Why Intent Matters
By Jay Simple
Images by Jay Simple
With a foreword interview between Zora J Murff and Jay Simple.
[Letter from a Facilitator, ZJM]
On Sight (A year in review, to come)
*best read while listening to Knuck If You Buck by Crime Mob*
What a time to be alive, when “how are you?” feels like a loaded question (this sentence feels like a platitude that will mark early 2020 to now).
I’m not okay.
I’m not okay, and I’m saying that to force the normalization of that shit. Living Black in the United States has already been hard. But since March 2020, each day has been an onslaught of reckoning with how the world is trying to kill me. A violent pandemic on all fronts: the air I breathe, those charged with “protecting and serving” me, the school I work for (even from a distance), and cultural institutions and actors in the throes of white guilt en masse.
I found shelter from this storm in those (as Harmony Holiday would put it) other undone homelands waiting to hear the response of a talking drum. These folx—my Affirmation Network—do the love of friends by accommodating my anger, sorrow, and joy by telling me, “Say less.” Through them, I remember that I’m still alive, and that privilege evaluation always brings me back to being an agent of love in this mission of position. These pursuits I’ve dedicated myself to—social worker, artist, educator, co-facilitator of this archive—have called for jumping in the pit and throwing my elbows with such ludicrous violence to make space for others. This work of finding ways to fully acknowledge lived experience helps Us reframe an existence perceived as marginal, an infinite act of love.
Finding ways to love one another despite a world that can’t seem to find ways to love Us is what we’ve always been doing. It has been an honor to live and love with y’all through this site, and I plan to keep doing just that for the year to come.
I’m kicking off the year in-conversation with the excellent homie Jay Simple, founder of Photographer’s Green Book, and an introduction to his essay Why Intention Matters in Photography. We hope you enjoy it.
Love yourself, stay well, and sing the songs you want to sing.
xxx
ZJM: Yo man. We’ve experienced a lot together over the past year, so I thought it was appropriate to invite you to do my first interview. Before we talk about anything else, though, I thought we should talk about all the shit that’s happening right now. I started school this week, and I had both of my classes do a first-day-first-image exercise. I chose the picture of police officer Eugene Goodman taken during the insurrection to preface their History of Photography lecture. What is this photograph, if not historic?
We talked at length about conflict, for the obvious reasons, but more deeply how this image conflicted with how they think about the word patriot. As I’ve continued to process this moment, I think of how this image feels like a reversal of those we witnessed last year.
JS: Thank you for inviting me to have this conversation, which feels like an extension of a lot of collective thinking about the place we live. I guess I should have already known that we wouldn’t ease into this conversation. In a moment where time is so obviously a construct, there is no use in wasting it.
This image brings up a lot of thoughts for me. This image embodies the conundrum of our current moment in so many ways. A black body tasked with keeping the rule of law and order, or simple reason, in the face of white rage. “This moment,” a phrase we so often use right now, is really at its root, not that unique of a moment. We see BIPOC people being asked to contort their bodies to live by the rules of truth, justice, love, and all of the ideologies of a free and democratic state. However, the angry mob thirsting for blood and oppression, sometimes even their own, is more accurately what the doctrine of contemporary eurocentric culture espouses. However, this culture allows those considered white to have the space to act outside of the fallacy of the democracy to voice their grievances and still be amongst the living. Everyone else is somehow supposed to integrate into the system and stick to its rule despite the apparent contradictions. In this image, I see generations of humans, who in themselves embody the principles that we should strive for, set up for failure as they try to play by “the rules” of compassion and equity against soulless monsters.
ZJM: *Denzel clap*. Look, for those not in the know, who is Jay Simple?
JS: Jay Simple is his ancestor's wildest dream when they conceived of an idea that worked its way through time and found itself in the mind of Alisha B Wormsley when she proclaimed, "THERE ARE BLACK PEOPLE IN THE FUTURE."
ZJM: Say less. You completed an artist residency through PPAC over winter break, and we had some good laughs over the new things you were making. How was the residency, and where do you feel you’re headed?
