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  • Sharon Farmer
  • Charles H. Rowell

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Photograph courtesy of Elaine Dade

Portfolio of Artwork 914-918

[End Page 821]

Sharon Farmer (b. 1951, Washington, DC) became interested in photography after she began her music studies at the Ohio State University, where she received a BA degree. While formally studying photography at Ohio State, she began the practice of creating photography outside the classroom, beyond her formal course of study. After discovering the “magic” and joy that are in photography as an aesthetic and documentary practice, Sharon Farmer used photography as a mode of engagement in student social and political activities at Ohio State: she contributed photographs to the Makio, the student yearbook, and she also served, during the 1970s, as a photographer for Our Choking Times, the black student newspaper that recorded significant student activities, engagements, and aspirations that The Lantern, the white-student-controlled daily, ignored. Her work as a student in photojournalism garnered for her an internship with Associated Press during her senior year, and when she graduated in 1974, she returned to Washington, DC, where she did freelance photographic work until 1993, when President Bill Clinton appointed her as a White House photographer. In 1999, Sharon Farmer made history: the President promoted her to Director of White House photography, making her the first African American and first woman to be officially appointed to the position. We will always remember her account in The Crisis of two historic moments, which she captured with her camera:

In 1998, I accompanied the President and Mrs. Clinton to Ghana. There was a huge rally in the stadium in Accra. There must have been over 250,000 people cheering the President and First Lady. What a moment in time! Never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine that an American President would visit an African country and be received so wonderfully. That moment, to me, is only second to watching and photographing Nelson Mandela being sworn in as President of South Africa. I attended the event with Mrs. Clinton and the delegation that Vice President Gore led. Every day I pinch myself to see if I’m dreaming that I have this job here, in this time, in this world.

from The Crisis, September/October 2004

Her viewers should not, however, be misled into viewing Sharon Farmer as exclusively a documentary photographer. Her portfolio in this issue of Callaloo • Art states the contrary: she is also a fine art photographer with ranging subject matter and vital questions about contemporary humanity, with urban residents in her native Washington, DC, as her most potent metaphor. In addition to serving the White House as a photographer, this Washington, DC, resident has also worked for the Smithsonian, the Washington Post, and National Geographic.

To understand the subtext that drives the photographic work of Sharon Farmer, we need to deconstruct her artist statement in which she gives us a broad sweep of her motivations, influences, sensibility, background, and will to document life as it passes before her/our eyes—to record the now as it becomes the past—or what she calls “history.”

Creativity is still the key for my enjoyment of life as the good goes hand in hand with the bad. Passivity is not my nature. All and everything still makes me pause to think. My camera is pro-active. Through documenting life, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles, and of history. They are past and present, a set of anecdotes. History becomes a flowing stream and folks can see my reflections and eddies in my communities. Much visual fine art emotes in our communities. [End Page 822]

Many women have inspired me including my Mom who always took pictures when we were neatly dressed or celebrating a birthday. My Mom’s brother, Arthur Lancaster, Jr., put himself through college taking pictures at Hampton Institute in Virginia. My inspirations include Washington, DC photographers Roland Freeman and Ricardo Thomas (first African American White House photographer), Margaret Burke White, Roy DeCarava, historian Bernice Johnson Reagon, news reporter Helen Thomas, Morgan Spingarn Collection photo archivist and historian Donna Wells, and jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams. Because of the...

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