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72 INDETERMINACY: THOUGHTS ON TIME, THE IMAGE, AND RACE(ISM) David Campany, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa Mack 978-1-913620-48-6 £ 15 DARK MIRRORS Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa Mack 978-1-913620-39-4 £ 25 Spread from Indeterminacy Indeterminacy is a welcome addition to the new and innovative Discourse series of short books put out by MACK. Half of the previous items in the series have been singleauthor studies – spectacularly Sally Stein on Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother – while this one involves not just two authors but emphatically constitutes a dialogue. The to-and-fro format, inaugurated during the pandemic and first conducted by email, allows the particular preoccupations of each contributor to be explored, questioned and elucidated, often by reference to their previous or ongoing projects. Thus – to give but two examples – WolukauWanambwa offers neat expositions of the various parts of his One Wall a Web (2018, reviewed in Source 97) and Campany reworks some of the ideas that gave rise to his ingenious and extraordinarily wide-ranging exhibition and book A Handful of Dust (2015, reviewed in Source 91). They mainly pore over photographic representations of matters much in the news when they were writing (and since), most importantly the murder of George Floyd, the power of Black Lives Matter campaigns, and the increasing precariousness of American democracy. I was especially impressed by Wolukau-Wanambwa’s exposition of what he was attempting to do in his installation, on a huge wall within the International Center of Photography, of varied sized photographs treating race and masculinity. He shows how the installation demanded that viewers interrogate the interaction of the images to achieve any kind of ‘meaning’. Neither contributor shies away from the awfulness of our times or witholds his own personal and/ or political opinions, but they both also know that our eyes tend to tame what they see by recognising tropes. The American artworks, books, exhibitions and, particularly, the photobooks discussed are very much of this cultural moment – and exemplary single images are thus (thankfully) adequately reproduced for readers on this side of the Atlantic. Whatever their subject – and, as indicated by those subtitle concepts ‘time’, ‘image’, and ‘race(ism)’, there are some big ones here – both writers are acutely aware of the complexities involved. We sense that sometimes one or other of them presses the other beyond his comfort zone. Whether the particular photograph being addressed at any particular juncture is an artwork or a mass media image, Campany and WolukauWanambwa want us truly to see it, think about it, and realise the impossibility of a single, sure-fire interpretation. It is no accident that the book’s final short section carries the title ‘Inconclusion’. In Dark Mirrors, Wolukau-Wanambwa reprints (and quietly edits) sixteen disparate items originally produced during the previous six or so years – an exhibition review from a specialist journal, a book review, a blog piece, a catalogue essay, and so on. He contextualises and unifies these items – some just a few pages, others long and almost exhaustive – to a surprising degree through the deployment of a subtle and probing introduction, ‘Times Like These’, that both evokes this critical American scene, photographically as well as politically, and positions him within it. ‘Times Like These’ offers preliminary treatment of some of the artists to be looked at in detail later, usually here registering their take on the zeitgeist. Wolukau-Wanambwa claims – or, rather, regrets – that he is the first black critic to offer such an intervention: ‘I have yet to encounter another set of selected essays written about art photography by a black person in the English language’. Normally I deplore as irrelevant the growing tendency of critics to emphasise ‘where they are coming from’. But here – a book largely devoted to black artistic wrestling with questions of race – the autobiographical reflections of a ‘British Ugandan’ acculturated to racism in Britain and profoundly exposed to de facto segregation during his first years in the United States, grant extra authority. (It is worth adding that Wolukau-Wanambwa also shows, as he does, too, in Indeterminacy, that he is not only extremely well-versed in critical theory of every kind but also passionately steeped in the history of African American expression, from Frederick Douglass’s autobiography of an ‘American slave’ to the more recent powerful enunciations of Fred Moten.)
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Spread from Dark Mirrors Spread from Dark Mirrors Spread from Dark Mirrors books 73 Dark Mirrors treats a range of photographers – including Katy Grannan, Arthur Jafa, Deana Lawson, Paul Pfeiffer, and Rosalind Fox Solomon (known to some readers on this side of the Atlantic through yet another MACK publication) – who have worked in various genres, most impressively portraiture but also collage, installation, or the crafted photobook itself (The only essays that sit slightly uneasily here are the earliest, a probing reconsideration of Lewis Baltz’s landscapes or anti-landscapes, and the fresh consideration of Mark Ruwedel’s Pictures of Hell of 2014, western landscapes sometimes reworked from images by such classic figures as Timothy O’Sullivan). Wolukau-Wanambwa typically tells us something of the background and career of the artist, evokes his or her work in general, then homes in on a particular project or, even, a single work, before indicating the singularity of his or her achievement. Thus, he draws out the depth of insight in Dana Lixenberg’s long-term project to document, mainly through portraiture, the effects on residents of low-income housing in the Watts ghetto of racism and the riots consequent on the police beating of Rodney King in 1992. Thus, in ‘World-less’ he examines Kristine Potter’s photobook Manifest (2018), showing how profoundly it undermines the very basis of America’s ‘manifest destiny’ to dominate the West (and the world), using the tenets of Laura Mulvey’s canonical essay on the ‘male gaze’ to describe Potter’s camera eye as a female one, her male subjects not objects of desire but figures, often, of abjection. One of the most impressive essays is the short piece on the colour portraits made by Robert Bergman and collected in A Kind of Rapture (1998) with essays by Toni Morrison and Meyer Schapiro. Wolukau-Wanambwa goes compellingly beyond both Morrison and Schapiro by thinking through Bergman’s faces in the light of Emmanuel Levinas’s thoughts on the Other. Equally impressive, in this case because it tackles, with much astuteness, the whole theoretical and institutional placement of photography within the museum and gallery world in the teen years of this century, is the opening essay on Charlotte Cotton’s anthology Words Without Pictures (2010). All told, Dark Mirrors is clearly an important book, if a tough read. I originally speculated that Indeterminancy – as a dialogue, with some signs of spontaneity and quick-fire response – might clarify aspects of Dark Mirrors, but it, too, is very much written. It has been worked over, considered, and polished almost to its detriment. The phrasing is repeatedly so exact, so nuanced, or so theoretically urbane, that perhaps some readers will feel as if they were meant to be excluded. In neither book’s case was there, I’m sure, any such intention, so if you are fortunate enough to be able to frequent a bookstore that stocks Mack books, buy either one to insure you are able to read it at your own pace. — Mick Gidley