JS: Big shoutout to PPAC for the opportunity to take a month and focus on my practice. During the residency, my plan was to wrap up working on Exodus Home, which explores the Great Migration. I began to think about this idea of blackness and where it migrates and moves to both literally and symbolically. I was thinking about Henrietta Lacks and how blackness is even infused in protecting our bodies from viruses and sickness. I was also thinking about how many different terminologies around the world are used for those designated as "black" within their society. To name one as such means they are despised, like a trip to the doctor, and necessary for any nation's health and wealth.
The ideology of blackness has, since its inception, always impacted our understanding of nationhood, economics, culture, politics, and science, though I'm sure I'm missing other concepts. It works as a forceful subversive being. It's so simple. To hate blackness is to hate peanut butter. To hate blackness is to hate agricultural infrastructure. To love blackness is to love all things that black touches and are infused with. Blackness is inside of us and around us.
It was a joyous thought, so I made comical collages thinking of blackness's infinite manifestations and its ability to dismantle systems of oppression. This is when they find that behind their docile servants' fantasies are radicalized agents of their demise.
ZJM: One of my favorite parts of getting to know you has been watching the Photographer’s Green Book grow from a list of questions and organizations into a research and resource site. There are a few different facets to PGB, could you introduce us to it?
JS: PGB was born out of observations of what it’s like to navigate the photo/art world throughout my career. When it comes to exhibitions, publications, grants, and community for a non-white artist, we are frequently relegated to being an exception to the rule of homogeneity that dictates who gets exposure, recognition, and validation. This feeling of not being accepted is only because we are taught that the spaces that validate and make our careers are white spaces. This is the biggest lie that is told in many different facets of our society. I know this because PGB has a listing of over 140 organizations and spaces which aim to decenter the narrative of critical visual expression away from its mainstream whitewashing.
PGB crowdsources all of its information, so we are here to facilitate communal connections and engage in the dialogue that occurs when we come together as a broader community. For us, this means creating a reading list to decolonize curriculum; gathering letters by students and faculty against racist academic institutions; hosting conversations with artist and institutions about equity within their field; partnering with organizations to teach high school students how to document their community; or compiling questions that drive us to ponder our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We can do all of this because our community is strong and should be valued, praised, and accessible to those often lost trying to navigate through these unsavory roads.
ZJM: Y’all just put out a call for scholarship on history, process, or community and advocacy. The call is really great because y’all are offering $100 honorariums for the three individuals selected. What are some of your hopes with such a call?
JS: We wanted to do a couple of things with this new call. The first is to continue our effort in sourcing together toolsets that can be utilized to navigate and understand the field of photography. We did this when editor Sydney Ellison created the Green Pages reading list, a source filled with books and articles that push our understanding and ability to decolonize the medium. However, we could only source books or articles that had been published, and we wanted to know, to hear, and to understand from the voices of artists and scholars who perhaps don't have the social capital or resources yet to be published. So we want to try and do some of that work and give humble compensation to those who put pen to paper in ways that explain our experiences' complexities. The three selected writers will also be published in our forthcoming book in the fall. You can find all the details on our website.
ZJM: You’ve started curating content, programming, etc., for PGB, but you just opened Asterisks in the Grand Narrative of History at the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts. You curated it with your friend and colleague Emma Steinkraus. Tell us about the exhibition?
JS: Asterisks is a collaboration between me and Emma from several conversations over the past year about putting together an exhibition in Farmville, Virginia. The show is looking at artists who use the archive as a part of their work, and the collection spans across two spaces, the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts and The Gallery at Hampden-Sydney College. I’m glad you were amongst the 8 artists in the exhibit. The other artists are Marisa Williamson, Jason Patterson [link], Becci Davis, Anina Major, Amir George, Kieran Myles-Tverbakk, and Richard-Jonathan Nelson. It’s incredible seeing the variety of approaches that physically present the archive, use it as a point of reference, or become a mixture of it all. The archive, our own or others, is a space synonym with artistic endeavors. They create juxtapositions that surpass temporal laws. The work in the exhibition becomes history’s asterisk to explain and contextualize our understanding of national narratives.
Link: https://lcva.longwood.edu/exhibitions/asterisks-grand-narrative-history
ZJM: This idea of challenging history through one’s artistic practice makes me think about the conversation we were having that brought Why Intent Matters In Photography to fruition. We both had similar experiences as students because the environments we were in didn’t possess those histories and knowledge necessary for us as individuals or for the work we made. I’m really excited to have it debut here on Strange Fire Collective.
