My American project is
that piece of the American fabric
that is not always engaged or amplified
in the great American narrative.
Looking at those histories, those subjects who throughout
the great American project have very often
been marginalized.
My work over these past 40 odd years has been
about amplifying those presences
and amplifying those narrative and those subjects
in a visually ambitious way, that also engages
with the history of photography
and how photograph visualize and represent the world.
That's my piece of the great American project.
All photographs start with the imagination.
I want to make a certain kind of photograph.
And you need to actually do it, you know,
to have the assurance that in fact you can make
a physical thing that's the equal of the idea.
I would say that I pretty much learned
to make photographs by making those pictures in Harlem
from 1975 to 1979.
Getting to know the community in Harlem,
allowing people in the community to get to know me
and trying to make what I felt was an honest representation
of African-Americans in that particular urban community
that in some ways,
stood in relation to the more,
I guess you could say, pathologically driven representations
of African-Americans.
What I came to realize in making those photograph,
there was not only the picture making part
but there was very clearly the social part.
How does one inject himself momentarily
into someone's life
and come away with something
that resonates with some real aspect
of the individual?
And the success of that work would be that
the camera itself disappears.
You don't look at those portrait-based works
and think about the camera.
So it moves from being a photograph or a photographic object
to being an experience between you and that individual.
Over the years,
I've never completely lost touch with Harlem.
The neighborhood began to be transformed
both socially and spatially.
The geography of the community began to transform.
I realized that I wanted to make work
about how this particular
African-American community
where my own personal narrative begins
and where my work begins was being transformed
through those forces of global capital and gentrification.
That for me was the tension between the past
and the present.
And I wanted to try to make photographs
about those absences and disappearances
as it was taking place.
For me, one of the things
that this exhibition has certainly
amplified is the aspect of history.
I've always been working either in response to histories
whether it's a personal history or a larger history
or in a way that seeks to
insert the Black subject
or the teenage subject
or some other socially marginalized subject
into that thing that we call history.
History in its re-telling tends to become mythic.
And that is certainly true in the case
of the Underground Railroad.
Because of necessity, those locations,
most of them were never known.
I had some specific sites that I knew were related
and I started looking at the landscape around
and in between those sites, trying to look
at the contemporary landscape
as if it were the landscape of the past
and trying to see through the eyes
of a fugitive African-American escaping from slavery
moving across that landscape under cover of darkness,
not in the full, bright light of day.
I didn't just want to document
what remained of that history
but I wanted to find a way through the imagination
to make it resonate through the photograph.