Lorna Simpson: Phototexts at the Intersection of Gender and Race
Through a career spanning decades, from the early 1980s to present, artist Lorna Simpson has worked in a variety of media. She rose to prominence, though, through her conceptual photography: particularly her phototexts. The words Simpson uses to accompany her images are neither descriptive (plainly stating the visual content of the work) nor prescriptive (explaining how the images are meant to be interpreted), but act as extensions of the images, complicating their arguments. This text also asks the viewer to critique their immediate assumptions and associations when faced with images of Black women.
In her phototexts from the late 1980s to mid-1990s, Simpson explores the oft-ignored experience of being a Black woman in America. Alongside other Black female artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Kara Walker, Simpson is credited with bringing these narratives to the attention of the New York art scene. The figures in Simpson’s phototexts are often turned with their backs to the viewer, obscuring their identity. This also leads to the motif of Black women’s hair playing a significant role in her images. In Back (1991), Simpson presents the image of a Black woman, facing away from the viewer, her hair braided and held up in a knot. This image is juxtaposed with that of a cut braid, which encircles plastic plaques that read “eyes in the back of your head.” Without being able to see her face, Simpson’s subject is seemingly deindividualized. In an unexpected way, this deindividualization may suggest more agency for the subject. By obscuring her identity, Simpson denies “the fetishization of the female body—especially the black female body” that is all too common in anthropological photography. The text suggests the subject is more cognizant of the viewer than one might assume. Black hair carries a stigma: non-normativity, exoticism, unprofessionalism. Because of this, it attracts attention in the form of unwanted glances, stares, even touches. By suggesting “eyes” on the back of the subject’s head, Simpson frames the wearing of natural Black hair as a bold statement, a challenge to Eurocentric beauty standards that is willing to stare right back at critics.
In Same Two (1991), Simpson uses the image of the braid as a signifier of shared experiences and cultural ties. Through eight photographs, connected in two rows, Simpson depicts a similar knotted hairstyle to the one in Back (1991). However, this hairstyle is shown on two subjects with one long braid connecting the two. The text explores the similarities and differences between the two subjects. Both “knew illness” and “worked for the same pay,” but they “were not related” and “had never met.” Another phrase suggests workplace discrimination, in that both “were let go for the same reasons.” Simpson also alludes to the disproportionate amount of violence experienced by Black women and the fear it fosters: both subjects “read the news account and knew it could have easily been them.” The connection of the braid represents the links of shared experience and trauma among Black women, even if they do not know each other, turning the metaphorical bond into a physical one. The rope-like construction of the braid may also allude to the intergenerational trauma exacted by slavery, imagery present in other Simpson works such as Double Negative (1990).
Simpson shifts from depictions of natural hair to the artificial in her work Wigs (1994). The work was inspired by her own wig-shopping in New York City in the early 90s. “Shop after shop sold all sorts of wigs. Human hair, yak hair, synthetic hair,” Simpson said in an interview with The Guardian. The 21 wigs Simpson displayed in the original 1994 Wigs portfolio represent a range of hair, from straight platinum blonde to afros and braids. She also included a fake mustache and a merkin for good measure. The photos themselves stand as anthropological specimens, inviting the viewer to wonder about who would choose to wear them, and for what purpose. The wigs serve as reminders of the performativity of identity. “The wig produced the desired effect,” one piece of text reads, acknowledging wigs as physical markers meant to elicit certain responses from viewers. Simpson also uses the text to explore the performativity of gender in particular. These phrases, taken from pre-existing sources, include
She dressed them as twins
Sometimes male
Sometimes female
Truth was asked that she display her breasts to confirm her sex during a meeting that she might have been a man masquerading as a woman.
Both passages explore the role of wigs and hair in the performance of gender, and the assumptions tied between sex, gender, and certain hairstyles.
Phototexts are now just a fraction of Simpson’s oeuvre; in the mid-1990s, she turned to film and video. Her portfolio also boasts sculptures and collages. Today, she focuses on her collage works, made with found images, and large-scale paintings. Though the image of the Black woman is common throughout her work, Simpson struggles with only being seen as a Black artist. “Just as the Caucasian figure in contemporary art is seen as universal,” she says, “the black figure of African descent should be too.”