#seenunseen

It was the day of the senior prom in Newnan, Georgia, and it was hot – unseasonably hot, I was told, for the South. I had been running around all afternoon when I received a text that the downtown was full of young men and women in their tuxes and gowns. As I headed there, I crossed the train tracks, where a girl in a long red dress was posing for a picture. I stopped at the city park, which was fluttering with teenagers as though they were butterflies, in brilliant raiment of magenta, azure, peach, gold . . .

I got out of the car and started photographing couples: girls holding balloons with elaborate hairdos piled on their heads, boys standing tall with lots of promise in their stiff clothes. Nothing I made felt good to me. Plus, it was so hot!

Just as I was about to leave I saw a woman using her cell phone to photograph a couple. Her blond-streaked hair was catching the light, and her jewelry sparkled from feet away. I approached her, asked if I could make a few pictures of her. She said yes and told me her name was Teneka, and that her two small daughters were with her. While the girls circled around us, we made a few frames. Then I left.

When I later looked at the photographs of Teneka, they – like so much of the work I’d done that day – disappointed me; they didn’t feel the way I had felt when I had first seen her. But then there was one photograph that I didn’t remember taking, in which the wind had lifted her hair, and she seemed for a moment to depart to another place. I decided to make a print, and to call her.

When I reached Teneka by phone, she told me that she was working – she goes to people’s homes, doing their hair and makeup – in a neighborhood north of town. She said she’d have a lunch break in the afternoon, and that we could meet then. She gave me an address, and when I arrived, she was sitting in her car, waiting for me.

Inside Teneka’s car, the air was cool and scented by the spicy wings she’d picked up for lunch. When I pulled out her portrait and gave it to her, she stayed silent for a second. Then she said, slowly, “Oh my God, oh my God,” and started to cry. Then I started to cry, and we just sat there for a while.

“It’s like I’m saying, ‘God, just take the wheel,’” she finally said. “‘Just give me the faith that I need, that strong independence. Just help me move on to my next destination.’”

Teneka told me all about her two daughters, ages 6 and 9, and her father, whom she’s caring for, who has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. She told me that she loves having her own business, but that the strains and frustrations have grown increasingly trying. She said that when I met her she’d been photographing a client she’d been with all day.

“I’m a total believer, and I’ve been praying a lot,” Teneka continued. “Like, I don’t know, sometimes you wake up with a lot of demons, or a lot of weight on your back. And you know, you just gotta talk to yourself, and faith is what you need. I got to keep moving. I got to keep going, no matter what goes on in my life.”

I asked her what she thought her photograph said about her. “It says I’m humble,” she said.

Here’s what I’m learning, working as a photographer and writer, and publishing my photographs and stories in the communities in which they are made: People want to be respected. They want fairness. They want for themselves and their communities to be seen.

The problem is, it is nearly impossible for any group of people to agree on what that means. I have found that one person may see a photograph or read a story and experience it as beautiful, aspirational, even transcendent. Another person may see the same photo and story and view them as outrageous, harmful, disrespectful. In the end, I hope that these clashes of perspective might lead to a finding of commonality, to an appreciation for others’ views, and to respectful dialogue and conversation.

My work in Georgia is a work in progress, with a public installation as the final goal. There is much more to be done, and I have much more to learn. I have come to love the people I have photographed. To try to be the most fair to them all, as I express what I see, I’ve decided it will be best to publish the photographs and stories all together, when the body of work is complete. 

I hope you will stay tuned! Thank you to all, 

While working in Georgia, I am trying to consider the long threads of history: how they come together to weave the present moment, tethering the present to the past. If I’m to make work that helps people see past their bubbles into the lives of another, mustn’t I look backward, to see how these bubbles were created?

In Newnan, black and white people have lived side by side – and in almost equal numbers – since its founding, in the early 1800s. At that time, Scotch-Irish and English settlers moved inland from the coast, bringing their families, their animals, and their slaves. Many built cotton plantations and immense fortunes – soon turned to dust by the Civil War. In the following decades, poor white farmers and freed black slaves, both now tied to the land as sharecroppers, would replant the cotton and bring it to harvest. The landowners, with their newly built textile mills, would turn that crop into a dazzling wealth. By 1910, a local newspaper reported that Newnan was the fourth-wealthiest town per capita in the United States.