JS: Suppose you are considered a black or minority artist within higher education. In that case, you experience a culture that necessitates you explain your history, ideology, personal trauma, or nuanced stances on basic principles like “I’m just a human.” This same situation replicates itself throughout many institutions that these artists will come in contact with. This creates a burden of labor for that artist, and it also requires them to continually have a clear intent based on how what they make relates to themselves and the rest of the world. While the burden is unacceptable, the task set in front of these individuals is simply extraordinary. The care and respect that comes from that level of self-awareness pushes back against ideas of capturing, exploring, and the whimsical nature of chance.
For me, this essay was a chance to look at photographic history and theory with a lens that preferences these experiences and beliefs.
ZJM: Looking forward to a bright year, let’s get to frolicking!
JS: Frolicking is a radical state of being. In this moment it denies certain forces the ability to suppress our joy. I'm headed to the nearest field of daisies and lilacs under a rainbow to get active. Pull up, I hope to see you there.
Recently I was reading an introductory photographic theory book. Within its pages, I was confronted with an idea that often has been presented to me in writing or within conversations I've had with others in the photographic community. It is an idea about the nature of photography and about how one goes about being a practicing artist in a truly photographic way. It strikes me how a privileged position is taken up by predominantly white artists and critics in photography concerning intent. There is always this romantic idea of going out and capturing the world without inward intent outside of discovery. Letting the "Photograph speak". It is such a position of privilege to be able to stumble around the world having no intent for what you do. It seems to go hand in hand with having no deep understanding of the repercussions of what you make, or how your aloof positionality contributes to a culture of apathy towards things that matter and must be said and changed.
As a “Black artist” in the United States that is not a position that seems logical or is even afforded me by the same people who embody this position of non-intent. I only have to think back to my time in photography departments where I and my BIPOC colleagues would roll our eyes when we were asked about our intent, purpose, trauma, and willingness to bear our souls for consumption. They rolled because, in juxtaposition, our white cis-male counterparts spoke of adventure, exploration, external systems, and the ontological or epistemological nature of the photograph. Never being questioned about their intent, which inherently means discussing one's positionality and understanding of the world around them.
This lack of accountability isn't simply a photographic stance, but it comes about through a series of cultural and political propositions that have their roots in colonization. Since the early days of colonialization, white citizens of the colonies didn't need to individually justify their actions, they were already culturally being affirmed through ideologies like Manifest Destiny. In the contemporary moment, we see such affirmations found through ideas of the American Dream or pull yourself up from the bootstraps mentality, where possibility is boundless with privilege and white skin.
On the other side of the coin those who identify with BIPOC, are constantly being asked to explain their humanity, or they are put in positions which constantly necessitate reflection and understanding about how their actions and mentality inform and influence their navigation in the world. The latter being especially important for those who see themselves entrenched in battles against institutions and broader societies which overtly exclude and demean their existence. if your daily experience doesn't involve this reality it is easier for you to not think about the intent of your actions.
BIPOC lives are always filled with self-reflection about how actions are influenced, or matched, to intent. This truth, or even the perception of its reality, is evident in the ways that photographers who are black are called "black photographers". It is the assumption that whatever they create will have the intent and perspective of their social or cultural identity. Whereas white photographers are called just "photographers" because the assumption is their social or cultural identity, and its perceptions and biases, somehow dissolve into an objective perspective of "the photographer".
The point of this essay is not to solely point at how intrinsically white practitioners of photography perpetuate colonial and destructive ideology, but it is to show how overtly this behavior is taught through broader social and cultural cues as well as specific notions propagated in the field of photography. This propagating isn't universally done, but it's very much a part of curriculums found in higher education, where professors tend to be predominantly white men. Through their acculturation into being artists they are rarely asked to be critical about their intent.
This is a series of ponderings which can lead to a mental safeguard against continuing to use photography as a tool of colonialism. Perhaps the most useful aspect of this essay is that it serves as a series of affirmations for those undergraduate students sitting in silent critiques, graduate students asked to educate their departments, artists being denied exhibitions, and faculty being overlooked for tenure jobs. These BIPOC artists understand that underlining these dilemmas is a faulty culture that promotes exclusion of criticality, and difference, which disrupts the normalizations of white-centric ideology.