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Dark Mirrors treats a range of photographers – including Katy Grannan, Arthur Jafa, Deana Lawson, Paul Pfeiffer, and Rosalind Fox Solomon (known to some readers on this side of the Atlantic through yet another MACK publication) – who have worked in various genres, most impressively portraiture but also collage, installation, or the crafted photobook itself (The only essays that sit slightly uneasily here are the earliest, a probing reconsideration of Lewis Baltz’s landscapes or anti-landscapes, and the fresh consideration of Mark Ruwedel’s Pictures of Hell of 2014, western landscapes sometimes reworked from images by such classic figures as Timothy O’Sullivan). Wolukau-Wanambwa typically tells us something of the background and career of the artist, evokes his or her work in general, then homes in on a particular project or, even, a single work, before indicating the singularity of his or her achievement. Thus, he draws out the depth of insight in Dana Lixenberg’s long-term project to document, mainly through portraiture, the effects on residents of low-income housing in the Watts ghetto of racism and the riots consequent on the police beating of Rodney King in 1992. Thus, in ‘World-less’ he examines Kristine Potter’s photobook Manifest (2018), showing how profoundly it undermines the very basis of America’s ‘manifest destiny’ to dominate the West (and the world), using the tenets of Laura Mulvey’s canonical essay on the ‘male gaze’ to describe Potter’s camera eye as a female one, her male subjects not objects of desire but figures, often, of abjection. One of the most impressive essays is the short piece on the colour portraits made by Robert Bergman and collected in A Kind of Rapture (1998) with essays by Toni Morrison and Meyer Schapiro. Wolukau-Wanambwa goes compellingly beyond both Morrison and Schapiro by thinking through Bergman’s faces in the light of Emmanuel Levinas’s thoughts on the Other. Equally impressive, in this case because it tackles, with much astuteness, the whole theoretical and institutional placement of photography within the museum and gallery world in the teen years of this century, is the opening essay on Charlotte Cotton’s anthology Words Without Pictures (2010). All told, Dark Mirrors is clearly an important book, if a tough read. I originally speculated that Indeterminancy – as a dialogue, with some signs of spontaneity and quick-fire response – might clarify aspects of Dark Mirrors, but it, too, is very much written. It has been worked over, considered, and polished almost to its detriment. The phrasing is repeatedly so exact, so nuanced, or so theoretically urbane, that perhaps some readers will feel as if they were meant to be excluded. In neither book’s case was there, I’m sure, any such intention, so if you are fortunate enough to be able to frequent a bookstore that stocks Mack books, buy either one to insure you are able to read it at your own pace.

— Mick Gidley

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