Figure as Index // Georgia Phillips-Amos
Luther Konadu’s Figure as Index at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, March 18-April 30, 2022.
Portraits and Repetition
“There can be no repetition,” wrote Gertrude Stein, “because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.”[1] Here, in Figure as Index, images repeat. A photograph of four people sitting around a table is framed next to another photograph of hands holding another photograph of the same four sitting around the same table. In both, one person sits on the table and they alone look straight at the camera. Nearly identical, the two images inspire a game of Spot the Difference; the angles have slightly changed, one face has turned, a tan line remains where a bracelet is now missing. The color of the second print is softened, washed out. Its surface is shiny and crinkled by the hands that cradle it. The composition, which at first appears to simply repeat, has been altered in reproduction by chance and by design. The corner of the print in the second frame has been dog-eared. Stein’s emphasis slides from the figures represented to the tactile nature of photography itself.
“Luther Konadu photographs people casually and repeatedly. His portraits are of young black friends and loved ones. Some appear again and again, in frames taken seconds apart or over the six years he has been working on this ongoing project.”
Stein was writing about language: “No matter how often you tell the same story if there is anything alive in the telling the emphasis is different,”[2] she insists. Luther Konadu photographs people casually and repeatedly. His portraits are of young black friends and loved ones. Some appear again and again, in frames taken seconds apart or over the six years he has been working on this ongoing project. Rather than the pursuit of an ideal portrait, this study in redundancy results in a heightened awareness that no photograph can pin down its subject, ever. Photographer Elle Pérez has said of their own portraits that a photograph is “a perfect container because it is not actually, ever, definitive.”[3] As in Konadu’s repeating frames and scattered collages, subjects are recorded as they transform, sometimes perform, and evade our grasp. Konadu describes his use of multiples as key to his practice that is both “continuous and without a specific destination.”[4] His repetitions emphasize both the inadequacy of photography to capture its subjects and the materiality of the photographs. He wants us to remember we are looking at framed pieces of paper, made documents, not through windows onto people’s lives.
Luther Konadu’s Figure as Index at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, March 18-April 30, 2022.
The Studio
“I like that sense of anonymity that comes with removing information from my photographs,”[5] Konadu explains. He asks the people he photographs to wear plain nondescript clothes and minimal jewellery. Signs and signifiers of who they might be are stripped away. Konadu evokes the work of LaToya Ruby Frazer. Frazer, who also employs classic black and white documentary-style photography, tends to photograph subjects in places that are essential to them—for example, family members standing before framed photographs on their mantel piece at home in Braddock, Pennsylvania, or residents of Flint, Michigan, brushing their teeth with bottled water. Rather than stage environments that will tell us something about the people in his images, Konadu photographs friends in his spare studio.
The artist describes his studio as an “idea space” or a “non-place, separate from the world or the realities beyond.”[6] This idea of a non-space is an illusion that draws out the artifice of representation. Figures are photographed standing and seated against blank walls. They are arranged tableau vivant style, yet the contrived scenes are never of obvious historical or picturesque meaning. We’re left with an awareness of the studio, a signal of the labour and artistic intention that goes into each portrait and collage. We see the bare room where the image takes shape, and, in some works, we are given the impression of looking directly at a work in progress, a wall or a desk where the artist is completing a composition. As in the work of Paul Mpagi Sepuya, who often photographs himself photographing his subjects, the set-up behind the final image is never beside the point. The studio is a theatre where the dual performance of posing and taking photographs takes place. It is also a social space. Against the myth of the artist as a singular genius, here, Konadu’s studio is buzzing with collaborators and movement.
“The studio is a theatre where the dual performance of posing and taking photographs takes place. It is also a social space. Against the myth of the artist as a singular genius, here, Konadu’s studio is buzzing with collaborators and movement.”
On his studio walls, the artist uses painter’s tape to hold photographs in place, and this tape becomes key to the compositions. The artist Carmen Winant recently used blue painter’s tape to stick 2,000 images of pregnancy and childbirth to the walls of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in 2019. Describing why she used this hardware store material, Winant explains that it can be easily removed and “it holds images up.” Likewise, in Konadu’s work, the labour and ephemeral components that go into holding images together are made hyper-visible. Hands, presumably Konadu’s own, raise and sometimes point to one image in particular. Roland Barthes wrote famously that an essential function of photographs is their ability to point to and mechanically repeat something “that has been.”[7] Rather than order and memorialize the contents of the frame, this artist’s hands point to the potential rearrangement of what we see and expose the illusion of the composition.
Luther Konadu’s Figure as Index at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, March 18-April 30, 2022.