To start parsing these ideas out, I would like to focus on two aspects out of many approaches that normalize within the medium a white artist disregarding intent. I have found varying degrees of these statements in many popular theoretical proses, mostly written by white men, and would summarize the bases of their arguments as such:
1. The physical photograph is a representation of reality which includes, often, more information than the taker of the image registers when taking a photograph. Therefore, once the image is made and printed, there is a conversation that happens between maker and object where something new is revealed or understood. This conversation can inform the maker about what to look for next time they are out in the world making images. This a process that happens continually, constantly honing in the skillful eye of the master photographer. This theoretical approach prefers the photographer who goes out to capture what the world will show him and to not predict, understand, or know what they are looking for before taking an image. Such a stance is peppered with topics like instinct, unconscious calculation, decisive moments, and being open to the world.
2. The meaning or message within a photograph is referential and not literal. Images are not like the written word. I can write the sentence "Jay is sitting at his' computer inside of his home in Virginia writing an essay on photographic theory" but if I took a picture of myself right now, it is reasonable to say that it would be hard to discern if the computer I'm using is mine, if the house is mine, if the state is Virginia, or if my name is Jay. Since images can't be literal the "reading of them", the understanding of what the image is about by the viewer, is often left ambiguous. Therefore the viewer projects an understanding of what is shown based on their predispositions and positionalities. So if we go to the example of the image of me sitting at the table, the viewer's understanding of what the image means is going to be based on how they feel about a black guy sitting at a computer. It is under this framework that the intent of the photographer is downplayed, if not disregarded.
While presented separately, both of these points interconnect and reinforce each other. The idea that the image holds more information than the photographer can understand while taking the image supports the idea that intent is unnecessary, because the photographer doesn't know what they’ve made before they’ve made it, or seen it. So a truly photographic practice then becomes about being “open” to “discovering” what is in the world to be “captured” through a series of subconscious instincts. The intent of the photographer becomes secondary to the reading of the image by the viewer, so the photographer is best off “capturing” the things they see as they “explore” and let the moment and their instincts guide them. The words within these quotation marks have a brutal history rooted in a colonial mindset. That history is also the history of photography and must be considered in brief.
The idea of Manifest Destiny finds its popularized roots in the 19th-century ideology embodied by European colonizers of the Americas. Its principles were(are) that the lush landscape and resources they discovered were bestowed upon them to take by destiny or by God. As colonizers found and explored, under this notion, they only found what was theirs to have by right. This position denies the existence and humanity of those who originally inhabited the Americas and other colonial frontiers. It laughed at the repercussions of introducing one's self-righteousness into those spaces and the repercussions of inserting Eurocentric cultural, social, and political manifestations as given law like gravity. It was emboldened by the fact that the Americas were discovered on a trip to Asia for spices. If not destiny then what could have guided those first explorers to this lush land? They said God. I say ill intentions and a deep desire for less bland food. Much hasn't changed in the ways of colonial culture.
Under the mentality of Manifest Destiny, genocide was cleansing of savages, plundering of resources was capitalizing on the unused, and the only atrocity was to stand in the way of the discovering and capturing of open resources by colonial powers. Artistic expressions helped popularize these notions into the minds of citizens of Western nations. Paintings and drawings of open lush landscapes were a way of saying, "Nobody is here, this must be ours to take". Photography played a crucial role in this matter as well. Images of native and enslaved populations mirrored Eugenic diagrams meant to show the closeness of these populations to apes. This wasn't political propaganda they said, it was science and discovery of what they found.
I have begun to see that ideas of instinctual discovery and exploration are not objective actions, but they are subjective actions with intentions that are not being analyzed or considered. They are a series of actions that often have been normalized to aid in the continuation of colonialism and white supremacy. The idea of the instinctual investigation has to take into consideration that instincts become influenced by the cultural ideologies that one is raised within. If we consider that the viewer will read images based on their own biases, why are some not readily discussing that the photographer creates images based on their biases? To dismantle this situation is to be critical of one's intent, to analyze our dispositions and prejudice, and to regard every action as holding vast consequences.
