In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

192 Making and Remaking a Promised Land Harlem’s Continuing Revisions As Harlem confronts the pressures of “development,” it is being forced to redefine itself, and issues of isolation and integration have taken on new meanings. This redefinition has a profoundly visual component. —Alice Attie, Harlem on the Verge In her afterword to Harlem on the Verge, a collection of portraits of neighborhood people and places taken between 2000 and 2001, photographer Alice Attie ruminates on the power of the photograph to document a moment in history, the “now” of her subjects’ lives.1 Nevertheless, the images also capture a disappearing Harlem, or what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes as a “vanishing present.”2 Citing Walter Benjamin’s definition of the photographic aura, Attie asserts, “[I]t is by way of the image that the culture’s memory passes through the eye. The photograph becomes the mark of a crisis, a rupture and the beginning of historical mourning.”3 Robin D. G. Kelley notes this aspect of Attie’s work as well in his introduction to Harlem on the Verge, and argues that the photographer “sets her sights on capturing the old Harlem before it completely disappears , the Harlem that will become our next nostalgic memory, our future golden age.”4 Memory trace, vanishing present, historical mourning, and/or nostalgic memory: what does Harlem signify at the beginning of the twenty-first century? And why do we continue to return to the photographic image—still or moving—to explore Harlem’s many meanings? Attie explains in the afterword to Harlem on the Verge that she wanted to document the “ominous” changes occurring in the area, changes that have led to the “closing of small neighborhood shops and the appearance of large retailers .”5 To that end she created a series of images that combine portraits of the neighborhood’s black (African American, West Indian, African) residents with uninhabited shots of storefronts, signage, murals, and graffiti.6 Most of the images in Harlem on the Verge are formally composed and take architecture, Conclusion ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ MAKING AND REMAKING A PROMISED LAND 193 particularly closed stores or empty buildings, as their primary subject. The portraits of people are equally formal; subjects of varying ages sit or stand facing the camera (in this way they resemble the majority of Attie’s other work, which does not focus on Harlem). Harlemites are often situated in the middle of the frame, posed and frozen in time. A few more casual, less composed street scenes are mixed in with the formal portraits. These capture people on the move and unaware of the camera. The combination of images broadcasts an overwhelming sense of a vanishing moment in time, an illustration, perhaps, that Harlem is “on the verge” of becoming something else. In her documentation project, Attie reflects a strain of nostalgia in evidence in the majority of written (particularly in the popular press) and visual (photographic and cinematic) projects about Harlem from the past two or three decades. Here we can look back to Barron Claiborne’s reinterpretation of James VanDerZee’s portrait or to the gangster films discussed in the previous chapter. In this, and in the subjects she chose to photograph, Attie’s Harlem series references a number of the themes that Making a Promised Land has explored and problematized, especially those related to African American visibility, identity , and citizenship and the role of photography and film in the making of a New Negro for a new century. Therefore, I will conclude with a brief discussion of the ways in which Attie’s images touch on the main concerns of the earlier chapters. The preceding analysis of Harlem and African American representation has covered a lot of ground: spatial and temporal, literal and metaphoric, fiction and nonfiction. With the establishment of the area as an African American neighborhood in the early twentieth century, Harlem became the primary location for the construction of a new African American identity by black Americans from different social, economic, and geographic places. This selfconstitution often was communicated visually, and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Paris Exposition photographs from 1900 were one of earliest instances of the political use of technology to provide visual evidence of African American humanity, modernity, equality, and beauty, thus beginning a long and fraught history of attaching truth claims to technologies of the visible (as a means of combating centuries of caricature and stereotype). Such a project—the marshaling of technology as a tool to represent a race...

Share