Forum
(Academic)


Academic Forum


General Comments


Questions to
Chester Higgins

 

Please take a moment to comment on your experience here:

ADD YOUR COMMENTS


Comments:
See MAGAZINE LAYOUT In the Shadow AT:
http://www.chesterhiggins.com/magazine_layouts.html

Research in African Literature,
Volume 40, Number 4, Winter 2009.
© Indiana University Press.

In the Shadow of the Castle: (Trans) Nationalism, African American Tourism, and Gorée Island

SALAMISHAH TILLET
University of Pennsylvania
Stillet@sas.upenn.edu

ABSTRACT

“In The Shadows of the Castle: (Trans) Nationalism, African-American Tourism, and Gorée Island” argues that the late twentieth-century “Back to Africa” discourse departs from the nineteenth-century emigrationist and mid-twentieth-century expatriate “Back to Africa” movements; the contemporary discourse predicates itself more on a commemoration of slavery's past than on creating a programmatic solution for the future and establishing an alternative homeland in an emancipated African postcolonial present. By examining the photographs from Carrie Mae Weems's “Elmina Cape Coat Ile de Gorée” and Chester Higgins's “The House of Slaves at the Door of No Return,” this article contends that the advent of African American heritage tourism enables post-Civil Rights African Americans to replace (and thus temporarily reconcile) their sense of exclusion from America's canonized national self-narrative with recourse to an alternative, albeit romantically imagined, Diasporic site of origin.

“It is all but impossible to be Black American and not know of Senegal. So many of us made our way to the New World through Gori [sic] Island. Through a fort and a hole in the ground where even yet one hears the moaning of captives. What made those people survive, to replicate themselves - to live?

- Nikki Giovanni, Preface to Abandoned Baobab By Ken Bugul

“I has been to the slave castle once before at Gorée Island….At one point during my tour I walked into the room designated for the 'crippled and infirmed.' And despite my tendency toward ironic detachment in places hollowed by history, to my enormous surprise, I found myself crying uncontrollably.”

- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Wonders Of The African World


On the warm morning of April 3, 1998, President Bill Clinton's twelve-day tour of sub-Sahara Africa culminated with a visit to the famous slave port of Gorée Island, Senegal. Until then, Clinton's trip to the African continent was an unprecedented gesture by an American president. For many US citizens, Clinton's travels meant an unrivaled return to the paradigmatic African American site of origin; for many in Africa, it suggested American foreign aid to a struggling continent. Only a few days before his Senegal trip, Clinton had visited an elementary school in Mukono, Uganda, where he awkwardly confessed to his audience that “European Americans received the fruits of the slave trade…and we were wrong I that” (qtd. in Douglass, “Confronting” A21). Almost immediately, Clinton and his aides bemoaned this admission. Perhaps they feared that his comments would open a national Pandora's Box and thereby release unresolved conflicts about American slavery. Or that Clinton's regret about European-American privilege would exacerbate tensions between blacks and whites about how best to redress the wrongs of slavery. In the aftermath, Clinton aides worked quickly to diffuse rumors that the president had apologized for slavery. His statement transformed from being a request for forgiveness into a simple acknowledgement of Africa's past. The Reverend Jesse Jackson II, then Clinton's special envoy for Africa, publicly dismissed the value of an apology. During his subsequent visit to Robben Island in South Africa, Clinton even told Mandela that a formal apology about slavery would be unfitting because he was more focused on America's future, not its past (Douglas, “Seeing Slavery's Door A04). At Gorée Island, Clinton would emphasize this point: “We cannot push time backwards through the door of no return. We have lived our history, America's struggle to overcome slavery and its legacy forms one of the most difficult chapters of that history” (A04) Through a sleigh of hand, Clinton acknowledged America's slave past, while evading its impact on contemporary US race relations. Phrases like “We have lived that history” and “one of the most difficult chapter of that history” situate slavery and its legacy in a bygone past. In the end, Clinton's “apology” became part of a project to delete chattel slavery from the national memory - to forget it, in other words.

While Clinton's trip to Senegal embodies the anxiety associated with formally integrating the memory of slavery into the American national consciousness, this essay examines how many post-Civil Rights African Americans respond to and resist this structural amnesia of slavery in the American landscape by visiting one of the most popular transatlantic symbols of the slave trade, the House of Slaves (in French, La Maison des Esclaves) at Gorée Island, Senegal. More specifically, I contend that while the previous movements of antebellum emigrationists and Civil Rights-era expatriates framed their “returns” to Africa as a locus of racial and national freedom, the “Back to Africa” discourse, during our post-Civil Rights era, has undergone a significant transformation in which images of global tourism have replaced repatriation rhetoric. I am particularly interested in the way post-Civil Rights African American photographers Chester Higgins and Carrie Mae Weems depict the House of Slaves as a constitutive and generative site of the African Diaspora in order to subvert the racial exclusivity of civic myths in the US. By doing so, their photographs, respectively titled “the House of Slaves at the Door of No Return” and “Elmina Cape Coast Ile de Gorée,” assert a narrative of lineage and origins that pre-dates the founding of the United States. On one hand, these images not only reframe the language of civic belonging in the transnational discourse of the African Diaspora, but by doing so simultaneously and inevitable challenge the racial hegemony of the national memory. On the other hand, these visual representations risk reinforcing a touristic gaze of what I understand to be “African American exceptionalism” that posits and arrests “Africa” solely as site of slavery, thereby denying the specificity and contemporaneity of West African nation-states. In these accounts of homecoming and mourning, modern-day Senegal is neither engaged nor integrated. In short, Senegal and by extension Ghana surface as the exclusive mnemonic properties of the African American heritage tourist.

COMING HOME TOURS: CIVIC ESTRANGEMENT AND IMAGING THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

Even though the first big wave of African American heritage tourism to Africa began in the late 1970s the numbers had, by the mid-1990s, soared to tens of thousands per year (Campbell 372). While many of these tours include more traditional leisure activities like shopping and relaxation, they primarily target African American clientele by describing their travel packages as “coming home” tours. According to anthropologist Edward Brunner, many African American heritage tourists who travel to the slave forts are already motivated by the larger “quest for roots, to experience one of the very sites from which their ancestors may have begun the torturous journey to the New World” (291). Differing from the emigrationists and expatriates who believed that their travel and eventual relocation to West Africa was both a continual affirmation of their cultural identity and an enduring challenge to the hegemony of American slavery or segregation, contemporary African American heritage tourists are more likely to understand their journeys both as a personal reclamation of the slave forts and as a sacred pilgrimage to the home of their enslaved ancestors. While it is difficult to settle on a precise date when the “Back to Africa” discourse transitioned from a movement concerned primarily with repatriation to an effort characterized by commercial tourism, I would argue that we could locate the beginnings of this shift in the mid-1970s, at the intersection of five distinct factors that sparked the first major wave of African American heritage tourists to the slave forts. First, the 1966 political coup in Ghana and the economic instability of independent Tanzania, Guinea, and other African nations of interest for African American expatriates. Second, partly inspired by the success of Alex Haley's neo-slave narrative Roots and its attendant miniseries (see Finley, “The Door of No Return”), the increased enthusiasm for which David Lowenthal describes as “the zeal for genealogy” among African Americans (and all Americans for that matter) to locate their ancestors (xv). Third, the persistent absence of heritage sites in the United States commemorating the histories of enslaved African Americans. Fourth, the designation of the slave forts at Gorée Island in Senegal in 1978 and El Mina and Cape Coast Castles in Ghana in 1979 as “world heritage sites” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). And fifth, an increase in the standard of living and the newfound emergence of an African American middle class that, due to political gains of the Civil Rights movement, now had the financial means to engage in large-scale international tourism (Dallen and Teye 114).

Unlike with the slave forts in Ghana, there have been a number of controversies surrounding the House of Slaves concerning its role as a major portal for the transatlantic slave trade. In 1995, the eminent Africanist historian Phillip Curtin said in unequivocable terms that “Gorée was never important in the slave trade” and in 1996, French historian Emmanuel de Ru published an article in Le Monde titled “le mythe de la Maison des Esclaves qui resiste a la realite.” This debate, though, played out primarily among French and Senegalese historians and newspapers and had a nominal impact on the African American heritage tourist industry. As such, despite these debates, The House of Slaves remains as one of the most popular and highly visited monuments of the slave trade. Though not all African American tourists consciously or unconsciously visit these slave forts in order to gain a better understanding of their present political status or to put forth new narratives of national belonging, the advent of the contemporary African American heritage tourist is the product of an attempt to reconcile what I describe as a fundamental paradox of racial politics in the post Civil Rights US: an emergent African American legal citizenship that is complicatedly coupled with a persistent sense of civic estrangement from the rights and privileges of the contemporary public sphere. Because there are so few formal symbols of the lives and contributions of enslaved African American heritage tourists re-appropriate sites and symbols of their “forgotten” history by returning to West Africa to reclaim these particular slave forts. Through this process of recuperation, these heritage tourists acquire what Cheryl Finlay describes as symbolic possession over the historical narratives of American slavery (see “The Door of No Return”). Instead of accepting the conspicuous national amnesia of American chattel slavery, these heritage tours allow post Civil Rights African Americans to render and to remember the transatlantic slave trade as essential to the formation of their African Diasporic identities. On these tours, the slave fort epitomizes the larger African American quest to rediscover a point of cultural origin. By traveling to Gorée Island, El Mina, and Cape Coast, voyagers encounter anew the genealogical discourse of “Mother Africa” and claim alternative founding mythologies of the African Diaspora. By asserting the African Diaspora as a generative site of identity, the African American heritage tourist - to quote Brent Edwards - “likewise inaugurates an ambitious and racially decentered analysis of transnational circuits of culture and politics that are resistant or exorbitant to the frames of nations and circuits” (52). Rather than remaining locked out of national civic myths and denied cultural citizenship, post Civil Rights African American heritage tourists reclaim slave forts to reconstruct American civic narratives, from a transnational locale. As displaced figures who invoke the Diaspora and claim Africa as a site of origin, these heritage tourists appear to completely subvert the definition of national identity by traverse beyond the American nation-state (Clifford 250). And yet, there remains a paradox. As Aiwha Ong suggests in her analysis of Chinese transnational communities in Flexible Citizenship, such a reading of diasporic travel tends to “overlook complicated accommodations, alliances, and creative tensions between the nation-state and mobile capital, between diaspora and nationalism” (16). Ong's argument is particularly instructive here because these coming-home tours not only predicate themselves on the imagined community of the African Diaspora, but stimultaneously project a nationalist myth of what I call “African American exceptionalism.” As used here, African American exceptionalism describes an interpretative process and ideological project in which African Americans “map” their unique history of American slavery, segregation, and post-Civil Rights racism onto the racial histories of non-US subjects and places.

