Fictions and Found Photographs

or The Black Experience of Black Experience

Digitized replicas of age-worn black and white photos have recently circulated in my family of my grandmother and her siblings taken before I was born. I had never seen these remnants of reminiscence that introduced me to a younger face of my young-ish grandmother, a face that was uncomfortably unfamiliar. I was astonished at how much she didn’t look like herself, but the context of her sisters and brothers, whose faces I knew, confirmed that the woman in the image was who they said she was.  I stared at the picture for hours searching for clues for how the shape of her face had changed, for the ways her nose, broken in a car accident long before I could memorize it, had healed into the version I would later recognize. I long for more pictures to fill in the gaps as an explanation for how living maps itself on our bodies in ways that can make us unrecognizable over time.

My own face, my mama’s face, was buried beneath shame and insecurity for so long that I am only recently recognizing myself in mirrors, seeing our similarities as if for the first time. If her face was hidden in mine with smiles, it took me decades to smile long enough to see it.

There are precious pictures of my aunts and uncles, none when they are children, evidence that their reality was too harsh for evidence. I imagine their youngish faces by looking at their children--and by admiring high school photographs in our family albums of them—

blackish-brown,

longish,

lanky limbs

and afros.

When I was growing up, my family did not get dressed up in their Sunday best and head to the Sears studio for professional photos. We color-coordinated clothes from our closet and stood, stiff and still, in front of the hollow walls of our trailer, or in front of any cornered landscape in ours or our neighbor’s yard, following the instructions of my aunt’s partner, a photography hobbyist, who had a “professional” camera. The faux wood walls are identical to every other “in home” picture I can remember from the 1980s, clutter and paraphernalia hidden from the lens. When taken outside, the pine trees and rocks are outside the camera’s panoramic view.

For more candid photographs, there was the trusted and affordable Polaroid camera. There are hundreds of family Polaroids capturing the everydayness of our lived experience—uncombed hair, unkempt clothes, unkept house—if the posed for pictures housed in gold lined frames were Sundays, the Polaroids, often hidden in drawers or stacked in albums, were Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, random days when we weren’t necessarily thinking about the weekend. Unposed, the pictures captured moments turned memories of the Christmas I got two dolls, the summer my father surprised me with a puppy, and my fifth birthday when I posed behind my store bought cake and in front of the house bar, a white sheet cake with baby blue icing at my fingertips, cone hat made of paper on my head, a birthday grin on my face, and liquor bottles lined up behind my shoulders. The pictures themselves are memories, reminding me of moments and details I would otherwise not remember.

I think of these hidden pictures as I scroll through photographer Zun Lee’s found-photo series Fade Resistance (https://faderesistance.tumblr.com/), a curation of thousands of Polaroid pictures of black folk he has compiled from years of scavenging, yard sales, and eBay.  Lee’s work is a visual metaphor and an intentional reclamation of black life and joy. Through the collection of Polaroids capturing the intimate and deeply personal lives of unknown black folk, he reminds us of the power of self-definition and the interconnectedness of blackness.

The beautiful black people in the pictures make me wonder about pictures of myself, floating in time and space, shared, lost, thrown away, potentially picked up and looked at— saved. The pictures would remind a black observer of something close to the bone, inspiring them to make up a story about who I am in the picture, what I was thinking, when it was, where I was, then/now.

I imagine middle school pictures with affirmations to friends scribed on the back in my twelve-year old handwriting, any number of wallet-sized family photographs passed out indiscriminately, unknown pictures of myself, and my family that I have never seen sitting in someone else’s albums.

The scenes of Lee’s series remind me of the fading photographs in my family’s tattered album— the faces I don’t know but could know, the “when they were littles,” the “Mama, who is thises” and the “This looks just likes” of the pile, kept safely next to sacred family photographs

kindred

kinfolk

kin

fictional and factual faces I inherently recognize. . .

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Polaroid close ups

intergenerational black and brown skin

club scene backdrops

painted backgrounds inside institutions

stoic gazes, over and underdressed bodies

couples, children, grandmothers

afros, jheri curls,

wave caps, baseball caps and toboggans

waving peace signs and middle fingers

father son, mother daughter

mother son, father daughter

brothers, sisters, play cousins

friends

and lovers

huddled together touching

front porch posing

Christmas (tree), Easter (basket), Birthday (cake) backgrounds

milestones. Military men—first babies

posing but almost never smiling

folded legs and crossed arms

leaning against big-bodied cars

plastic-covered couches in living rooms

with church directory portraits decorating the walls

cheap picture frames are framed by wallet sized school pictures

tucked on the sides, and peeking from the background

of family members long grown and graduated

shirtless men, cigarette mouthed

women with rollers in their hair, smiling

the everydayness of blackness captured in caption

a picture that holds a future memory

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These are not pictures of my family, but they could be

The familial familiarity inspires fictions,

untold stories of the

struggles not captured in the square,

of chaos and poverty

loss and uncertainty,

abandonment and recovery,

reunions and revivals,

holidays and hope

freedom and escape—

togetherness, safety, solemnity

I see myself

in the existence of blackness

and

in the black experience of black experience.

[Check out Fade Resistance and other photo projects by Zun Lee at

http://www.zunlee.com/]