Sometimes the most radical of images can come from the most usual of places. When Theaster Gates, the Chicago-based artist, professor, and curator, was approached by the Fondazione Prada in Milan to organise a photography exhibition for their Osservatorio gallery space, he immediately decided to showcase that cross-section between the everyday and the extraordinary, and foreground an institution that was instrumental in making his hometown one of America’s great bastions of African American culture: the Johnson Publishing Company. The company — which published among other publications the most iconic black magazines of all time, Ebony and Jet — opened their archive of millions of photographs to Gates, who painstakingly put together The Black Image Corporation, a comprehensive look at the company’s indelible imprint on African American womanhood in mid-20th-century America.
The photos themselves are transcendent — black women of all shades modelling the most expensive couture, but also showcasing intricate hairstyles, stunning homes, and daily scenes, which suggest the universality of these women’s experiences. The show focuses on the work of two photographers, who were stalwarts of the JPC’s publications: Moneta Sleet, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his coverage of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral, and Isaac Sutton, a JPC staffer, who lensed era-defining icons such as Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson, Richard Pryor, and Aretha Franklin. Limiting the scope of the exhibit to these two artists gives it a stark focus, while exploring the Osservatorio feels akin to waltzing through a time capsule. When we spoke to Gates soon after the exhibit opened, he talked about the importance of selecting Sleet and Sutton, and what their images said about the African American experience at the time.
“The Black Image Corporation project allowed me to extend the life of Johnson Publishing image-making, so that more people — not just African Americans, but people from all over the world — get to experience this amazing proliferation of images over seven decades,” Gates tells SLEEK. “I thought it could be so interesting to do a presentation of a couple hundred images from the Johnson Publishing Archive at the Prada Foundation, not as an artistic work, but as a sort of curatorial scope, celebrating Sleet and Sutton. We probably looked at over 200,000 images to land on about 13,000 that we were given licensed permission to use, and of that 13,000 we were able to select 366 that were in some way associated with our project.”
Obviously that’s an incredible amount of photos to oversee. Narrowing it down from hundreds of thousands to a few hundred proved to be both a blessing and a curse — the opportunity for Gates to explore the JPC archives at his heart’s content, but also the gargantuan task of finding the theme and scope of the exhibit. Luckily, there were no shortage of muses. “Initially I just had curiosity,” says Gates of his experience researching the archive. “I just thought, ‘Let me just see what’s in these boxes’, and how I can start making a case for the genius of the Johnson Publishing Company in the world.” Gates decided to make black women the “protagonist of the collection” and personified his research by calling it The Black Image Corporation.
Gates doesn’t speak of photography, or publishing, or printing, but “image-making”, a differentiation that might set The Black Image Corporation apart from your typical photo retrospective. The era that the show deals with, smack-dab in the middle of the American civil rights movement, birthed thousands of images that are seared into the American psyche — images of discrimination, injustice and violence. Far from escapism, the photos on display show another, just as true side of the black experience at the time — one that Gates wanted to display in earnest. “When the outside world, or the European world, imagines the black experience of 1960, they immediately imagine German shepherds being sicced on black teenagers,” Gates explains. “What I wanted to say in the exhibition was that in addition to the truth of the civil rights movement and the truth of a kind of post-civil rights moment, there were these other aspects of the black experience that were real.” Outside of the struggles faced by African Americans, Gates desired to show that there were still opportunities arising for black Americans at this time, including affirmative action. “I wanted to focus on the other truths of the black experience. These are very sophisticated, college educated, beautiful people, and that story needs to be better known.”
The title of the exhibit also speaks to the proliferation of JPC’s images, and their reach within the black community and beyond. After all, the show isn’t called the Black Image Gallery, or the Black Image Exhibit. It, like JPC, seeks to harness the lense of consumerism to solidify its message. “In a way, this was an attempt to honor [JPC founder] John Johnson. It was actually through his company that he was trafficking in black images,” reveals Gates. “It wasn’t altruistic, it was a company, and I thought the best platform to give him would be in the form of a company (in the title).” It’s quite a novel idea, especially given the connotations of the word ‘corporation’ in the art world: the capitalistic intrusion of money into the creative process, which Gates was aware of. “I think that in some ways, I was trying to give a heart to that word ‘corporation’, because the truth is, there are very few altruistic endeavours that would be as focused and prolific as Johnson Publishing was,” admits Gates. “And, so maybe one way to tribute this company is by creating a new company. Not creating a museum, not creating a little book—creating a company that could continue to proliferate those images around the world. I’m honouring capital, not capitalism.”
Out of 300 photographs tucked in every nook and cranny of the gallery, we had to ask Gates to highlight a few favourites. “There’s one portrait of a woman, she looks a lot like Toni Braxton,” Gates muses . “It’s really hard to tell if the photograph was taken yesterday, or in the late 1960s. That kind of timelessness of that image is something that’s really special.” On the ground floor, he spotlights another gem, a photograph of a woman singing with her fist clenched. “We don’t know the name of this singer, but she reminds me a lot of Mary Wells, the old school singer. But what I love is that there was this moment where they probably said to her, ‘Go on and sing, and we’ll just shoot,’ and we just see this expression of the black experience captured.” A final favourite for Gates is an image of a tall woman wearing a black and white rectangular dress. “She looks like a Mondrian painting,” Gates poetically puts it. “What I love is that there’s this artfulness to the photography, but also the design. It’s just such an graceful portrayal of the black body, one that’s not derogatory or highly sexualised, but elegant and precise.” That sounds like the perfect description for this one-of-a-kind exhibition overall.
Black Image Corporation at Fondazione Prada, Milan Osservatorio runs through to 14 January 2019.