SENEGAL IN BLACK AND WHITE: THE AFTER-LIFE OF SLAVERY?

In the absence of national heritage sites that commemorate enslaved African Americans in the United States, African American photographers Chester Higgins and Carrie Mae Weems traveled to Gorée Island, Senegal, to locate physical monuments of the slave trade, and thereby engage in a formal remembrance of the lives and experiences of their enslaved ancestors. By privileging and reconstructing the House of Slaves at Gorée Island as the visual symbol of the entire slave, Higgins and Weems are able to remember slavery and reclaim Gorée Island as an originary site of African American identity. And as they reclaim Gorée Island as a starting point of the slave trade and therefore the genesis of African American culture, both Higgins and Weems initiate new myths of belonging and beginnings for post-Civil Rights African Americans. By asserting their allegiance and membership in the larger “imagined community” of the African Diaspora, African Americans resist their civic estrangement in the United States. However, like any other myth of civic belonging, the myth of the African Diaspora excluded those interpretations of the past and experiences in the present that disrupt the historical authenticity of these narratives.

While remembering Gorée Island as a slave fort provides African Americans with alternative heritage sites and literally memorialize the counter myth of the African Diaspora, it also erases or marginalizes those histories and present-day realities that challenge what Saidiya Hartman describes as “the distinctly American narrative of captivity, deportment, and slavery” (“Time of Slavery” 770). By deliberately privileging Gorée as the ultimate symbol of the slave trade despite debates about its historical role in the Middle Passage - and by erasing the presence of other tourists or the local Senegalese inhabitants who actually live and work on the same island - they perpetuate a myth of the African Diaspora that gives preference to African American interpretations of slavery. Here, the African American heritage tourist sees Senegal only through the gaze of remembrance. Chester Higgins awaited his first rip to Africa with baited breath: “I was full of anticipation. Finally, I was to discover for myself the parallel black identity I had nourished in my imagination… One that first trip, I began a lifelong study of the mannerisms, culture, and traditions of African people: mirror images of the people of my childhood (“Into Africa”). For the last thirty years, Higgins has traveled to Africa almost yearly, using his camera “to discover, confront, examine, and depict - through dispersions and connection - the existence of people of African descent” (Feeing the Spirit 9). This odyssey culminated in Higgins's Feeling The Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa (1994), which documents what he describes as the “historical ruptures” (37) and 'divisions' (“Interview”) among “the peoples of Africa” initially caused by slavery, segregation, and apartheid - now sustained by racism and ethnic conflict. While a shared, ongoing history of displacement, divisions, and rifts in identity birthed the present-day discourse of the African Diaspora, Higgins is clear that the goal of Feeling the Spirit is not to emphasize geographical distinctions but rather to reveal “the affinities between residents of Africa and their far-flung relatives dispersed by slavery” (qtd. in Hughes). As Higgins insists, “Feeling the Spirit is about dispersion and connections. Today, African people live on four transatlantic continents in many different nations. We are a diverse people. Although we are separated by geography, national boundaries, and language, we are still similar in the ways that bind us together. In our diversity we are much alike.” (Feeling the Spirit 8). Here, Higgins's praise for the “diversity” of the African Diaspora draws upon an American discourse of plurality and democracy. Ironically, in his semantic attempt to move beyond the national-state and connect to a larger transnational black community, he stresses an almost uniquely American preoccupation and thus reinforces an identity that locates him, ideologically, within the US. Nevertheless, Higgins's photographs provide a visual narrative of an African Diaspora that, as Paul-Gilroy articulates in The Black Atlantic, challenges “both the structures of the nation-state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (19). Replacing the nation-state as the site of origin with the African Diaspora, Higgins's Feeling the Spirit provides a visual genealogy of transnationalism that allows both him and his African American subjects to transcend the racial exclusivity of their “home”: the United States.

Like national civic myths that transmit the fiction of collective histories to its citizentry, the myth of the African Diaspora also requires tropes of unity and continuity. Both myth-making processes either forget or marginalize aspects of the past in order to sustain doctrines of coherence and consensus. In an effort to protect and perpetuate the ideology of an uncompromised American democracy, American civic myths mandate the exorcism of colonialism and slavery from the national memory. While narratives of the African Diaspora often attempt to address the racial exclusivity of national myths, they do so by inventing counternarratives of transnational racial solidarity. Instead of prescribing national allegiance, such myths of transnationalism dissolve the nation-state by emphasizing commonalties that transcends geographical, linguistic, or even ethnic difference. For example, in an effort to reveal how “in our diversity we are much alike” (Higgins, Feeling the Spirit (8). Higgins arranges his collection of photographs “by sticking different places and parts of the Diaspora right next to each other” (“Interview”). Instead of portraying his individual subjects in the context of their national or ethnic backgrounds, Higgins erases - or, in his words, “eliminates” - their borders in order to reconcile the divisions constituted by forced movement and displacement (“Interview”). In the spirit of Stuart Hall's brilliant analysis of Jamaican-born photographer Armet Francis in the essay “Cultural Identity and the Diaspora,” I also would argue that Higgins endeavors to reconstruct visually “the underlying unity of the black people whom slavery and colonization distributed across the African Diaspora. His text, “like that of Francis “is an act of imaginary unification” (Hall 224).

Although Higgins has traveled to Gorée Island twelve or more times, I am especially interested in the way he constructs the African Diaspora in one of his earliest black and white photographs of Gorée Island, “The Door of No Return in the House of Slaves (1972). For it is constitutive of his broader vision of the African Diaspora and offers insight about impulses that would shape the trajectory of future work. In the “Middle Passage” section of the book, Higgins begins his visual narrative at the House of Slaves at Gorée Island, Senegal, but then follows these photographs with a documentation of “the People of Africa” who, judging by the title Feeling the Spirit: Searching for the People of Africa, presumably constitute the African Diaspora. This collection of photographs takes the viewer from the House of Slaves to the African Burial Ground in Manhattan, to former slave cabins in South Carolina, to a memorial service at Coney Island, New York, in honor of the millions of enslaved Africans who died in the Middle Passage - from the Celebrations of the “Oath of Bois Caïmon” in Haiti, which inaugurated the Haitian Revolution, to the Sisterhood of the Good Death ceremony that acknowledges the end of slavery in Brazil. Like his arrangement of photographs throughout Feeling the Spirit, Higgins did not arbitrarily place the photographs of the “Middle Passage” series alongside each other, but compiled them as a joint history of African captivity, the middle passage, and the New World racial discrimination, Higgins's placement of these photographs allow him to create a visual saga in which the genealogy of the African Diaspora literally begins at the slave fort and culminates in New World ceremonies that remember the rebellious history of enslaved Africans. By positioning the House of Slaves as the nascent point for all members of the African Diaspora, Higgins supplements their histories of dispersal with what Stuart Hall describes as “an imaginary fullness or plentitude” (225). By reconfiguring the slave fort as the symbol of departure and the site to which Diasporic blacks should return, Higgins's “Middle Passage” series is a visual text in which returning to Africa becomes both a transnational act of resistance and a commemoration of slavery's past.

For Higgins, “The structure of [the House of Slaves] stands as a horrifying physical reminder that human beings are capable of enslaving each other” (Feeling the Spirit (36). The interior of the House of Slave holds “the terror in the cramped, awful dungeons where Europeans enacted unspeakable crimes against African men, women and children, trying to strip them of their humanity” (36). As such, the slave fort becomes the symbol of the forced separation and loss of identity that enslaved Africans experienced on the shores of West Africa, on the slave ships, and in the New World. In the photograph “The Door of No Return in the House of Slaves” (1972), Higgins reinforces this sense of separation by foregrounding the silhouette of a young, black woman against a mysterious, ceaseless Atlantic Ocean. Historically, “The Door of No Return” was allegedly the last view of Africa for enslaved Africans placed on ships destined for the New World. As a result, the door represents the “process and the condition” of the African Diaspora (Patterson and Kelley 20) - the coerced transference of cultures, languages, and bodies from the Old World to the New World. Because of the astounding darkness enveloping the silhouette at center, the borders around “the Door” in Higgins's photograph are even more pronounced. In the midst of darkness that envelopes the room, leading out, past our female subject's body, into the Atlantic Ocean, the only source of light comes from beyond the frame of the photograph itself. This source, which enters the scene from beyond the door, consists of sunlight bounced against and reflected from the Atlantic Ocean, is the sun's reflection. As the sun hovers over the Atlantic Ocean, it simultaneously illuminates the haunting darkness of the House of Slaves. As a result, the doorway becomes the most significant object for the viewer. Even as our gaze is drawn to the camera's point of focus upon the Atlantic horizon (a perspective that in fact simulates the last the last memory before dispersal), the darkness of the silhouette and the doorway pulls us closer toward the Door of No Return. Since the doorway is occupied by the young woman who stands at the intersection of darkness and blinding light - or between Africa and the New World - there are no objects competing for the viewer's attention: she, like us, concentrates on the doorframe, the rectangular lines that separate her body from both the camera and the background. In this way, she both inhabits and becomes the symbol that initiates the break between Africa and the daunting currents of the Atlantic Ocean. Her body, the doorframe, and the actual frame of the photograph not only dramatize the threshold between the Old World and the New World, but also remind the viewer of the unnatural limitations of borders, boundaries, and nation-state itself. Additionally, due to the photograph's underexposure, the overwhelming darkness that foregrounds her silhouette appears to match the color of her body, her face, and her ethnicity. Because the darkness (really, the blackness) is so encompassing, our subject's facial features are difficult to discern. So in addition to reenacting the moment of separation that constituted the African Diaspora, her anonymity further symbolizes the eternal loss of individuality imposed on enslaved Africans at the slave fort.

Yet, despite being the site of separation, Higgins portrays the slave fort as the ultimate site of reunification - the place that stripped Africans of their humanity but one to which we must return in order to restore our memories of Africa as home. By creating a silhouette, Higgins manifests a visual image of continuity and unity within the African Diaspora. Paradoxically, her anonymity is a stand-in for the lost histories and voices of “Some 10 million African men, women, and children [who] passed through the dungeons in the House of Slaves on their way to the slave labor markets” (Feeling the Spirit 42), her ambiguity also represents the fluidity of transnational identities. Because a silhouette is designed to outline shapes and forms, there are no discernable markers of her ethnicity or nationality. Because we cannot locate her particular site of origin, we cannot essentialize her nationality as American, Jamaican, Brazilian, or Senegalese. While the silhouette forces the viewer to remember the thousands of Africans who forcibly left their homes and families in Africa, the young woman also inhabits the space-in-between Africa and the Atlantic Ocean, or what James Clifford describes as “the co-presence of here and there” which creates the African Diaspora consciousness (Clifford 264). She leans against “The Door of No Return” in order to reclaim the monument but fills in “the violent absence” caused by slavery with what Sandra L. Richards characterizes as the materiality of the tourist's body and becomes a stand-in for those whose names can no longer be recalled (626). And by doing so, she provides a heretofore unknown subjectivity for those enslaved Africans who violently left the shores of West Africa for the New World and becomes the prodigal daughter who claims her inheritance of both the slave fort and the memories of all those who were forced to leave.

