Lorna Simpson

LORNA SIMPSON

London: Phaidon, 2002

We all know a classic Lorna Simpson photograph when we see one: those elegant black female figures, their backs to us, rejecting any familiarity yet communicating with us feverishly in accompanying written messages located just beyond the borders of the image.

When these works first appeared in the early 1980s they held up the medium of photography for intensive interrogation. Using the traditional format of the silver print, Simpson questioned the authority of realism that defined the photographic project. Particularly at issue were the tropes of documentary practice (perhaps best known through the angst-laden pictures of the New Deal era), which in their illumination of human suffering mostly framed such realities as natural, inevitable occurrences, the political causes behind the events remaining invisible and unexamined.

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Loma Simpson continued

Simpson often provided detailed visual accounts of the body in her work but denied the strategies of the portrait and the particulars of biography thought to reside in the countenance. She also undermined the vision of the erotic female body as subject by never presenting nudes in the tradition of Western art, instead clothing her models in light, white shifts that covered the sensual form. As artist Coco Fusco reminds us: “Those enigmatic and alluring black female figures with their backs turned or their faces out of the frame came to stand for a generation’s mode of looking and questioning photographic representation.”

—from “(Un)Seen & Overheard: Pictures by Lorna Simpson” by Kellie Jones