundations and yoking it to very different political work.39

American Art | Fall 2014 47 Of course, Lawrence may also have been referring to racial stereotypes once imagined as humorous through the presentation and dress of the figures in his painting. The groom, for instance, with his stovepipe hat, long coat tails, and oversize white gloves, brings to mind the performers who caricatured blackness for popular audiences, such as those depicted in Vaudeville or in comic stereography. The bride also displays elements of exag- geration; her gown strikes the viewer as a bit too fussy, even ostentatious. In addition, who has ever encountered a cut flower the size of the one she holds to her chest? Finally, there is the matter of the pair’s facial coloring, which not only evokes the positive-negative photographic process but also suggests blackface minstrelsy and its cosmetic application of racial stereotype, common features of early photographic humor. Hills notes that critics since James Porter in the 1940s have acknowledged Lawrence’s fondness for humor, noting his deployment of caricature and comic irony in a broad selection of paintings. These have included many of his early works that comment on interracial relations in Harlem, such as The Eviction(1935, Blanton Museum of Art), Street Scene—Restaurant (ca. 1936, private collection), and Interior Scene (1937, private collection).40 To insert comedy into commentary on the interactions among blacks and whites was to participate in a rich African American tradition of charting the evolution of those interchanges and critiquing the racial stereotypes they produced. Glenda Carpio explored this tradition in her book Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery through case studies that include the African American artists Robert Colescott and Kara Walker. According to Carpio, the artists “use the complicated dynamics of race and humor to set the denigrating history of antebellum stereotypes against their own humorous appropriation of those images.” They conjure stereotypes “through formally innovating means that incorporate aspects of popular culture (images produced by television or by advertisement, for example), of other art forms (modern art, film and comic strips, for instance), and postmodern techniques.” Their work thus “give[s] life . . . to the most taboo aspects of race and sexuality in America, ultimately seeking to effect a liberating sabotage of the past’s hold on the present.”41 Taboo adheres to this characterization of African American humor not only through its obvious engagement with a taboo subject but also by appropriating a racial stereotype, adopting one of its most popular visual forms, and then using that form to undermine its own message. Resonances with the work of Colescott and Walker are apparent, but so too are those with that of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, both of whom explored the relations among humor, race, and photography in the mid twentieth century.42 Of particular note are the many possible links between Taboo and Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952). That image and text shared space in Lawrence’s mind was dem- onstrated at Terry Dintenfass’s gallery in 1963, where Taboo was exhibited with another painting by Lawrence titled Invisible Man among the Scholars (1963, private collection). We may continue to explore their connections by unearthing the novel’s copious references to documentary and vernacular forms of photography, which sit alongside its extended meditations on laughter, jokes, and comic stereotypes. To add to Sara Blair’s insightful reading of Invisible Man, and to make a case for Ellison’s influence on the strategies of Taboo, I would flag several moments when the narrator turns to metaphor to frame his experience of interracial relations. Late in the novel, after he has become disillusioned with the Brotherhood, the multiracial organization that recruited him to promote its socialist agenda in Harlem, for example, he encounters two figures in a subway car: “On one side I saw a white nun in black telling her beads, and standing before the door across the aisle there was another dressed completely in white, the exact duplicate of the other except that she was black and her black feet bare.” Looking back and forth between them, the narrator finds himself erupting into laughter, struck by the incongruity they

48 American Art | Fall 2014 embodied—an incongruity that can seen as photographic in character, dovetailing with the narrator’s previous naming of himself as “the Negative” and evoking the scene that Lawrence staged in Taboo.43 Tantalizing intersections between Lawrence’s painting and Invisible Man run through Ellison’s text, including conspicuous references to the discourse of taboo. One of these deals directly with the subject of miscegenation and its proscription, when the narrator finds himself in a sexual encounter with a white woman named Sybil, who invited him to her bedroom. She was “one of the big shots’ wives” whom he met at a committee meeting of the Brotherhood. Recognizing that she was attracted merely to the idea of sharing her body with a black man, he remarked that, for Sybil, “I was Brother Taboo-with-whom-all-things-are-possible.”44 Near the end of his epic narrative, Ellison’s “invisible man” muses at greater length on the state of interracial relations in the mid twentieth century and spells out his vision for the future:

Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they’ll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. . . . Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description. Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he’s going.45

