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227 Double Consciousness and Images from The Amistad Center for Art & Culture The Sweet Flypaper of Life, Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’s 1955 photo album and essay, captivated young Deborah Willis when her father brought it home. Willis grew up to become a photographer and won a MacArthur fellowship in 2000. She treasured the photographs her father, police officer Thomas Willis, took of friends and family from her Philadelphia neighborhood. The Sweet Flypaper of Life, though, gave her a context for her father’s pictures. Willis remembers, I always looked forward to my father coming home with the past week’s prints and negatives. I enjoyed placing the photographs in the photographic album and trying to structure the album the way Hughes and DeCarava had set the photographs in Sweetflypaper. Sweetflypaper spoke of pride in the African American family, good times and hard times, with an emphasis on work and unemployment. Sweetflypaper said to me that there was a place for black people’s stories. Their ordinary stories were alive and important and to be cherished . . . For me a veil was lifted. I made it a point from that day in 1955 on to continue to look for books that were about black people and to look at photographs that told or reflected our stories.1 In her images and books, Willis creates and interprets so that her viewers will see and appreciate themselves as subjects, just as Sweet Flypaper helped her to see beyond the veil: a veil that separated but also shielded, making it possible to recognize and share the good and the hard times. A half a century before Willis pledged herself to photography another African American genius used the metaphor of a veil to describe what separates blacks from full citizenship. W. E. B. DuBois begins The Souls of Black Folk with his now-famous description of the veil: Wm. Frank Mitchell 33 A Veil Lifted 228 Photo Essay After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil and gifted with a sort of second sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.2 Looking at African Americans in historical photographs and documents can seem like an exercise of peering through the veil. Many of those photographs, while confirming that blacks existed in this nation, were not meant to be affirmations of African American humanity . “Wanted” posters for the enslaved posted by those who took their freedom; bills, receipts, ledgers, and wills that reveal the fate of enslaved blacks or their daily living conditions; even the cherished early photographs of black people; all of these documents require the conscientious viewer to acknowledge that this material is the record of conquest, domination, and oppression, and its subject is a reluctant participant in these records. Early daguerreotype photographs of white children and their enslaved black caregivers, for example, challenge viewers to use their “second sight” to find the enduring humanity and compassion within an image that is a record of the “other world’s amused contempt and pity,” as DuBois termed it. Second sight might be understood as a survivor’s semiotics. A set of clues to interpret the subject’s life circumstances transforms these images into opportunities for reflection and celebration, though they belong to the perfidious records of slavery. From the safe and compensatory distance of these many decades, there is now space for reflection and enough objectivity to find inspiration in the evidence of a momentous struggle that has been spiritual, political, cultural, sexual, intellectual, financial , and environmental, though it is most often defined as racial. A century of change in this country and the scholarship and theory it has generated reveals new dimensions in these pictures. The images now have a gravitas that transcends their origins. It grants them the depth, beauty, and truth we hope to find in art. With a survivor’s semiotics and the gift of double consciousness, our interpretation of images from the archives is manageable. Photographs and...

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