Her darkness suggests that she is from anywhere in the black world, but her nonspecificity claims nowhere. As such, she truly becomes Higgins's “citizen of the world” in which African Diaspora myths of similarity and belonging subsume markers of difference (“Interview”). But in addition to presenting a prodigal daughter, the feminized triangular shape of the silhouette also suggests a re-centering of Africa as both the beginning of the “triangular” slave trade and the “mother” of the African Diaspora. To quote Hall again, imaginary coherence of the African Diaspora is restored by figuring Africa as “the mother of these different civilizations …for Africa is the missing term, the great aporia, which lies at the centre of our cultural identity and gives it a meaning which, until recently it lacked” (224). In order to reconcile the ongoing sense of fragmentation and historical displacement that defines post-Civil Rights African-American identity, Higgins depicts “The Door of No Return” as the monument to which African Americans must return and the silhouette is a nascent point. It is only through the process of reclaiming the memorializing this slave fort that African Americans can supplement narratives of dispersal with Pan-African fictions of healing and wholeness.

Like Chester Higgins, photographer Carrie Mae Weems returned to West Africa in order “to gain a first hand understanding of the way that Africa had impacted both her and America” (Piché 17). In 1993, immediately after finishing the Sea Island Series in which she examined the legacy of slavery in the United States by capturing the landscape of the coastal islands of the American South, Weems decided that she wanted to visit what she calls “the vestiges of slavery: the slave ports, forts, castles, along the coast of Ghana, El Mina, Cape Coast and Ile de Gorée. (Piché 17). While in the Sea Island Series Weems focused on the remnants or traces of slavery in the United States, like praise houses, graveyards, and abandoned slave quarters, Weems traveled to West Africa in order to formal remembrances of the slave trade. By returning to Africa in order to locate remnants of the transatlantic slave trade that she could not find in the American South, Weem reverses the middle passage journey from West Africa to the New World and creates a visual genealogy that both centers and deconstructs Africa as a site of origin. On one hand, by following the Sea Island Series with the Africa Series, Weems articulates a vision of the African Diaspora which features “an African lineage that has survived despite slavery, colonial rule, and French assimilation policies … it is a shared history of slavery that creates a common bond between Senegal and the United States” (Jacobs 12). Through documenting both the coasts upon which enslaved Africans arrived in the New World such as Charleston, South Carolina and the forts at which they left Africa for the New World, Weems also turns to Africa in order to create an alternative transnational discourse of origins and belonging. Thomas Piché, Jr., describes Weems's Africa Series as a myth-making process in which she “creates a fiction out of the truths she encounters rather than finds a truth deep within the fictions. Rather than looking to Africa [as she did in the Sea Island Series], she goes to Africa” (33).

Yet, while Weems weaves a diasporic myth that allows her both to claim Africa as a site of origin and resist the racial exclusivity of American nationalism, she, unlike Higgins, emphasizes the moments of rupture and discontinuities that also comprise the African Diaspora. These thematic distinctions are in fact ideological differences based on the temporal frame in which these photographs were produced. Originating in 1972 and on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, Higgins's “The Door of No Return at the House of Slaves” emblematizes a Black Power vision of the African Diaspora in which international black solidarity and racial unity supplant fidelity to, and faith in, the American nation-state. Unlike “an act of imaginary reunification” that Higgins's photograph inscribes, the identity politics of and the intellectual and social debates that took place in the 1980s and early 1990s greatly inform Weems project. Characterizing the anti-essentialist and post-structuralist discourse of scholars like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Paul Gilroy, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michelle Wallace, and bell hooks, Weems's images are ones that Stuart Hall would describe as recognizing the “critical points of deep and significance difference which constitute 'what we really are'; or rather - since history has intervened - what we have become” (Hall 225). Thus, the transnational myth of the Africa Diaspora that Weems represents at Gorée Island is both a story of common histories and a narrative of fragmentation and difference. The photographs of Carrie Mae Weems's Slave Coast Series thus likewise uphold the African Diaspora as an alternative imagined community but with quite different implications, suggesting that while the need for a counter civic culture has remained constant throughout the post-Civil Rights era, there is not a singular or hegemonic remembrance or configuration of the African Diaspora.

Weems's myth of an African Diaspora in which inflections of difference are as, or even more important than those of sameness, is embodied in the silver gelatin print titled “El Mina Cape Coast Ile de Gorée” (1993) from the Slave Coast Series. Although the title and accompanying text suggests that the triptych includes all three forts, the actual photograph features three different views of The House of Slaves at Gorée Island. By conflating all three forts, Weems deemphasized their respective locations in the nation-states of Senegal and Ghana and consolidates them into one singular image of the slave trade and beginning of the African Diaspora. Yet while her text provides a narrative of wholeness and oneness, the accompanying photograph undermines the sense of continuity for which she strives. “El Mina Cape Coast Ile de Gorée” is a vertical triptych of the famous staircase of “The House of the Slaves.” In the first photograph, there is a close-up, frontal shot of the entire stair case with a miniaturized view of “The Door of No Return” functioning as the focal point. Unlike Higgins' photograph, because there are no people in Weem's reconstruction of “The Door of No Return,” the architecture alone resurrects the foreboding spirit of the slave trade. Instead of having a silhouette remind the viewer of the slave trade's ghastly, and ghostly, traces, Weems simply situates the darkness that surrounds the Door of No Return between the bright sunlight that comes from the inner courtyard and from the Atlantic Ocean to emphasize the historical significance of the port. Shrouded by light, the Door of No Return appears so small, so seemingly benign, that its role as the final gateway between life in Africa and New World slavery seems even more disturbing and dehumanizing. Cheryl Finley notes in Imagining African Art that be removing “any signs of life” from Gorée Island, “Weems reconstructs “mood [that] is silent, solemn, chilling, and empty” (26).

Weems works to recreate the feelings of confinement, dismemberment, and displacement through her manipulations of the architecture of Gorée Island. In contrast to the wide-angle shot of the staircase in the first image of the triptych, the second and third images are side-angle shots of the staircase. The second photograph features only the top of the left side of the staircase, while the third of the triptychs appears to be the view taken from top of the staircase in the second photograph - only revealing the bottom part of the right staircase and the quarters reserved for enslaved men that stand right behind it. The vertical placement of the photographs discourage the viewer's eye to travel along the staircase, while the side-angle shots upset the sequential order of such travel. Instead of traveling up and down the staircase in one fluid motion, as in the first photograph, the second and third photograph discourage the viewer from recreating a narrative of wholeness and stability. Instead, these images stacked on top of each other suggests the ruptures and discontinuities that constitute Weem's version of diaspora. They materialize what Hall refers to as a view of the African Diaspora in which “identity does not proceed, in a straight line, from some fixed origin” (226). Instead of representing the Diaspora as singular and intact, Weems breaks up the staircase to suggest a sense of transformation and movement. She recreates the House of Slaves as a point of origin that parented unwanted mobility and coerced travel and harkens back to the mass exodus out of the Door of No Return and the attendant tortuous journey of the Middle Passage. Here, both the use of the triptych, the vertical placement of the prints, and the actual images contained in the photographs produce an image of the African Diaspora that both deconstructs the myth of reunification and privileges sites of cultural difference. However, by placing difference “in and alongside continuity” (Hall 227), Weems Diaspora does not simply replace the desire for wholeness and civic belonging with a reality of fragmentation and civic alienation.

Through re-appropriating the slave fort as the originary point of identity, Weems reaffirms African American claims of historical connection to Africa and legitimates their membership in the African Diaspora. As a result, the fragmentation of the staircase can be read as both a visual recognition of cultural difference and as a commemoration of diversity. The focus on the staircase, as opposed to the Door of No Return, suggests movement and flexibility. Weems underscores that despite the literal rigidity of the structure of the slave fort, or better yet the durability of American racism, the African American traveler can return to Africa in order to reclaim the slave fort and reshape its historical meaning. While the side angle shots suggest discontinuity, they also hint at heterogeneity and plurality. These photographs allow the viewer to understand the House of Slaves and the memory of slavery from multiple perspectives and viewpoints, thereby resisting the impulse to proceed with authoritative notions of the past. By providing the viewer with these varied images of the slave fort, Weems also reminds us about diasporic difference and the diversity of all those who left these shores for the New World. Like Higgins's photograph, Weems triptych also fills in the missing bodies and the forgotten histories of enslaved Africans. But instead of using the solitary figure of a silhouette to supplement the void left by slavery, Weems replaces their absence with different perspectives concerning the same object: or the polyphonic voices that initiated and continue to make up the African Diaspra. Brilliantly, in capturing difference by depicting multiple viewpoints, Weems's triptych contains a civic myth of the African Diaspora that embodies the qualities of democracy and open-endedness denied to African Americans in the United States.

In the distinctions between the way Higgins and Weems reconstruct the House of Slaves as a metaphor of the African Diaspora they create, to borrow a phrase from Smadar Lavie, “a frame of analysis that resists and transcends national boundaries” (15). Their transnational myths allow them to bypass the civic estrangement of post-Civil Rights African Americans in the United States. In many ways, their photographs embody what Victor Turner defined as “liminality,” or a state of being in which subjects are “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between” (Turner 94). Their depictions of the House of Slaves construct alternating civic myths that challenge American national memory, while re-centering these fictions within an African American historical framework. The fort resides in Africa yet becomes American. As such, Higgins and Weems reproduce a narrative of returning to Africa in which “Africa” is always seen not as it is presently is, but through “the backward glance of hindsight” (Hartman 763)/ In order to remember the house of the Slaves as it once was, as a site of trauma for thousands of enslaved Africans, “Africa” and the slave fort itself can only be signifiers of historical violence and loss. Yet, to keep the aspects of “authenticity” that make Gorée Island both a world heritage site and a popular tourist destination, Higgins and Weems use the authoritative gaze of black and white photography and privilege absence to make the viewer remember the histories and experiences of those enslaved Africans who unknowingly departed for the New World.

