#posingbeauty

Artist and historian Deb Willis, who curated one of our current traveling exhibitions, "Posing Beauty in African American Culture", worked with Thomas Allen Harris on his docu-film Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People. Inspired by Willis' research, the film uses family photographs of Harris, as well as photographers like Renee Cox and Carrie Mae Weems, to explore the interconnectivity of the personal image and Black history. These familial images are juxtaposed with historical photos creating a more in depth photographic record of Black America. 

Like the exhibition "Posing Beauty", Through A Lens Darkly meditates on the power of the image to represent and to challenge. Black representation and visibility are crucial themes explored in relationship to the larger narrative of American history and culture.  

Young Man In Plaid, is a photo I made in New York City in 1991. I was just walking near Union Square when I came upon this fellow standing in a doorway. We did not speak or interact at all, I very quickly made one or two exposures and continued on my way to wherever it was I was going at the time. Had I approached him and interrupted this moment his pose and body language would have no doubt changed, and this would have been a much different photograph. A much more self conscious portrait I suspect.

My wife Meg Henson Scales wrote eloquently about his image in an essay entitled, “(In) The Visible Man” for the catalog of the traveling exhibition, “Pictures From America, photographs by Jeffrey Henson Scales.”

    “ It is unclear whether Young Man In Plaid is the Mad Hatter or Dr. Feelgood- but he is an undeniable progenitor of style, which oozes from even his sweet bare tit. The door frame is almost Doric, en homage to his beguiling simplicity. He could be from the 12th or the 21st centuries, or anywhere in between. He's most definitely got his own bag, figuratively and beside him.”  Meg Henson Scales, 1996

Pictures From America was a traveling one-man exhibition of my work in that opened in 1996 and traveled throughout the US for five years. The show was co-ordinated by Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. Curated by James Wyman.

More recently this photo has been exhibited throughout the country again in the traveling group exhibition and book, “Posing Beauty in African American Culture” curated by Deborah Willis, and traveled by Curatorial Assistance. They both did a great job of getting and keeping this show on the road since 2009. It has been at some really great venues around the country and you can read a bunch of the reviews of the show at the bottom of the page linked here.