Decades after the popularization of Manifest Destiny, photographers like Ansal Adams would return to discover the landscape with an environmentalist eye. He wanted to show the beauty of America and what needed to be preserved against the destructive power of industrialization. How ironic for a man of the western school of thought to speak of saving the beauty of the land when his cultural reference is the same systems that stole and degraded the land. The plundering of land fueled the resources necessary for the technological advancement of his craft. It was the same plundering which allowed him to continue "discovering" things, which already existed, by denying the knowledge and voices of those who had lived there as far as memory could remember. This normalization of a faltered history and his privileged position within it must have eased his ability to explore, capture, and dictate ideas of what should happen. He didn't need to reflect on his intention, his intent was sanctioned by destiny and God.
Intent must be critical and fails when we are not reflexive about our positionality to the endeavors at hand. Take the example of Edward Curtis who traveled across the western United States. Curtis, like many white Americans during that period, believed that Native populations would disappear, and so anthropologists and photographers thought it their duty to preserve the dying culture. He would travel making images and paying indigenous people to pose for them, and what emerged was a series of images focusing on indigenous culture in a way that turns them into troupes easy to digest for western palates.
Edward Curtis came to make images of cultures that he believed were dying away. He thought he was best suited to go about the endeavor of preserving their memory. How did he prepare himself to understand how and what he photographed would be influenced by his perception of the people he took images of? This propoganda of the disappearing indigenous population is rooted in the final stages of the genocide that was undertaken by colonial powers. How can you then go out and capture scenes of a culture objectively and ethically if your basis for understanding those scenes is rooted in a self-serving ideology that the subjects will die off?
We can also consider the field of street photography more broadly. The basic notion of street photography is that you grab your camera and walk the streets and take images of what happens in front of you. Cumulatively, the images you make will create a narrative about the culture of the city or place you make images of. Which leads me to wonder, why is it that white photographers capture scenes of predominantly white people on the street, and at the same time you can have BIPOC photographers capturing scenes of their respective communities? I imagine the reason might be, in part, as simple as people go places with their fancy photography equipment where they feel comfortable.
There is importance to comfortability, but it is also highly subjective. In many ways, it should be because we learn what situations we are or aren't okay with by understanding our comfortability. That doesn't change that white photographers tend not to document black city life, and I can speculate on the reasons, but I will sum it up as uncomfortable. In turn, BIPOC photographers capture scenes of their community because they aren't being represented or because they are documented negatively. In regards to white spaces, they tend not to photograph them because they are thoroughly captured or they aren't accepted in them. What I gather from this is that the street photographer, whose artistic basis is instinct and discovery, has predispositions that must be reflected on from the moment they decide to walk down that street.
Ultimately what I am proposing is that this idea of the exploring instinctual photographer, waiting for moments to unfold, is one of the reasons photography is still seen as a tool of colonialism. If we understand that the photographer is filled with subjective perspectives then, even when they randomly walk the street, the "random" discovery is filled with unpacked intent. How was the neighborhood chosen or the people chosen to be photographable? Each decision is intently considered based on the photographer's beliefs and understanding of the world.
To battle against this, practitioners must have clear intent and purpose for their images. Being open to what happens should not be the basis of creative practice, but an obvious reaction to deciding to interact with the world. If we are learning openness as a learned skill for photographic practice and not a way of life we are already destined to fail far short of reflective and ethical practices. Before we interact and react to what we see, we must understand our positionality to the subjects that we explore. Otherwise, we risk the chance of repeating tendencies that replicate harmful ideology
To reach this end, we should stop teaching these colonial ideologies from photographic theory within our universities. Or if we do they must be put into a more critical analysis concerning their implications for image-making and their social and cultural lineage to colonialism and white-centric ideology. Unpacking the nuances and subtleties of how artistic practice and social and cultural norms entangle through history and the contemporary moment is essential to ethical practices. Hasn't photography done enough harm? Hasn't our knowledge of systems of oppression advanced to the point that we can change the narrative of how the medium is used? Or furthermore, are we at a point where personal reflexivity by an artist isn't only appreciated or expected by particular identities, but can it become normalized as the basis for how the artist frames and we understand the photographic depictions they create?
Perhaps, in the ultimate humor of the universe, only destiny will manifest that answer.