Unfortunately, in order to visually reproduce and preserve the House of Slaves as a heritage site, Higgins and Weems reconstruct the present-day House of Slaves only as an extension of the past - as such, they seem to position both Gorée Island, and by extension all of Senegal, “in a chronological period in which time has either stopped, or the past is identical to the present” (Richards 636). So, unlike the previous Back to Africa movements in which African Americans emigrants and expatriates engaged the African politics of their respective periods because “Africa” represented a potential site for political sovereignty and racial equality, the post-Civil Rights discourse does not invoke “Africa” as a substitute homeland. The re-positioning of Africa as an extension of remembering American slavery within the African-American consciousness is a direct consequence of the post-Civil Rights African American political position of legal citizenship and civic estrangement. In order to compensate for their exclusion from civic narratives, they reconstitute “Africa” as a site of a shared, common history. Not at all coincidentially, Higgins and Weems shoot in black and white. Although their images are taken outside the United States, both Higgins and Weems borrow from the American social documentary tradition in which black and white photographs convey a sense of “authenticity.” Black and white photography tends to invoke a sense of gravitas, stillness, and the past. For example, a color photograph of the House of Slaves reveal that the imposing staircase and the adjoining walls in the courtyard, which is a brilliant white in Weems's photograph, is actually a fading terracotta color. These rust-hued stairs do not lead up to black doors but ones that pale yellow walls frame and really are sage green. In contrast to the stillness and the absolute blackness of Higgins's picture, the bright colors of the actual House of Slaves imbue the landscape with a sense of energy, warmth, and movement. By capturing the realism of the House of Slaves through color photographs, Higgins and Weems risks disrupting the tourist gaze of Gorée Island as both “sacred” and “heritage.” In order to recreate the sense of haunting that they felt and other African American heritage tourists expect to experience at Gorée Island, Higgins and Weems transport the House of Slaves from its present-day color and warmth and attempt to put it back in its “authentic” role as a slave fort.

By erasing the color of the building, Higgins and Weems do not recreate Gorée Island as it once was (for it was not necessarily a white building in a darkened landscape); rather, they reconstruct Gorée as they want it to be remembered. Instead of allowing viewers to reconcile the feelings of discontinuity and discomfort that they may have with an image of brightly lit and somewhat welcoming tropical building, Higgins and Weems visually restructure the fort as a permanent reflection of, or monument to, the past. Vilém Flusser has argued that in addition to removing color to fix an image in the remote past, black and white photographs bear the badge of authenticity because they create the illusion that the world, when broken into black and white and thus perfectly opposable elements becomes more “accessible to logical analysis” (Flusser 42). In Spectral Evidence, Ulrich Baer applies photographs of Holocaust landscapes in which “the abstractions of true and false and good and evil, which predates the invention of photography, seems to find their representational correlates in black and white photographs” (Baer 152). Flusser's arguments can be extended to a transatlantic slave trade landscape in which the abstractions of slavery and freedom also correspond to the polarity embedded in black and white photography. By that I mean that like the opposing elements of slavery and resistance or slavery and freedom, black and white photography render the intangibility of these concepts real and accessible to the viewer. While color distracts and would most likely make us forget the feeling of loss associated with slavery, black and white forces the viewer to reconcile the strict binaries through which we interpret the picture, but more important, they symbolize the rigid laws of citizenship and nonbelonging under which enslaved Africans lived.

The use of black and white photography here also reveals the political underpinnings of the post-Civil Rights African American Back to Africa discourse that represents “Africa” as a site of slavery only. According to historian James W. Meriwether, in the 1970s and 1980s, “African Americans faced a situation in which …the historic imagining of Africa as a more or less unified whole could not be sustained in a world of radical nationalists, authoritarian strongmen, military coups, and democratic hopefuls” (243). In place of liberating “Africa” from European imperialists as African American believed they must do in the 1960s, in the early 1990s African Americans initially organized against South Africa's apartheid. Nevertheless, as South Africa eventually came under black majority rule, it also “marked the last point at which African-Americans could focus in the appealing simplicity of black and white politics in Africa” (Meriwether 244). As a result, pot-Civil Rights African Americans devised new relationships with and new images of “Africa” since they had finally gained full legal citizenship in the United States and because of the configuration of new African nation-states and internecine conflicts. However, as the rise in heritage tourism to the slave forts indicates, contemporary African American heritage tourists are more likely to emphasize those aspects of African American history that directly reflect their need to remember slavery. Because Senegal is neither a site of potential racial freedom nor, as Meriwether suggests, a site of overt racial oppression, African Americans may have difficulty engaging with its present-day postcolonial conflicts. For now, Senegal serves primarily as a site of origins and as Higgins's and Weems's photographs of the House of Slaves reveal, literally remembered in terms of black and white.

According to Cheryl Finley, Gorée Island is normally “teeming with life, visited annually by thousands of pilgrims from the Diaspora and tourists around the globe” (“Carrie Mae Weems” 26) And even though the House of Slaves at Gorée Island is one of the most lucrative tourist sites in Senegal, especially among African Americans, the bodies of tourists, in the photographs by Higgins and Weems are conspicuously absent. In addition to erasing the dearth of tourists, Higgins and Weems also erase the presence of the Senegalese inhabitants who live at Gorée Island and the fishermen and the House of the Slaves employees who work on the island. By removing these people and reconstructing Gorée Island as “a space of absence” (Baer 18), their photographs obliterate any present-day traces of Gorée Island as a place of tourist activity and maritime commerce and reconstitute it only as a monument of the transatlantic slave trade. Instead of interacting with present-day Senegal, Higgins and Weems, through their photographs, recreate the sense of displacement and rupture felt by the enslaved Africans and reestablish the feeling of loss and mourning experienced by the heritage tourist. Because of their deliberate emphasis of absence, they represent the House of Slaves as a silent witness to the trauma and the forgotten histories of the million of Africans forced to travel to the New World. However, the emptiness of the slave fort here also relegates all Gore Island to the mnemonic domain of the African American heritage tourist who feel compelled to travel to Africa in order to supplant the national amnesia of slavery in the United States and locate alternative ancestral origins. Ironically, not only do the missing bodies of tourists and the local denizens constitute the space of absence in Higgins's and Weems's photographs, but so does the erasure of all markers of present-day Senegal. Their pictures induce the viewer to remember slavery through voids, erasures, and absences. Much like the effects of their use of black and white photography, they recover the traumatic experiences of enslaved Africans at the House of Slaves by removing any signs of life or contemporaneity.

Unlike Weems's photograph, which creates absence through invoking and disrupting the traditional landscape art, Higgins's “The Door of No Return at the House of Slaves” creates absence through a re-enactment of solitude. The darkness in the photograph is so overwhelming that it literally engulfs the woman's body. Given that the only source of light is the blinding sun opposing the photographer's camera, the entire photograph reveals the conflict between the plentitude of darkness that appears to bleed out of the picture and the absence of light in the room. On a symbolic level, Higgins fills in the violent absence caused by slavery with the materiality and corporeality of the woman's body. In fact, like the heritage site itself, her presence at the Door of No Return appears to be an act of reclaiming and commemorating her enslaved ancestors. Ironically, while the silhouette suggests a sense of Diasporic wholeness, it also conveys a state of perpetual lack. As she leans against the Door of No Return, she is still, almost lifeless, and contemplative. By looking down at the floor and evading eye contact with the camera and the ocean, she stands in a trance-;ole state and risks isolation from the activities or persons that are, we might infer, around her. The combination of a confounding darkness, the ambiguity of the silhouette, and her crouching body all sustain the idea that the fort is a place of mourning and mediation. Furthermore, the absolute solitude of her figure reproduces, rather than replaces, the space of the fort as permanently marked by absence. Besides the outline of her body, the most dominant image in the photograph is that of blank darkness. And through this darkness, we are confronted with the unfamiliar and haunting waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

Given our point of view, the Door of No Return is foreboding and unwelcoming, the darkness is dwarfing and atomizing, and the ocean restless and weary. So by removing competing objects and thereby contending narratives, Higgins's “The Door of No Return at the House of the Slaves” and its depiction of the Door of No Return serve simply as symbols of slavery, and nothing else. Although the photograph is taken in Senegal, there are no markers of national identity or time period. In fact, we only know that it is in Senegal because Higgins's caption informs us as much. But for the most part, contemporary Senegalese culture is absent and replaced with an image of a slave fort that is exclusively locked into the parameters of American slavery and African American return. Through the juxtaposition of light and darkness and the invocation of absence through the loneliness of the silhouette, Higgins reproduces the feelings of desertion, dismemberment, and lack that we associate with the transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage. However, by foregrounding absence, Higgins either disentangles us from the present or renders the present filled with lack. Either way, the viewer does not have a sense of modern-day Gorée Island. As a result, the transnational stories of the Diaspora, of which modern Senegal is inevitably a part, are sacrificed and replaced with the civic myth of the African Diaspora that transcends the racial limitations of American national memory but re-centers those African American perspectives of slavery that are forgotten in United States.

Instead of recreating absence through juxtaposition, Carrie Mae Weems's “Elmina Cape Cost Ile de Gorée” omits any people or objects that would compromise the historical significance of the House of Slaves. In an interview about her trip to West Africa, Weems admits: “It wasn't the experience I expected, it was much more complicated than claiming roots, I felt methodical and emotionally distant. I had to deal with my emotions later” (qtd. In Piché 17). For Weems, the House of Slaves was not simply a site to reclaim, but one that contains and yields the indescribable emotions of mourning and permanent loss. Because of her emotional distance, Weems chose to photograph the architecture of the House of Slaves. Through displaying the emptiness of Gorée Island that Weems's photograph visualizes W.J.T. Mitchell's argument in the essay “Narrative, Memory, and Slavery” that the contemporary African American representations on slavery reveals “psychical process of disremembering the trauma of slavery, of repressing a horrific experience that can be never fully known, in order to remember what can never be fully understood” (183-207); see also (Shaw 42). In the case of Weems, the unspeakability and the incomprehensible of slavery occur in the absoluteness of Nothingness in her landscape. As Baer notes in regards to photographs of Holocaust landscapes; “For the nothing to be translated into sight, it must be shown as nothing” (75). Likewise, for Weems to reconstruct the feeling of loss and abandonment that she associated with the slave trade, she like the slave traders themselves, exorcises the entire fort of the bodies and remnants of the enslaved Africans. In order to acknowledge their presences, she accents their absences.

Although Higgins and Weems both reconstruct the House of Slaves as a metaphor for the African Diaspora - Higgins as a site of “imaginary reunification” and Weems as a site of inflected difference - their representational concerns originate with the need to locate heritage sites that remember American slavery. And in spite of some of their ideological distinctions, both photographers conclude their depictions of “The House of Slaves” by effectively creating and simultaneously undermining the transnational myth of the African Diaspora to which their photographs lay claim. On the one hand, these photographs reveal Higgins's and Weems's re-appropriation of the Senegalese slave fort as a generative marker of identity that transcends and visually supplements the racial exclusivity of American civic myths of belonging and historical commonality. On the other hand, by sanctifying the House of Slaves as the constitutive site of the African Diaspora, their photographs erase and marginalize those histories and present-day realities that challenge the myth of the African Diaspora. Within the context of heritage tourism, travel to the interior lands of Senegal is tangential and the present-day government of Senegal in and of itself can be secondary or, as anthropologist Paulla Brown notes, “seem irrelevant, even antithetical” to the larger and more personal mission of self-discovery and re-memory” (920). Consequently, “Africa” becomes fixed in the pre-colonial slave trade and the Back to Africa discourses in which “slave fort” and “Africa” are interchangeable signifies for the African Diaspora political identities (Scott 263).

