Close-Up Gallery: Nothing But a Man

Figure 1.

Filmmaker Robert M. Young, pencil drawing

Adele Stephenson's original artwork for the gallery engages with the aloneness occasioned by the travails of history and the gravity of circumstance. Paradoxically, in the personal estrangement evoked by the humiliations borne daily and without pause in everyday life, she discerns the dignity in those who resist such privations.

Commissioned to render a series of portraits and depictions on Nothing But a Man, the film featured in the Close-Up section of this issue of Black Camera, Stephenson allowed her gaze to foreground the personal—the interiority of her subjects—and distressed lives of ordinary people who, unable to evade their circumstances, endure.

Stephenson evokes this paradox in the gestures and countenances of her protagonists and most poignantly by the way they look inwardly, at one another, and across a physical landscape devoid of promise. The images show men crippled and abandoned by industry; men doing right against and despite the odds; women pulling their weight and more while daring to love; and children who most likely will inherit their parents' fortunes.

Figure 2.

Duff and Josie, collage

No less cognizant of the social and material cost to laboring people and racial minorities in her own homeland, Britain, Stephenson remarked upon her artwork to Black Camera.

BC:

Britain has its own racial problems derived from its long history of empire. Are there similarities to be drawn from depictions of race in the United States and Britain?

AS:

Obviously, anyone who has grown up in Britain is conscious of issues of race, and I grew up for instance in a part of the UK [West Yorkshire] that has a history of multiple multicultural and ethnic communities—including a large white working-class community. It's impossible not to be aware of race as an issue because it's everywhere. I grew up with The Black and White Minstrel Show on television every Saturday night.¹ And you can't escape the tensions or consequences of racial tensions. The riots this past summer were a lot to do with race. But the history of slavery in the U.S. obviously leaves an absolutely unique racial dynamic. So that's not to say racism or racial discrimination and so on does not exist in the UK or isn't as bad in the UK but only that it is expressed in different ways. For instance, this past summer [2011] in the small seaside town where my parents live, I came across Aunt Jemima golliwog dolls openly for sale in the local post office. It's hard to imagine that being tolerated in the U.S. But in the UK those things are still around and for many—if not most—white people they are completely unremarkable. Television and the popular media are still filled with racial stereotypes although it is as likely to be connected to religion and Islam now than say thirty years ago when it was much more directly related to race and the Afro-Caribbean community specifically. So there are some similarities, and many racial stereotypes cross boundaries and borders, but I think that each place has its own way of expressing those things.

BC:

What are the organizing principles for the artwork in the gallery?

AS:

My starting point for the series was to think about maleness and masculinity and to investigate the different expressions throughout the film of what it means to be "a man." This is expressed so differently through Duff's

Figure 3.

White man in car, pencil

Figure 4.

Duff's father, charcoal

father-in-law, the guys Duff works with at the sawmill and on the railroad, Duff himself and his father, his own son, and the aggressive whites in the car. It seems to me that it is the racism that Duff suffers that challenges or confronts his notion of what it means to be "a man" and forces him...