arts and design

'It's about not giving up': behind Teju Cole's exhibition on America

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In 1993, the New York photographer Fazal Sheikh captured a young girl and her brother staring blankly into the camera. It was shot at a Somali refugee camp in Mandera, Kenya, and is part of the artist’s 25-year journey documenting displaced minorities affected by war and catastrophe.

This photo and roughly 150 others are on view in an exhibition opening at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, which runs until 29 September. Guest curated by the Nigerian American writer Teju Cole, who is also the photography critic at the New York Times Magazine, the show, entitled Go Down Moses, reflects on human suffering.

But looking through the images, which range from a toddler at a homeless shelter to a desolate road shot at night, Cole looked for a throughline to put together “a visual analogy”.

“When I look at these photos, I’m looking at things we should be talking about: the future, climate change, the population, almost a cataclysm that has wiped out humanity,” he says. “I don’t think anything can be innocent any more. It is drawing an explicit comparison between societal upheaval and moments of disorder, moments of dishevel and the current moment.”

Dorothea Lange’s A Sign of the Times from about 1934.



Dorothea Lange’s A Sign of the Times from about 1934. Photograph: Jonathan Castillo/The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

It all started when the museum invited Cole to peruse their archive of over 15,000 photos, which ranges from a young Aretha Franklin in a recording studio in 1960 to works by young Ethiopian photographer Aida Muluneh.

“They invited me to interpret their archive through a selection,” he says. “They’re interested in how different people can see what is here.”

The oldest work in the exhibit is from 1864, a photo by George N Barnard – an early user of the daguerreotype – for a photo called the Battle Field of Atlanta, Georgia, No 1, which shows a landscape ravaged by the American civil war. It’s part of Barnard’s time where he worked as the official army photographer for the Mississippi military (he also captured Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861).

However, most of the work is from 1920 to the present, including works by the depression-era American photographer Dorothea Lange, where Cole has selected a shot of a woman’s legs wearing torn pantyhose, sewn together.

“Working during the Great Depression has so much to say to us right in this minute; she took amazing photos in the 1930s to show how the state failed its children and how the government failed the citizens of its state,” Cole says. “It is unfortunately too familiar in photographic space.”

But is it a political exhibition? “It’s hard for me to do anything these days without it having some kind of political energy throbbing behind it. For me, nothing is absent of politics.”

The exhibit also features works by Melissa Ann Pinney, a photographer known for capturing girlhood, who took intimate shots from a hairdressing school in 1987, while Zora J Murff, who creates portraits shot in black neighborhoods, details how one Nebraska town has prejudicial housing policies.

There’s also a photo by Kerry Coppin, who shot African American neighborhoods in Chicago throughout the 1980s. Coppin once said of his work: “My photographs are interpretations, testaments, and poems. They are indictments! Not the first, nor the last, in an ongoing debate – the means by which people of African descent will restore our histories and cultures to their rightful place in the world community.”

Zora J Murff’s photograph Kevin at 17.



Zora J Murff’s photograph Kevin at 17. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist

This exhibition is described as a “poem of contemporary America, exploring elemental themes of movement, chaos, freedom, and hope”.

That’s broad territory, but Cole explains: “There’s a lot of mayhem in this show, a lot of melancholy moments of tension. One of the questions the exhibit asks is: what is hope when it’s not naive? Hope can be very much an embodied thing. It’s something that occurs fleetingly, but there’s power when it occurs.”

He adds: “It attempts to say something about our collective predicaments as human beings. It deals a lot with the American experience.”

The photos are not all American. They do, however, reflect upon the consequences of failed decision-making, and look at human suffering with hope, suggesting that a glint of optimism is still possible in contemporary America.

“I’m pessimistic and hopeful,” Cole says. “The facts indicate we’re all in a very hard time. It’s about not giving up. After all, we know things change.”

He adds: “This is about those who are tired offering something to those who are exhausted. There are degrees of this; I am so tired, and yet I know that there are people who have it much worse. So hope, in that sense, feels like a responsibility.”

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