The movement of thought in this passage can be dizzying, but it articulates a basic fear about whites’ efforts to eradicate blackness that both differs from Entin’s ascription to Wright of thoughts on the productive “intersectionality of black and white identities” and brings to mind the photographically enabled race changes staged in Taboo. The narrator imagines those efforts will result in a whitening of blacks and a blackening of whites that is so disruptive and senseless it can only be met with laughter. Like Ellison, Lawrence understood that others were laughing at the same idea for different reasons, namely to fulfill their own racist fantasies. The political work of racial humor, in other words, depended not only on its content but also on who was delivering the punch line. In Taboo, however, Lawrence ultimately left it up to the viewer to decide what will come of racial differences. He sets the stage for that viewer to see the bride and groom stereoscopically and thus to imagine a world in which black and white intersect to produce new biracial bodies. Whether this produces a negative state of disorientation or a positive state of reorientation is a question that we, as the operators of Lawrence’s experiment, must answer for ourselves. As Karen Woods Weierman observed in her book One Nation, One Blood: Interracial Marriage in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820–1870, representations of interracial relations, and specifically the “intermarriage taboo,” are “often ‘about’ something else.” Between 1820 and 1870 (the focus of her study) that “something else” constituted “Indian land, African labor, the nature of racial identity, or the place of people of color in the United States.”46 In the lives of mid twentieth-century African Americans it could have been the economic hardships of the postwar period, the failures of desegregation, racial sol- idarity, racial violence, political empowerment, urban migration, and much more. If this is what Taboo speaks about through the subject of interracial marriage, then vernacular photography is the medium or metaphor through which the message is spoken. In Lawrence’s colorful imagination, photography of the everyday became the ground on which to build “one of the greatest jokes in the world” and, simultaneously, to tear down its walls.

American Art | Fall 2014 49 Notes My biggest thanks go to Mark Mitchell at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for inviting me to give a public lecture at the museum in 2007, because, in preparing for that lecture, I discovered Lawrence’s Taboo. Those who have since offered me valuable insights and resources regarding Lawrence and photography include Rachael Ziady DeLue, Patricia Hills, Laura Katzman, Leilani Lewis, John Ott, Emily D. Shapiro, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Barbara Earl Thomas, and the anonymous reviewers for American Art. 1 For the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s own description of Taboo, see Alice O. Beamesderfer, ed., Gifts in Honor of the 125th Anniversary of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002), 140. 2 Some northern states maintained antimiscegenation laws through the mid-1960s. It was not until 1967 that Loving v. Virginia invalidated the bans on interracial marriage in sixteen states. For much more on this history, see Karen Woods Weierman, One Nation, One Blood: Interracial Marriage in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820–1870 (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2005). 3 Judith Wilson, “Optical Illusions: Images of Miscegenation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Art,” American Art 5, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 89–107. 4 Taboo would certainly not be the first modernist painting to reinterpret early photographic practices and through them mount a social or political critique. See, for example, Laura Katzman, “The Politics of Media: Painting and Photography in the Art of Ben Shahn,” in Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times, ed. Deborah Martin Kao, Laura Katzman, and Jenna Webster (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 97–117. 5 Patricia Hills, Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2009), 98–99. 6 Ibid., 238–39. Hills made the same claim in “Jacob Lawrence’s Paintings during the Protest Years of the 1960s,” in Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, ed. Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press in association with the Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonné Project, 2000), 179, 181. 7 Hills, Painting Harlem Modern, 1. 8 Leslie King-Hammond, “Inside-Outside, Uptown-Downtown: Jacob Lawrence and the Aesthetic Ethos of the Harlem Working-Class Community,” in Nesbett and DuBois, Over the Line, 77, 84. 9 Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007), 8. 10 Ibid., 10. 11 Deborah Willis, “The Schomburg Collection: A Rich Resource for Jacob Lawrence,” in Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner (Washington, D.C.: Rappahannock Press in association with the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1993), 33–39, at 37. 12 Hills, Painting Harlem Modern, 84 – 87. 13 Willis, “Schomburg Collection,” 37. 14 Deborah Willis, “Visualizing Memory: Photographs and the Art of Biography,” American Art 17, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 20, 21. Patricia Raub, “True to Life: Life Magazine’s Coverage of African Americans, 1936–40,” Prospects 25 (2000): 607–40. See also Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1992). 15 Willis, “Visualizing Memory,” 20. 16 Although its origins date to the nineteenth century, the tintype remained in wide use by American itinerant photographers into the first decades of the twentieth century. See Steven Kasher, America and the Tintype (Göttingen: Steidl; London: Thames & Hudson, 2008). 17 Ben Shahn produced at least two photographs for the FSA titled Itinerant Photographer in Columbus, Ohio and dated to 1938. For a discussion of these photographs, see John Raeburn, Ben Shahn’s American Scene: Photographs, 1938 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2010). 18 Hills, Painting Harlem Modern, 177–79. Lee’s photograph appeared in 12 Million Black Voices under the title Toilet in “Kitchenette” Apartment House, Chicago, Ill. 19 Maren Stange, “Illusion Complete within Itself: Roy DeCarava’s Photography,” in A Modern Mosaic: Art and Modernism in the United States, ed. Townsend Ludington (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000), 279–305, at 290; and King-Hammond, “Inside-Outside, Uptown-Downtown,” 74. 20 Gordon Parks, Moments without Proper Names (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 231. 21 DeCarava quoted in Stange, “Illusion Complete within Itself: Roy DeCarava’s Photography,” 290. 22 Ibid., 294.