NOTES
1. On July 8, 2003, President George W. Bush also traveled to Gorée Island and offered a critique of the sin of slavery without putting forth a presidential apology. However, unlike Clinton's trip, Bush's sojourn was substantially more controversial and divisive in Senegal. For a detailed and insightful examination on Bush's trip to Senegal and on how many Senegalese citizens understand the coercive practices that both the American and Senegalese governments employed in order to “protect” Bush as reproducing “the way enslavement historically worked on Gorée Island,” see Ralph.
2. For a wonderful summary of the debates among French, Senegalese, and American historians about the commercial significance of Gorée Island in the transatlantic trade, see Hinchman.
3. I borrow this term from Saidiya Hartman's memoir, Lose Your Mother (6).
4. The Oath of Bois Caïmon commemorates a ceremony held by some of the Haitian slaves plotting rebellion in the North in the Bois Caïmon (alligator swamps), Haiti, that most likely occurred on the night of 21 August 1791. According to legend, the ceremony was presided over one by one of the prospective leaders of the rebellion, Boukman, and involved the slaughter of a black pig, and the drinking of its blood by those assembled, who then swore obedience to Boukman. The accepted view of the importance of the voodoo religion in the organization of the slave insurrection, in fact, rests heavily upon this particular instance. Each year, from August 13 to 15, the Boa Morte sisterhood, a group of mostly elderly women descended from African slaves, put on their finest ceremonial clothes and jewelry to participate in three days of Masses, parades, public feasts, and dancing in honor of the Virgin Mary. On the surface, the festival is purely, ardently Catholic, but the reality is more complicated. The name of the festival refers not only to the good death of Mary, who, according to scripture, ascended into heaven, but to slaves who managed to become free during their lifetimes.
5. It must be noted that the terra-toned plaster at the House of Slaves was actually much lighter in color before its “restoration” as a World Heritage Site. According to Mark Hinchman, “A panel inside the house openly states that red is not the house's original color, and suggests that red (because it is the color of spilled blood?) better represents the memory of the trade.”

WORKS CITED
Baer, Ulrich. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Print.

Bruner, Edward. “Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora.” American Anthropologist 98.2 (1996): 290-304. Print.

Campbell, Middle Passage: African-American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Print.

Dallen, J. Timothy, and Victor B. Teye. “American Children of the African Diaspora: Journeys to the Motherland.” Tourism, Diasporas and Space. Ed. Tim Coles and J. Timothy Dallen. London: Routledge, 2004. 111-23. Print.

Douglass, William. “Confronting Slavery's Legacy: Clinton's Island Visit a Test of Sensitivity.” Newsday 3 April 1998: A04. Print.

Ebron, Paula. “Tourists as Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics.” American Ethnologist 26.4 (1999): 091-932.

Edwards, Brent. “The Uses of Diaspora.” Social Text 66 19.1 (2001): 45-73. Print.

Finley, Cheryl. “The Door of No Return.” Common Place 1 (4 July 2001). http:www/common-place.org/vol-01/no-04/finley/. Web.
-. “Carrie Mae Weems: Grabbing, Snatching, Blink and You Be Gone, 1993.” Imagining African Art: Documentation and Transformation. Catalogue for the exhibition, organized by Daniel Cornell and Cheryl Finley, presented at the Yale U Art Gallery, 9 May - 30 June 2000. New Haven: Yale Art Gallery, 2006. Print.

Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion, 2000. Print.

Giovanni, Nikki. Preface. Abandoned Baobab. By Ken Bugul. Chicago: Lawrence Hill P, 1991. Print.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, and Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. 223-37. Print.

Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
--. “Time of Slavery.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (2007): 757-77. Print.

Higgins, Chester, Jr. “The House of Slaves at the Door of No Return.” Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa. New York. Bantam,1994. Print.
--. “Interview with Chester Higgins Jr.” October 2001. http://www.abesha.com/abesha10/higgins.htm. Web.

Hinchman, Mark. “The Maison des Esclaves de Gorée.” The Slave Trade in African and African-American Memory. Ed. Ralph Austen and K. Warren. Unpub. Print.

Jacobs, Mary Jane. “Introduction.” Carrie Mae Weems: The Fabric Workshop/Museum. Philadelphia: The Fabric Workshop, 1994. Print.

Lavie, Smadar. Introduction. Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. Ed. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 1-25. Print.

Lowenthal, David. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Print.

Meriwether, James W. Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Print.

Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.

Patterson, Tiffany Ruby, and Robin D. G. Kelley. “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World.” African Studies Review 43.1 (2000): 11-45. Print.

Piché, Thomas. “Recent Work: Carrie Mae Weems, 1992-1998. Ed. Thelma Golden and Thomas Piché, Jr. New York: Norton, 1998. Print.

Ralph, Michael. “Crimes of History: Senegalese Soccer and the Forensics of Slavery.” Souls 9.3 (2007): 193-222. Print.

Richards, Sandra. “What Is to Be Remembered?: Tourism to Ghana Slave Castle Dungeons.” Theatre Journal 57.4 (2005): 617-37. Print.

Scott, David. “That Event, This Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas in the New World.” Diaspora 1.3 (1991): 261-84. Print.

Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Print.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997. Print.

Weems, Carrie Mae. “Elmina Cape Coast Ile de Gorée.” The Slave Coast Series, New York: PPOW, 1993. Print.

Wonders of the African World: The Slave Kingdoms. Dir. Nicola Colton. Per. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Kunhart Productions and Thirteen/WNET, 2000. Film.

In the Shadow of the Castle: (Trans) Nationalism, African American Tourism, and Gorée Island

SALAMISHAH TILLET
University of Pennsylvania
Stillet@sas.upenn.edu

Research in African Literature,
Volume 40, Number 4, Winter 2009.
© Indiana University Press.
- Salamishah Tillet  01/06/2010
See MAGAZINE LAYOUT Diaspora Connections AT:
http://www.chesterhiggins.com/magazine_layouts.html

African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal,
Vol. 1, No. 2, July 2008, p159-168

Diaspora connections and discontinuities:
the photography of Chester Higgins

by Abebe Zegeye, PhD

Renowned photographer, Chester Higgins, has captured in the sensitivities of people, interesting places, and fleeting moments in his art; and his creative canvas spans the world; it challenges and provokes but also offers solace in time of need. His work, when viewed by different people and different societal groupings, delivers new and often unexpected meanings. Although his photographs are difficult to categorize because absolute distinctions are constantly undermined by the viewer's horizons of expectations and values that are brought to the viewing situation, Higgins has slotted some of his photographic images into sections described as 'politics', 'writers', 'religion', and 'social life'. In this short essay an attempt is made to view some selected pieces and come up with innovative meanings. Since the unifying theme in the photography is that of Africans in the Diaspora, a few pieces are sampled from each section.

Chester Higgins Jr has had an illustrious career as photographer. Scanning through this collection one is struck by the variety of sources, backgrounds, histories, personalities, and lives that he has so ably captured and archived. Until recently, when cultural critics began to consciously seek to understand photography as stand-alone, creative narratives, the histories of eminent people, memorable places, and re-livable moments were narrativized through the written word. This created a vast number of detailed accounts of people's histories. However, photography puts a vibrant visual picture on the sterile word. Higgins' works spans almost all the world's continents. His creative canvas and social mise en scene are Africa, Asia, Latin America and its numerous islands, North America, and even Australia. It is a huge canvas from which the talk of a single Diaspora is but an inadequate characterization of his work. How then can we appreciate the whole gamut of Chester Higgins' photography, let alone explain theoretically the pluralities of meaning suggested by the polysemy of photography as picture, as symbol? An important starting point could be to consider Zegeye and Ahluwalia's characterization of Omar Badsha's photography in South Africa. The duo agrees that photography captures:

"Moments which speak of history, spaces and the rituals that rulers, collaborators and subjects played out in front of the camera and its biased gaze. They are also about moments which
return the gaze and serve as evidence; evidence of the discourse about art and struggle, as well as going beyond the frame and the heroic gesture. "(Zegeye and Ahluwalia 2001, p. 5)

Photography speaks to and of histories in the plural; these histories and spaces are populated by the memories of 'rulers, collaborators and subjects'. Photography, just as any other art form, can be domesticated and be put to the use of the oppressors in society.

Equally, and because of photography's visual elements, its systems of signs enable it to be viewed by different people; thus new as well as unexpected meanings can be encoded in the photographic images. That is why the ordinary people can archive, view, and read potentially alternative meanings to pictorial photography that would appear harmless in the eyes of the rulers.

Chester Higgins' photography challenges and provokes. It can be exhibited in a particular way to tell a single story; when it does so, it forces the viewer to adopt a single perspective on life; it can channel the viewer's emotions and desires so that what results is a rehearsed and commonplace knowledge of reality. However, photographers and exhibitors of photographic works are aware of the ways in which their art can be disruptive of the single meanings that artists sometimes intend to construct and promote. In fact, and differently put, the very idea of choosing what to capture in photographs is itself a political act; it fills the frame with some preferred content and in the process excludes some of life's content that might also have been captured. Any piece of photography is thus complete in its incompleteness.
Further, the actual arrangement of photography for public exhibition and even private archiving inevitably necessitates a preliminary critique of preferred meanings. And in the criticism of photography, the context in which a piece is appreciated suggests meanings that go 'beyond the frame' and will even interrogate the idea of the 'heroic gesture' that Zegeye and Ahluwalia allude to.

Chester Higgins' photography is difficult to categorize because absolute distinctions are constantly undermined by the viewer's horizons of expectations and values that are brought to the viewing situation. However, Higgins has slotted some of his photographic images into sections described as 'politics', 'writers', 'religion', and 'social life'. In this short essay, I shall briefly attempt to view some pieces arbitrarily selected, and still hope to come out with innovative meanings. Since the unifying theme in the photography is that of Africans in the Diaspora, I shall sample a few pieces from each section.