Sousveillance
A shared quality across the portraits is a still-water dramatic expression on the faces of the figures. This lends a neutral but loaded air, like the passport-photo, akin to the portraits of German photographer Thomas Ruff. Ruff, whose interests include both portraiture and abstract compositions, is another inspiration for Konadu. There is a shared austerity in their portraits. This is part of the protocol of Konadu’s studio: no smiling. The repeated photographs of the same aloof subjects calls to mind surveillance imaging, and their arrangements on the walls of the studio and the gallery can be forensic, lending a sense of mystery, but also a sense of heightened awareness of subjecthood and the powers-that-be.
“This is part of the protocol of Konadu’s studio: no smiling. The repeated photographs of the same aloof subjects calls to mind surveillance imaging, and their arrangements on the walls of the studio and the gallery can be forensic, lending a sense of mystery, but also a sense of heightened awareness of subjecthood and the powers-that-be.”
Photographic surveillance technology, with its imagined transparency, objectifies, classifies, and polices the subjects of its gaze. The surveillance of black bodies continues to be tied to colonialism, slavery, incarceration, and, most recently, racialized facial recognition technologies. Konadu’s practice speaks back to this history and shakes it loose from fixed narratives. These figures look back at the photographer and beyond his frames and the frames of reference the viewer may bring. Picturing the same subjects again and again, Konadu explains “the photograph is not an accurate way for tracking them because they’re always changing.”[8] Cloaked in the anonymity of Konadu’s design, they are aware of being under scrutiny, but self-determined.
Luther Konadu’s Figure as Index at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, March 18-April 30, 2022.
Plexiglass frames provide an extra shield, introducing glare into the images and reflecting the viewer’s face into the frame. We are continuously confronted with an awareness of ourselves looking. The only works not behind glass are on twin plywood boards. Pasted on one is an image of Konadu taking a flash photograph, and on the other a young woman is taking a photograph too. Are they taking pictures, or are they using their cameras to shield their faces from view? On hinges, these works jut out from the wall into the room, turning the cameras on the viewer. Simone Browne has utilized the concept of sousveillance, meaning “to watch from below.”[9] She writes of dark sousveillance as a means to “render one’s self out of sight.”[10] Konadu’s subjects do both. A photograph on sky-blue backing folds over itself to conceal the head of its subject. Konadu tells me this is the direction he’s moving in—a kind of opaque abstraction that keeps the viewer right at the surface of the project. Rather than offer up his subjects, the artist refuses to be an authoritative witness and celebrates instead the irreducibility of the people who pose for him.
Luther Konadu’s Figure as Index at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, March 18-April 30, 2022.
The Grid
Black justified frames break up the gallery space. In this way, the room is cut up into a grid. Cuts and folds within each frame echo this effect. A grid sets its components in relation, separating them but along a shared path of inquiry. Bright post-it squares, painter’s tape, and strips of studio detritus pop against Konadu’s black and white portraits. No one element is given pride of place in the patchwork. Instead, splashes of color and overlapping lines interrupt and lend momentum to the arrangement. Enter a room run by Mondrian’s grid logic, where abstraction dislocates time and space.
Konadu works in still-portraits but the grid-display contains an element of continuous movement. The grid is a map that can be followed in n+1 directions. Tina Marie Campt has described stasis as a means of displaying the “tension produced by holding a complex set of forces in suspension.”[11] It is within this suspension that Konadu’s still compositions operate. Laid out like a story board, the grid implies a narrative to uncover but the compositions allow no inroads. Close reading one collage, my eyes scan from text to photograph to photograph, squinting to find the meaning in the picture, the poem in the words I see: “with,” “video,” “a,” “had,” “had,” along one end of the frame, “beauty” in the far corner. No gap gardening to be had here. Instead, my eye finds a hair caught behind the glass: a glitch in the grid. Is this the subtle punctum I’ve been looking for, or a mistake? Emphasis and attention waver in Konadu’s grids and the tensions between art and life, order and mess, collide. In this collision is the rhythm of the project.
Georgia Phillips-Amos is a course instructor and a PhD candidate in art history at Concordia University in Montreal. Her writing on art and literature has appeared in Artforum, Border Crossings, C Magazine, Frieze, and The Village Voice. She is also a contributing editor for O Bod Magazine.
Footnotes
1 Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” in Lectures in America, (New York, Random House: 1935), 167.
2 Ibid.
3 Elle Pérez, “Elle Pérez Works Between the Frame: New York Close Up,” Art21, March 20, 2019. https://art21.org/watch/new-york-close-up/elle-perez-works-between-the-frame/.
4 Luther Konadu, Interview with the author, zoom call, April 1, 2022.
5 ibid.
6 ibid.
7 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982), 4–5.
8 ibid.
9 Browne, Simone, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, (NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 21.
10 ibid.
11 Tina Marie Campt , “Performing Stillness: Diaspora and Stasis in Black German Vernacular Photography,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 26, Number 1, June 2017, pp. 155-170 (Article) , 159.