50 American Art | Fall 2014 23 For a discussion of this photograph, see Philip Brookman, “Unlocked Doors: Gordon Parks at the Crossroads,” in Gordon Parks, Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective (Boston: Bulfinch Press in association with the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1997), 346–53; Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly Brannan, eds., Documenting America, 1935–1943 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 226–39; and Natanson, Black Image in the New Deal. 24 Natanson, Black Image in the New Deal, 183. 25 See Maren Stange, Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures, 1941–1943 (New York: New Press, 2003). 26 Natanson, Black Image in the New Deal, 163. 27 Hills, Painting Harlem Modern, 189. 28 Richard J. Powell, “Harmonizer of Chaos: Jacob Lawrence at Midcentury,” in Nesbett and DuBois, Over the Line, 154, 156. 29 Ibid., 154. 30 James Smalls, The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 2006), 1, 4. 31 Ibid., 10. 32 The Roy and Sherry DeCarava Archives declined to grant the rights to reproduce Sun and Shade in this article, citing its disinclination to support publication permission for “projects not directly related to DeCarava’s work and context.” Susan Wheatley, The Roy and Sherry DeCarava Archives, to Tanya Sheehan, April 1, 2014. A reproduction of Sun and Shade can be viewed at http://www.moma.org /collection/object.php?object_id=46018. 33 Hills, Painting Harlem Modern, 199–202. 34 Joseph B. Entin, Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2007), 231–32. 35 Lee Stephens Glazer, “Signifying Identity: Art and Race in Romare Bearden’s Projections,” Art Bulletin 76, no. 3 (September 1994): 424. See also Gail Gelburd and Thelma Golden, Romare Bearden in Black-and- White: Photomontage Projections, 1964 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997); and Louis Kaplan, American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005), 107–30. In her article Glazer refers to The Burial by the title The Funeral. 36 See Brenton J. Malin, “Looking White and Middle-Class: Stereoscopic Imagery and Technology in the Early Twentieth-Century United States,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 4 (November 2007): 403–24. 37 The Knoxville, Tennessee, photographic studio Knaffl & Bro. may have been the first to print a photograph with this title, although the stereographic companies that distributed it (including The Universal Art Co. and Griffith & Griffith) attribute the copyright to the Philadelphia photographer William H. Rau. Other comic stereoviews of black weddings include Rau’s The Coon Wedding March, ca. 1897, which continues the scene in fig. 18; Carleton H. Graves, publisher, A Darktown Wedding, To the Bride’s Health, © 1901; and B. W. Kilburn, photographer, The Colored Wedding, © 1892. 38 See Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, “The Coon Caricature,” http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow /coon/, accessed August 10, 2013. 39 Tanya Sheehan, “Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography,” Photography and Culture 4, no. 2 (July 2011): 133–56. 40 For recent readings of these paintings in relation to humor, see Hills, Painting Harlem Modern, 172; and Elizabeth Hutton Turner, “The Education of Jacob Lawrence,” in Nesbett and DuBois, Over the Line, 101. 41 Glenda R. Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), 15. On the critical work of African American humor, see also William W. Cook, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke: Traditions of Afro-American Satire,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 109–34; Granville Ganter, “‘He Made Us Laugh Some’: Frederick Douglass’s Humor,” African American Review 37, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 535–52; and Karen Dalton, “The Past Is Prologue but Is sic[ ] Parody and Pastiche Progress?: A Conversation,” International Review of African American Art 14, no. 3 (1997): 17–29. 42 See Blair, Harlem Crossroads; and Entin, Sensational Modernism. 43 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 441, 91. 44 Ibid., 516. 45 Ibid., 577. 46 Weierman, One Nation, One Blood, 4.

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