'Politics' and photography
In this section one picture from Africa immediately captures the attention of viewers. The piece is that of former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. The overarching emotions associated with this work are those of an African hero who was imprisoned by apartheid on Robben Island for 27 years for leading his black people in resistance against dehumanization. Other positive memories that are evoked by the piece Mandela piece are those that relate to him as an astute politician who brought warring parties to the negotiating table; to claim South Africa as a country of immense possibilities for both black and white South Africans. The iconic picture of Mandela, not only in Higgins' photography, memorializes emotions of love and bravery; he inspired many people in Africa and in the Diaspora to greater heights of commitment to fight for human dignity. However, the instabilities of meaning that can be authorized by photography are situational; the context in which a piece is viewed and the actual Mandela understood do not lend themselves to unitary meanings. For example, Mazrui, writing in the context of African renaissances, questions whether or not the 'positive' values almost always attached to the photographs of Mandela do not mislead. Mazrui believes that it is possible to view Mandela's politics of forgive and forget the past as compromising the liberation of Africans in the continent and those in the Diaspora. In particular, Mazrui finds embarrassing what he calls Africa's 'short memory of hate' which the likes of Mandela have promoted:

"the Irish have long retention of memories of atrocities perpetrated by the English. The Armenians have long memories of atrocities committed against them by the Turks in the Ottoman Empire. The Jews also have long memories about their martyrdom in history. . . . Is a short memory of hate a precondition for the African renaissance? Nelson Mandela lost twenty-seven of the best years of his life. Yet on being released, not only was he in favour of reconciliation between Blacks and Whites, he went on to beg white terrorists who were fasting unto death not to do so. He furthermore went out of his way to go and pay his respects to Mrs Verwoerd, the widow of the architect of apartheid. Is Africa's short memory of hate sometimes 'too short'? Is it nevertheless necessary for the African renaissance?" (Mazrui 2004, p. 53)

Writers in the African Diasporas
The contradictory meanings yielded by a rigorous viewing of the Mandela pictures are also felt in the Higgins photography that features African writers, Black American writers, and those in Caribbean. For example one of the enduring pieces is that of Leopold Sedar Senghor, writer, poet, philosopher of the Negritude Movement and former president of Senegal. Viewing his picture in this selection of Higgins' photography evokes in the viewer those moments associated with Senghor's use of Negritude poetry to fight French colonialism. In his artistic works, Senghor strove to project Africans as beautiful people; his poetry was therapeutic, aimed as it was to heal Africans of the psychological wounds inflicted by the colonizer. Senghor was also the first president of Senegal. However, it means going beyond the 'frame' of Senghor's picture in Higgins' collection to come to the shocking understanding that Senghor fought hard to make Senegal a province of France, a move that if successful would have reversed the political gains made by Senegalese people during decolonization in the 1940s.

The uniqueness of Higgins' photographic oeuvre is that it provides for the viewer a 'continuous and contingent maelstrom of unguaranteed political argument and debate' in the way it encourages and predisposes the viewer to approach the images in a 'pluralistic manner' (Zegeye and Ahluwalia 2001, pp. 8, 7). In his collection of photography, Higgins has immortalized the pictures of Alice Walker (1983), Aimee Cesaire (1975), and Derek Walcott (1985) as representing different African consciousnesses in America and the Caribbean respectively. Walker is not only a black American writer; she is a female author who has written, amongst other great works, the novel, 'The Colour Purple'. Cesaire is creatively known for initiating the debates the eventually congealed into the Negritude Movement of which Senghor was also a founding member. The Negritude Movement was both a literary and a political movement. In literature, Negritude emphasises the vitality of black cultures all over the world; in political circles, the Negritude Movement struggled to impart among Africans a consciousness that they could rule themselves; that the educated should to return to the masses and forge a collective identity with which to confront white racism. The theme of return to the source popularised in the political programme also urged Africans to make use of deeply embedded spiritual resources to shape their new destinies. This theme resonates in the works of writers from Africa, to America and the Caribbean, thereby establishing a strong connection of cultural sensibilities informing these writers from different continents. On the other hand, the return to the source, particularly in the works by Alice Walker, 'forced' African patriarchy to revisit its cultural assumptions; The Colour Purple in particular advances a feminist perspective that is either suppressed or buried in the works of Senghor and Walcott. To be honest, none of these works of art are mentioned in the captions to the photography of Higgins. However, photography works through associations and it is surely poetic licence to link the photography art work with verbal narratives. It is another way of recontextualizing the pictures without suggesting that as narratives in their own right they cannot evoke the positive meanings that are well elaborated in works of fiction.

Religion and popular music of the Africans in the Diaspora
A permanent feature in Chester Higgins' photographic oeuvre is his capacity to be drawn to contexts of religious prayer. These contexts afford Higgins the opportunity to recuperate moments of collective solidarity among Africans. It matters little whether the gatherings are women from Ghana or the religious symbolism captured in or announcing the vibrancy of Islam as one of Africa's tenacious value system or the pensive mood of the Sister of the House, Salvador, Brazil.

In particular, religion offers not only solace in times of need; it can also be a way of hibernating to avoid confronting life's problems; a form of escapism. However, Higgins' photography will reject being viewed in a one-sided manner. For example, the vodun purification ritual 4 (African naturalism) recalls to mind the possibility of an alternative social theology that Africans in the Haiti diaspora authored in order to make sense of the whirlwind of poverty and economic instability that characterises Haiti. Historian C.L.R James (1998) has associated vodun practices with those spiritual values held by Haiti communities; they refused to be subdued in the brief period when the people of Haiti were under French rule.

In Higgins' photography, the contradictory lives of the people of African descent are immortalized in the pictures on Jamaica. Jamaica is presented as country of extreme contradictions; on one hand, there is the photo of young boys, haggling over who has won the card game. This dispute is highlighted in the picture: and juxtaposed to this carefree wasting of youthful lives is the towering image of Bob Marley, the legendary singer whose reggae beat has united the world against social tyranny. Marley's fame echoes in Zimbabwe where in 1980 he graced the newly independent country that had successfully shaken off the yoke of British colonialism. The irony, though, is that in Higgins' collection of photography, the man who took over from the British, Robert Mugabe, has grown increasingly tyrannical, to the extent that he has turned his guns on his own people.

Again, Higgins' picture of Robert Mugabe is as ambiguous as the man himself; the liberation hero sliding into dictatorship. These meanings can only be read into the photography because by its very nature, photography is both metaphorical and metonymic. This is where the strength of Higgins' photography lies.

Conclusion
It is not possible to discuss all the pictures that form the oeuvre of Higgins' photography. The aim of this short essay was to explore the extreme sensitivities that define his photographic consciousness; he chooses what to immortalize and what not to take seriously. Photography as an art form defies being viewed in a single dimension. This paper has deliberately highlighted the examination of those photos that readers are likely to be familiar with. The idea, though, was first to create links and connections in the lives of the people whose images were captured, whether they are in Africa, America or the Caribbean. The essay also attempts to reveal the complexities of each picture by analysing the conflicting systems of signs inherent in each picture. A little background to the people featured in each work was intended to create a broader social, artistic, and ideological form within which to comprehend the different agency of those immortalised
in the photos. Photography opens up memories of those people whose lives are captured, whether these lives are depicted in a positive light or not. It is appropriate to end with the words of Abebe Zegeye and Pal Ahluwalia, that photography is a 'narrative that forces the viewer to consider alternative modes of representation, to reinterpret history and to reconceptualise space and society' (Zegeye and Ahluwalia 2001, p. 7). In depicting Africans in diaspora through photography, Chester Higgins forces the viewer to consider connections and disconnections in the values that inform the lives of Africans scattered across the globe.

References
Ce´saire, A., Return to my native land. London: Penguin Books.
James, C.L.R., 1998. Letters to Constance Webb. In: A. Pettinger, Always elsewhere: travels of the black Atlantic. London and New York: Publisher/publishers.
Mazrui, A., 2004. The language of Francophone and the race of the renaissance: A Commonwealth perspective. In: O. Uduka and A.B. Zack-Williams, eds. Africa beyond the post-colonial: political
and socio-cultural identities. Ashgate: Burlington, 50 65.
Senghor, L.S., 1991. The collected poetry. Charlottesville, VA: University Virginia of Press.
Walcott, D., 1965. The castaway and other poems. London: Jonathan Cape.
Walker, A., 1983. The colour purple. London: The Women's Press.
Zegeye, A. and Ahluwalia, P., 2001. Travelling cultures. In: O. Badsha, Imperial ghetto: ways of seeing
in a South African city. Pretoria: South African History Online, 5 27.
168 A. Zegeye

About Abebe Zegeye
Graduate School, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
Rice Family Foundation, Visiting Professor, MacMillan Center, Yale University, New Haven, USA

Keywords: Chester Higgins; photography; Negritude; images of the diaspora.
Photo 1. Nelson Mandela. Stockholm, Sweden. Freedom fighter in South Africa during apartheid. His first trip out of South Africa after his release from prison to visit an ailing Oliver Tambo.
Photo 2. Leopold Senghor. Dakar, Senegal. Head of State, Poet/Co-founder of the Negritude Movement and French intellectual.
Photo 3. Alice Walker. New York, novelist and author of The Color Purple.
Photo 4. Man at cross in prayer. Accra, Ghana.
Photo 5. Aimee Cesaire. Head of French Department of Martinique, Poet/Co-founder of the Negritude Movement and French intellectual.
Photo 6. Eye of Allah, Islam. New York. A young Moslem woman
Photo 7. Sister of the House of Casa Branca, Salvador, Brazil, Candomble. African Naturalism.
Photo 8. Vodun purification in Gonaive, Haiti. African Naturalism.
Photo 9. Bob Marley. Jamaican reggae singer and prophet of Rastafarism.
Photo 10. Robert Mugabe. New York. Freedom fighter, field commander and Head of State of Zimbabwe

African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal,
Vol. 1, No. 2, July 2008, 159 168
ISSN 1752-8631 print/ISSN 1752-864X online
# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17528630802224072
http://www.informaworld.com
- Abeye Zegeye, PhD  04/28/2009
See MAGAZINE LAYOUT Concerned Photographer AT:
http://www.chesterhiggins.com/magazine_layouts.html

Chester Higgins Jr., lives a dual life. Workdays he makes a living as a general assignment photographer for the New York Times, photographing news conferences, fires, and society events (“Anything but sports,” he says.) Nights, weekends, and vacations he spends on his own long-term projects. His best-known personal project, Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa, took him to over thirty countries, was eventually published as a book, and traveled as an exhibition worldwide.

These days a degree in photojournalism from a school of journalism is a virtual necessity for a newspaper job. Things were a little looser when Higgins started his career in the early 1970s. His training was in business and sociology and, while he learned photography in college, he never studied it formally. Coming to New York City after graduation, he taught for a while at New York University and worked as a freelance photographer. His success freelancing eventually led to a full-time job at the Times.

Most photojournalists use automated 35mm SLR camera systems. These are quick and flexible and allow the use of a wide variety of lenses and other accessories. However, Higgins prefers more basic equipment. For general-purpose work, he uses a 35mm rangefinder. When he needs an SLR, such as when using telephone lenses, he shoots with a manual-focus 33mm SLR.

While many photo-journalist carry a lot of equipment, just in case they'll need something, Higgins prefers to keep it simple - one camera body (maybe a second as backup when traveling), three lenses, flash, battery pack, and reflective umbrella. “For me, the greater the limitations, the more I need to be creative. Besides, too many options breeds insecurity, “ he says.

