Lorna Simpson and contemporary visual culture

Lorna Simpson]

In the 1930s, Dorothea Lange used photography to document the disastrous conditions for Americans confronted with the Dust Bowl in the West. The images demonstrated the urgent need for government programs to assist these disadvantaged people. The photographs told the entire story. Today, Lorna Simpson's photographs do the same: document the American blacks and demonstrate their personal societal needs. This Brooklyn-born artist uses black-and-white images to portray the situation of present-day American blacks so uninformed viewers can better understand these individuals perception of the world.

As Simpson notes about her work:

By presenting these cliches about women, I'm dealing with the language of stereotypes. I'm pointing to the fact that the wrong questions are so often asked, and this is why you don't know anything about this person. I intentionally sought to avoid presenting a 'them and us' situation, them being a white audience. It is also a self description, because these stereotypes cross the boundaries of race and gender. It is not necessarily pointing a finger at any individual's ideology, but at the language of stereotypes. Stereotypes don't reveal anything about a woman or an experience anyway. So I am suggesting that cliches and assumptions should be discarded. (Willis 1992)

Simpson graduated from the New York School of Visual Arts with a BA of fine arts in photography in 1983 and from the University of California, San Diego, with an MA in visual arts in 1985. Born in 1960, she grew up in a time when the Civil Rights movement was front-page news and black artists and authors were struggling to find acceptance of their works. Simpson became one of the first to break through the race barriers: She was the first black woman to participate at the Venice Biennale and to have a solo exhibition in the "Projects" series of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. She was one of very few black-American artists to exhibit at Documenta in 1987 and 2002. She has also received numerous grants and awards and displayed her work worldwide (Arango np).

Simpson began her career as a painter, but she changed to photography as this medium offered a better opportunity for the documentary genre. Later, "she began taking issue with the unquestioning manner in which viewers approach documentary images, the expectations of truth they bring to the images, the scopophilic pleasure taken in viewing the images, and the imbalance of power between the photographer and subject" (Joseph 35). Her unique trait is the combination of text and images that make the viewer ask questions about race and gender. Her black-and-white photos of black women are candid, yet disquieting. The subjects often have their backs to the camera, which further separates them. As she explains in a Museum of Contemporary Art website interview:

I took elements from my own documentary work and abstracted particular qualities, putting them into very stark environments -- meaning, perhaps, the way a person stands or a particular gesture -- but leaving the photographic subject blank or not permitting the photographic subject's face to appear. That way, all the information or clues that point to a particular individual were eliminated from the image.

She, 1992.

The work She (1992) clearly demonstrates how she uses the camera to define her poses. In this case, the subject wears a brown suit and white, buttoned shirt. She sits facing forward as if at a meeting or interview, with her position shifting slightly in each image. Simpson cropped the image so that the person can only be seen between the lips and the knees.

This work exemplifies Simpson's thoughts about black women in the U.S., who are often treated as if they are faceless and have no separate identity. In this case, the viewer must focus on other aspects of the body instead of the face, such as the attire that appears very masculine and the relaxed pose. Can "she" wear a suit and still be a woman? The title "female" in lowercase italic script looks like a scientific label. Simpson says of this and similar works, "They're generically seen as black characters or as people of ethnic groups. Whatever the subject of my work, it will always first be categorized in those terms. I have my own utopian sense that at a certain point people's relationship to this work will change, that it will not come to the forefront as "Oh, they're black!'" (Sims 85)

The She image, like a similar early one called You're Fine, You're Hired, focuses on the experience of the present-day worker and the difficulties black women have finding positions. This photo is somewhat autobiographical in that Simpson had trouble finding work after graduating from school. When applying for a job just to answer telephones, she had to have a number of physical exams including an EKG, eye test, urinalysis and blood test. Once she was hired, she found that no other black woman ever worked at this company and no other woman or man had had to go through the tests that she had to go through (Ansell, para 35).

Simpson's work combines a photograph that requires thought, and often can be misread (as with She regarding gender), as well as text to make sure that the individuals looking at the visual are actively questioning something new, something that they may have often seen out of the corner of their eye but not taken notice of and actually analyzed.

Artist Coco Fusco writes of Simpson's work, "[Her] focus on the construction of meaning and value, and how they are generated out among the artist, viewer, and object, places her work within a realm of philosophical questioning that has been central to conceptual art for decades." Simpson "continually makes the point that her images do not give answers." Fusco suggests that Simpson's images are "fetishlike symbols of something or someone unfathomable or unrepresentable." If her visuals symbolize the "unrepresentable," then the merging of art with social theory resounds by informing one other. Art attests that no one must choose a poor representation of oneself because there might not be a representation capable of totally encompassing one's individuality. A white feminist criticized Simpson's work for "enforcing black women's invisibility." Fusco would argue that the work was actually "reflecting the audience's own limitations back at them." That is, people "see" what they want. Viewers bring their own political context and personal identity to art with a lens to "see."