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  • Photographing Miles Davis
  • Anthony Barboza (bio) and Barry Maxwell (bio)

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Davis for You’re under Arrest album photo, 1985

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In this selection of Anthony Barboza’s photographs of Miles Davis, the matter of fashion is at the fore. Miles’s body, an object of admiration for Barboza and many other photographers, becomes a kind of armature around which the constituents of fashion are draped or wrapped or strapped or arrayed: clothing, hats, the requisite closet, a trumpet, and even a gun—toy, or not. The custom-made black trumpet is not, in these images, of a wholly different order from an expensive watch; it is not a sounding instrument but an accessory; a visual signifier of uniqueness, of stylistic unmistakability; and a commitment to the powers of blackness. Like many other aspects of these photos produced under the sign of fashion, an industry in which Barboza has worked for most of his life, the horn, and the automatic weapon, can be read as funereal, just as Miles’s face is in the later images a proleptic death mask. Barboza’s cover photographs for Miles’s 1985 album You’re under Arrest rely on the gun-prop for shock value, but other images from this session show the black gun and the black trumpet used interchangeably, each as a device for bringing line and definition to Miles’s face and—particularly, piercingly—his eyes. To appreciate the presence of death in the mid-1980s images, one begins with the insistence on fashion in the earlier shots. Miles wants his stuff on display, as an index to the importance to him of dressing fashionably, indeed, of living within the world of fashion. (Left to the reader of this piece is Walter Benjamin’s observation in the Passagenwerk that “to each generation the [fashion of the] one immediately preceding it seems the most radical anti-aphrodisiac imaginable.”)1 Of the 1971 Essence magazine shoot, in Miles’s apartment, Barboza recalls the youthful-seeming forty-five-year-old Miles

put[ting] on this long coat and some really nice boots. He did some modeling and eventually took his shirt off for more shots, showing off his muscles.

He took me into his bedroom and showed me a closet overflowing with clothes and shoes.

In his autobiography, in a caption beside Barboza’s closet shot, Miles registered his appreciation of his young lover Betty Mabry as “a big influence on my personal life as well as in my musical life. She also helped me change the way I was dressing.”2 And the image of the still-young, stylin’, shirtless Miles brings to mind no figure so much as Fela Kuti, who at the moment that Miles was stylin’ in New York took for himself in Nigeria the middle name Anikulapo, “he who carries death in his pouch.”3

In the later images, death and fashion—death as fashion—confront the viewer with all the power of Miles’s cool, composed concentration. In the early shots, Barboza found the erotic pride of musculature; in the later, the skeletal emergence that means death, in a little while. Death would come in 1991, six years after the You’re under Arrest shoot, after years of ill health and intermittent withdrawal from performance.

In 1824 the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi brought fashion and death into dialogue, revealing them as “sisters.”4 Barboza’s images dramatize the collusion between fashion and death; they compound fashion and death in Miles’s stare into the mechanism of the camera, a mechanism not less than an automatic weapon dedicated to the fixing of a moment. As such, the later images precipitate for the viewer a world of stillness and contemplation, altogether different from the dynamism and restlessness of Barboza’s thousands of photographs of jazz club performances. They join the harrowing late photographs of Billie Holiday, the skeleton and the gardenia, as moments of the necessary portraiture of evening.

Anthony Barboza

Anthony Barboza is a photographer, historian, artist, and writer. His photography of jazz musicians appears in his book Black Borders (1980). His conceptual photographic artwork exhibition, Black Dreams...

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