Newspaper photojournalists almost always use color negative film. Negative film offers more latitude; if the exposure or lighting situation is a little off, it won't matter quite as much as it would with transparency film. And using color gives photo editors the option of running the image either in color or black-and-white. Higgins uses color negative film on assignment, but prefers black-and-white negative film when photographing for himself.

Film is processed at the newspaper using the same type of machine used by mini-labs (so-called “one-hour labs”). Newspapers rarely use prints anymore. Instead the photographer (or photo editor) edits the negatives on a lightbox, then scans the chosen images directly. The designer drops the scanned (and reversed) files into the page layout on computer and sends it off to the printer.

The right equipment is important, of course, but perhaps a photojournalist's most important tools are good judgment and a sympathetic soul. Photographing strangers, for example, can be awkward, as many beginning photographers know. “Immediately reach out,” Higgins suggests. “If you like people and reach out, they'll reach back. Everyone wants acceptance and the fastest way to get it is to give it: Be human, direct, honest - no bull. Ask your subjects what's going on, and mean it. Be a good listener.” Higgins believes that if you listen, people will lead you to other subjects and ideas. “Turn people into teachers,” he says. “Exchange information and build a bridge of trust.”

Higgins often finds himself working in areas where he is not known and doesn't really know anyone. This can be dicey and sometimes dangerous. He tries to meet and enlist spiritual leaders as allies - for example, priests and other pillars of the community. “This is an efficient way to work, especially since I usually have a limited amount of time to work. These people know everyone - good and bad - and they know how to direct me.”

Most photographers work freelance; in fact, working for a newspaper is one of the few jobs in photography that actually offers full-time employment. On a large newspaper staff photojournalists sometimes specializes in one area - for example, sports events or city hall activities. Most, however, are generalists. Higgins likes it that way. It's fresh - “I don't know whose face I'll be looking at tomorrow,” he says - and it helps break the monotony of his long-range projects.

The fact that Higgins works on personal projects as well is relatively rare among newspaper photojournalists. The projects vary somewhat, but they all share certain common themes, frequently focusing on the state of African Americans. “Western media often lacks the ability to see and show three basic aspects of my people,” he says, “our decency, our dignity, and our virtuous character. The view all too often presented in the media concerning people of African descent is a limited one, focusing narrowly on pathological and deviant behavior.”

Preparing for his projects is a true test of Higgins's powers of perseverance and organization. He spends whatever time he can find researching areas where he plans to travel. He reads the available books, talks to people who have been there, and even subscribes to newspapers and magazines from that country or region. He photographs when he has vacation time. (What most people call vacations he considers a waste of time.) The personal projects are all financially supported without the help of the New York Times, with a combination of grants, publishing advances, print sales, and personal investment.

On the surface, much of Higgins's work is about African American issues. Yet in a broader sense his photography is about the human condition. A current personal project, a book titles Elder Grace, focuses on the perception of age in our society. Having grown up in a community where age was revered (the small Alabama town of New Brockton), Higgins finds it disheartening that “cultural wisdom is not valued anymore.”

Another reason Higgins is so focused on age may be his gratitude to older photographers who helped and influenced him - from Arthur Rothstein, who was best known for his work with the Farm Security Administration and later picture editor at LOOK magazine, to the great African American photographers and teachers P.H. Polk, Gordon Parks and James Vanderzee, and to Ernest Cole, an African photographer who documented Apartheid in the 1960s.

In a similar way, Higgins is leaving his own legacy. Over the years, he says “I have seen more willingness on the part of the media to report positively on our diverse cultures.” Such progress is a testament to individuals like Higgins who see their jobs more as a mission than just a means of making a living.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Photojournalism
By Henry Hornstein & Russell Hart
Prentice-Hall, 2001
- Henry Hornstein & Russell Hart  05/01/2008
Chester Higgins Jr:
Insights From 40 Years As An Artist

By Kim Milo
New York University Journalism student
March 2007

As a non-native of New York, any respite from the bitter hustle of Manhattan streets is a welcome relief. At the moment I crossed the threshold of Photographer Chester Higgins's Brooklyn brownstone, I as was instantly put at ease by the warmth of his home and by his graciously welcoming embrace.

In addition to completing 6 books of his photography, Higgins has worked as a staff photographer for the New York Times since 1975, and his work has appeared in magazines such as Newsweek, New York Times Sunday Magazine, Fortune, Art News, Essence and Archeology. Most recently, one of Higgins's original photos provided the basis for the three-story photo mosaic at the new Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco.

A product of the village of New Brockton Alabama, Chester Higgins Jr. and most of his personal work revolve around the lives and times of people of color. His photography at first explored the experiences of African Americans, and later grew to investigate peoples of Africa and other locations abroad.

On a mellow Saturday afternoon, Chester and I sat with mugs of coffee in his book lined living room where he shared with me his beginnings, his philosophies, and some of the best advice he's picked up during his 40 years as a photographer. As I inquired about his life and work with the thirsty ears of a devoted pupil, in a soft yet gravelly voice the seasoned artist responded with the sincerity of a dedicated mentor.

Q: What first inspired you to become a photographer?

A: Seeing some old photographs by P.H. Polk, from the thirties of people who were poor farmers but had an incredible sense of dignity about them. It made me realize that the people who I love the most in my life, my great aunt and my great uncle, I had never seen photographs of them. And also I realized that as a student I didn't have the money to ask a professional photographer to make these pictures. So instead I asked this photographer if he would teach me how to use the camera. I started saving my money and in about 6 months later I bought my first camera.

Q: So how did your initial desire to document your great aunt and uncle evolve into what you are doing now?

A: My desire out of the heart to create images of love of my great uncles and aunts first just evolved in showing heart-felt pictures of other people, who were my in my neighborhood, who were in my college, or who were in my county. Eventually it became politicized.

Q: How did your photos first become political or take on social significance?

A: Everybody has their political awakenings as they grow up and each generation has it for different reasons. My generation in the 60's had ours because we had problems with southern Dixiecrats. We held demonstrations at the governor's state house and I noticed the next day in the newspaper that when we were depicted in the media, not as American citizens petitioning the government, but rather as potential arsonists and thugs and rapists. It made me realize that I had a choice. I could scream racism or I could assume that the people who made these pictures were incapable of seeing it any other way. I said OK, I will go make my own pictures and see if I can convince editors to use these pictures, not instead but in addition to [the others.]

Q: What are you attempting to do through your art? What are the messages you are trying to send?

A: When my heart images became hitched to a wagon of political and societal necessity, I began to say that what I wanted to do was document the life and times of people of color seen through how I was seeing it, which I thought would be a more realistic rendering than how we were being seen by others. That's what I decided I wanted to do in 1968 and that’s essentially what I'm still doing.

Q: Do you consider yourself an insider trying to tell the rest of the world what this experience is like or are you yourself attempting to learn about it through your work?

A: I'm trying to do both. Because in order for me to make sure that the material itself is full and rich and valuable, then I have to learn. As an image-maker, the more you know the more you can effectively say. So I research. I try to make [my photographs] visually compelling, try to keep them simple, but if you deconstruct my images, you'll be able to see what I've been able to pack into it as an image. Content became a very important thing to me. I had learned to pack content into what seemed to be a very simple kind of image. So on the one had I'd done the homework to give it that quality of information, and at the same time I've also continued to be an advocate by getting the work out so that other people can see and be able to appreciate what I've been able to capture.

Q: When you photograph people you don't know, how do you gain their trust to get an inside perspective?

A: I try to set up a formula of, here is a person who I could like as a friend who happens to have a camera, but the camera is the last thing that I'm concerned about. My photographs are very personal, very intimate pictures, and you can't really do that without the cooperation of the subject matter. I want to insinuate myself within first, and once I'm within then I can look around but if I come first from outside trying to look with the camera, then all kind of paranoia flags begin to rise. I think the first thing people look for is if you are judgmental, the second thing is if you accept them. No matter who people are, they're still human beings. No matter what their situations are, you don't sacrifice their humanity on the altars of their condition. I try to avoid being captivated by their differences. Fundamentally, you're dealing human, to human.

Q: If you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring photographer, what would it be?

A: Travel. You have to go because it changes you. People around the world are quite interesting and you find that people around the world solve simple problems, that we do everyday, sometimes differently. It expands you. And I think that it becomes a cerebral high. It's something that you can't get by staying home. Get out there and find it, go out there and experience it.

Chester Higgins Jr.'s many beautiful and evocative portraits can be viewed at his website; www.chesterhiggins.com
- By Kim Milo  03/31/2007
See MAGAZINE LAYOUT The Spirit Catcher AT:
http://www.chesterhiggins.com/magazine_layouts.html

Brenda D. Glassé
Photojournalism Workshop
Empire State College, NYC
Final Project
Professor Melvyn Rosenthal
Summer 2006

"My photographs confront stereotypes. My mission is to redefine the visual document as it relates to people on the margins of society. I document potential: what it means to be decent, dignified and virtuous. I search for the signature of the Spirit."
-Chester Higgins

CHESTER HIGGINS JR.
(1946- )

"…he (Higgins) follows the maxim of his mentor Cornell Capa that the "role of photography is to show…things to be appreciated and respected."- Eddy L. Harris, New York Times Book Review
Chester Higgins, Jr.

Chester Higgins, Jr. was reared in a small community in New Brockton, Alabama, in 1946, with positive men and women who had a strong sense of who they were.

Mr. Higgins entire life seems to have been led by the Spirit. When he was a young boy he received his first understanding of spirituality. He awoke early one morning to "a low, constant sound" in his head and a "supernaturally, bright light coming from the wall diagonally across from my bed" (2). After the light cleared young, Master Higgins saw "the image of a man draped in a garment as in ancient times" (5). He became hysterical as the image began to speak to him because he thought that death was coming to get him. His grandfather, the Reverend Warren Smith, interpreted the experience as his calling to ministry. So at nine years old he "preached at different churches and recruited members into the Southern Baptist Church" (2) and he did so for over a decade under the guidance of his grandfather.

The Reverend Warren Smith was one of the strong forces in Mr. Higgins’ life giving him his first driving lesson at eight years old and teaching him how to knot a tie. An accomplished tailor, owner of the family’s dry cleaning business, and minister of three churches, he led by example. Fighting for the rights of African Americans in Alabama, Reverend Smith "withstood racial slurs and threats and had even had his house burned down during his struggles to secure voting rights and schooling for African Americans in Coffee County" (9).

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was also a powerful influence in Mr. Higgins’ life. African Americans were terrorized in the 1950’s and 1960’s in Alabama with Jim Crow laws. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took a stand and took up the cause of fighting for civil rights in the racist south. Mr. Higgins experienced racism in the south as a child. He had a traumatic experience when his neighbor, Andy, a young White boy beat up another White boy as a way of protecting young Chester. He was so panicked that the boy who was beat was going to come after him with a band of boys that he never spoke to Andy again.