I’ve noticed that with many white people in Newnan, talk of the power structure that underpinned the town’s beginnings is met with hushed tones, or outright resistance. What does that have to do with today?, I’m sometimes asked. What is the cutoff date, beyond which we don’t have to talk about this anymore? But with members of the black community, talk of those times rises quickly to the surface. Speaking of his ancestors’ contribution to the town’s white ruling class, one black man told me, “I earned that money for them, and I didn’t get anything.”

So in thinking about Newnan’s founders, I wondered where I might meet their descendants today. I was told they attend Central Baptist Church.

On the Sunday that I visited the church, Barbara caught my eye. She was petite and trim, with a bright blond bob and a rosy-pink jacket. She looked the way I’d imagined a Southern woman would look, and I asked to be introduced to her. I told her about my project, and asked if she’d be willing to let me make her portrait. She laughed, and agreed to let me call her later that week. I asked if she would wear the same pink jacket.

Barbara told me that she’d moved a log cabin onto her parents’ property, but when I arrived at the address I found myself in front of a white house. I called Barbara on her cell phone, and she told me that I was at her parents’ house, but that she’d come to get me. While I waited I looked around – at the vast woods, the flower garden, the American-eagle ornaments everywhere. I couldn’t help noticing a small statue, situated on one of the house’s front steps. It portrayed a black child seated with his ankles crossed, holding an American flag. It shocked me.

Barbara arrived, and we sat down on those steps. She told me about herself – that she’d been a flight attendant for Delta, that she competed in triathlons, that she had two grown children. She had just moved back home, to be near her family, after living in Atlanta for two decades. She told me that her parents’ house had been built before the Civil War, and that the land had been in her father’s family since the early 1800s. She said that her mother’s family had been in the cotton-gin business.

When I asked if I could make Barbara’s portrait there, as she sat on those steps, she chafed a little. She put her hand on the statue and said, “Doesn’t this offend you, sort of, a little? I mean it’s kind of cute, but can you imagine some black person walking up and seeing that? If I had a friend of mine who’s black come here,” she went on, “I just don’t think they’d appreciate their race sitting on the steps. They’re portrayed as being a slave, like ‘the good old days.’ I just don’t know about Little Black Sambo out here. It’s not nice.”

For the next hour Barbara and I talked about this portrayal. She told me about Elvo, her family's African-American maid, whom she had loved growing up, and her grandmother's beloved chauffeur, who once drove a birthday cake all the way up to Barbara in Atlanta. “They were not viewed as anything different,” said Barbara. I wondered if she meant that they weren’t viewed as unequal.

“But they were, kind of like, in their place, though,” I said.

“That’s what their place was, yeah. That’s how we viewed 'em, as just kind of helping.”

“The help,” I said.

“Yeah, there you go,” she said. “The Help. Driving Miss Daisy.”

I could tell Barbara didn’t want to criticize her parents, yet she talked of their views as both generational and persistent. I asked her to name a stereotype of black people that she’d often heard. “Lazy,” she said quickly, and added, “When I lived in Atlanta, you know, you just see a black guy walking with his pants half down and you’re scared to death. I am. I don’t know why.”

Then she told me a story about a running group she had belonged to, which worked out with homeless men, most of whom were black. Three times a week she rose at dawn, picked up the men in her car, and took them on long runs. They charted one another's progress, and competed in races. “It’s amazing how you get to know someone like that,” she said. “I mean, you encourage them to come work out, and they become your best friends. And oh my God, it was just a rude awakening. It will be a lifetime experience I’ll have forever. It was wonderful.”

When we were finished making photographs, Barbara and I agreed that we’d meet again before I left town. I admired her honesty, and in the following days I imagined her as somehow wedged between a generation compelled to portray a black person in humiliating caricature – a childlike object on a step – and a generation to which people of color might appear as equals.

I showed Barbara's portrait to a few people – including a friend of mine, who is black, who said, “She let you set her up like that?,” and Barbara’s mother, who said, breezily, “Oh I love that you’ve got the little black man in there!” When I showed it to Barbara, she gasped at her appearance, making a joke about needing plastic surgery. But then she said, “I love it.

“I love the picture because I think it speaks about the way our country is so divided right now. It speaks about the controversy between the blacks and the whites. . . . You have the Southern house – the Antebellum house – and the Little Black Sambo holding the American flag. And then you’ve got the eagle, which is the symbol of our country. And you’ve got the white supremacy.”

“Barbara,” I said, “this picture puts you in the position of the white supremacy.”