He said that living in Alabama during his early days "was like being in a cage with a rattlesnake and not knowing when the snake would attack" (13). Blacks had to always be on guard in the presence of Whites because many of them had unpredictable behavior that would lead to heinous acts or even to the death of a Black person. Like the case of Aunt Jessie’s pretty, little granddaughters who with her son came from Detroit to visit with her and Aunt Ola, her sister. The girls were not accustomed to being cautious in the presence of Whites and went to a restaurant owned by a Klansman to buy ice cream cones. They had no idea that Blacks were to be served only at the back door. Before they could get back to their grandmother’s house they were followed by the owner who was also the town policeman and his son in a police car, sprayed with tear gas, attacked with their batons, thrown in the back seat and carried off to jail while helpless Blacks watched. Aunt Jessie knew that her son would try to kill the policeman and risk being killed and would not let him go to the police station. Instead, for his own protection, she and eight other women locked him into a circle and would not let him go until they were satisfied that he would remain at Aunt Jessie’s house. She then went to the police station and returned with her granddaughters.

It was during these highly charged times that Mr. Higgins received his inspiration to be a photographer. Marching against George Wallace while a college student at Tuskegee Institute in the late 1960’s, Mr. Higgins was disappointed at the negative depiction of African-Americans that the news photographers made for "outsiders" to see. They were portrayed as "thugs and potential arsonists" (18). Certainly his photographs did not represent African Americans that way. They represented decent and dignified "American citizens exercising our constitutional right to petition our government for change" (18).

Inspired by Mr. Polk’s thirty-five year old photos of rural men and women crookedly lined on the inner walls of his studio at Tuskegee Institute, Mr. Higgins’ photography career began. Like Mr. Polk he wanted to make photos of "the treasures" in his life like his Great Aunt Shugg and his Great Uncles March Forth, John, and Bougg Harris. He was impressed with how the photographs of revealed the subject’s dignity and character.

Mr. Polk made picture making look so easy but Mr. Higgins soon found out that it wasn’t as easy as it looked. Nevertheless, he was hungry to learn and Mr. Polk, the college photographer, official photographer for Booker T. Washington, and the only photographer that Mr. Higgins knew at the time became his mentor. He believed in Mr. Higgins’ talent and his right to make pictures.

Mr. Higgins found Mr. Polk an easy man to love. He had great insight and knew how to make his subjects feel comfortable. After his first roll of exposed film produced two out of twenty-five pictures Mr. Higgins’ first lesson was how to read light, which Mr. Polk showed him how to do in spite of his 1960 Pentax not having a flash. One of the best lessons that Mr. Polk taught him was that no camera, lens, or light can make a picture. "Only your eyes can make a picture" (76).

After Mr. Polk’s training and the experienced gained making photographs at civil rights demonstrations at Tuskegee Institute, Mr. Higgins used the summer vacation before the start of his senior year to go to New York to "learn to make pictures as compelling as those published by the best photographers" (80). That is when he met his next mentor, the director of photography at Look magazine, Arthur Rothstein. Mr. Rothstein gave him guerilla photography training, a summer intensive, if you will. There was the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection to visit to study the visual concepts in the paintings of a list of artists. Then off to the Museum of Modern Art to study the works of Farm Security Administration photographers Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Seeking to know more he discovered the works of Gordon Parks, Marion Post Walcott, and to his pleasant surprise, Arthur Rothstein. As part of his training Mr. Rothstein directed Mr. Higgins to put down his camera and to "use his thumb and forefinger on both hands to frame images and to practice until he learned to compose his pictures right in the camera" (84), which was his lesson in pre-visualization. Last, Mr. Rothstein wanted Mr. Higgins to know that there had to be a message behind his photos—the photos should reflect what he is trying to say.

Summer ended and it was time to return to his senior year at Tuskegee. Equipped with sixty rolls of film Mr. Higgins and Mr. Rothstein continued their relationship by mail. Mr. Rothstein’s influence personally and professionally positioned Mr. Higgins to be a strong contender in photography and prepared him to receive the lessons of his next three mentors: Cornell Capa, the passionate founder of the International Center of Photography (ICP) to whom he is forever grateful for inviting him to the photographic seminars at New York University to listen to the likes of Ansel Adams, Jerry Uelsmann, W. Eugene Smith and who helped him to become "aware of the evolving trends in his personal work" (88); Romare Bearden, an excellent storyteller and a "celebrated and politically inspired artist" (88), who taught him "the greater the limitation, the more creative you must become to overcome it" (92); and Gordon Parks, an accomplished photographer, musician, filmmaker, writer, poet, and painter who told him that "great photographs are made with the heart, not necessarily with the eye" (95). He even would spend days talking to photographer James Van Der Zee who he considered a grand old man.

Family is important to Mr. Higgins as he so lovingly expresses in his stories and photographs, so when faced with divorce and a "court-imposed estrangement from my children" (103) he could not think of any other way to ease his separation from his family but to take his life. Emotionally distraught, he remembered the gun that he kept hidden to assist him in alleviating his pain. After loading all of the chambers and raising the gun to his head to end it all, he granted himself a last request "to look into the face of the sun" (103). He went out on the terrace and was met by light and an internal voice, "Have faith; it’s not over. There is a future for you" (103). I am happy to say, he is still with us and sought the help that he sorely needed. The most beautiful thing that came out of his near-death experience was that he stayed connected to his children.

One of the ways of connecting with them was through ceremonies such as the rites of passage ceremony that he performed with his son, Damani, in Egypt. Not growing up with his biological father, he wanted to have a strong relationship with his children. When Damani was twenty Mr. Higgins hired him as his assistant on his first trip and Mr. Higgins’ fifteenth trip to Africa to share with him the land of his heritage. They both share a love for His Majesty Haile Selassie and the Rastafarian lifestyle so one leg of the trip was to photograph the re-interment of what would have been his 100th birthday. To their disappointment, but not their discouragement, the new Ethiopian regime postponed that activity before they arrived. Traveling to Ethiopia to celebrate His Majesty’s birthday was an annual trek made by thousands of Rastafarians so Damani blended right in, locked hair and all.

The other leg of the trip was a stopover in Egypt for Damani to experience the pyramids, temples, and tombs. It was on this leg of the trip that Mr. Higgins had a dream while in the ancient, sacred city of Lalibela of a father and son facing each other against a backdrop of temples and pyramids as the father was speaking to his son and anointing him with a dry substance. Satisfied with the idea of performing a ceremony he shared it with his son who agreed to do it. Sand was chosen as the dry substance because, "Sand represents the Sahara, and sand also contains the remains of the ancient people of pharaonic Egypt" (137). Using a 35mm film canister Damani filled it with "sand from the desert in the shadow of the pyramids in Cairo and from around the remains of the Temple of Karnak—one of the largest, oldest stone temples in the world" (137). Facing his son in front of an enormous wall painting of Osiris, the deity of resurrection, inside the tomb of an Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh, Mr. Higgins performed the rites of passage ceremony. Looking into Damani’s eyes as he anointed the top of his head with sand he said, "I, your father, anoint the crown of your head with the soil of Africa. This piece of earth is a symbol of the lives of your ancestors. It is a bonding of their lives to yours. Like your father, you too are African. We are Africans not because we were born in Africa, but because Africa was born in us. Look around you and behold us in our greatness. Greatness is an African possibility; you can make it yours. So here, in the company of those great ones who have waited patiently for your visit, you are loved, you are encouraged. Our faces shine toward yours. Go forward; may you live long, may you prosper and have health." (138)

The ceremony undoubtedly strengthened his relationship with his son and made him stronger as a father, as well.

When his mother, Mrs. Higgins Smith, passed away, through his granddaughter, Shaquila, the youngest member of his family, he made a connection with his daughter, Nataki, with an African burial ceremony that he remembered from 1994 when photographing at the African burial ground that was discovered in lower Manhattan. The baby was passed three times across his mother’s casket as his children stood on one side and he stood on the other. The first pass was for the ancestors, the second for the living, and the third for those who will come after. The ceremony was the fusing of his family’s spirits with that of his mother’s.

During Mr. Higgins’ healing process from his divorce he noticed that he had become scattered, was losing enthusiasm, and had "lost clarity in his artistic direction" (107). Discussions with Cornell Capa helped to put him back on his professional path and Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa was born. Mr. Higgins’ had twenty-six years of photographs reflecting Africa and the African Diaspora. In his life’s work he came to the realization that his photographs "reflected his search for African identity" (109). He also noticed that even in between the fifteen working trips to Africa when back in the states he still "sought out Diasporan cultural links" (109).

During his sophomore year at Tuskegee he needed guidance from his favorite great uncle March Forth who at that time was in his seventies. He was sharing his fears about his future and his uncle listened attentively and then offered, "It is important to make a mark on life or else you could very well die, undeclared." Remembering those words, after the launch of his book and traveling tour that accompanied Feeling the Spirit, Mr. Higgins felt that he could die now not because he was disappointed or distraught but because that was his best work. He has left his mark and great uncle March Forth left his mark on Mr. Higgins. He died right before his 108th birthday and Mr. Higgins chose the end of his funeral as the time to marry his love of fifteen years. Before the casket was lowered his children, his soon-to-be wife, her daughter, and one hundred of the townspeople gathered together for their wedding. He wanted, "Uncle Fourth’s spirit to share my happiness and for our union to be blessed by his spirit" (55).

On his many trips to Africa Mr. Higgins has been able to research his African past and study African religions. He yearned to know the real story of his heritage. While in college he read the works of Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Leopold Senghor (Senegal) and although excited about one day visiting the continent, was fearful about Africa being primitive like the articles from the periodicals in 1950’s and 1960’s repeatedly stated.

The black educators in his life, including his mother who was a schoolteacher, pieced together, with the limited information that was available to them, a balanced diet of history that included African American heroes and martyrs, i.e. Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Denmark Vesey for the young Chester and other students, instilling pride and confidence.

A professor of industrial studies told Mr.Higgins an African tale that set him on a life long mission. A father tells his son a story about a hunter who stalks and kills the king of the jungle. The young boy didn’t understand why the lion, who is stronger and has sharp claws and teeth, did not win. The father’s response to his son was, "The lion will win when he writes his own story" (117). Through photography Mr. Higgins writes his story.

His first trip to Africa threw out the notion of African’s primitiveness and he could finally learn the truth for himself. Mr. Higgins has visited many countries in both East and West Africa but he feels most at home in West Africa where he looks more like the people and where "the red clay of the earth reminds me of the hills of Alabama (118).

As a student of Egyptology he spends much time studying the similarities of Egypt, Ethiopia, and other African cultures.
In Africa Mr. Higgins broke a prohibition enforced by his mother of wearing loud colors, especially red. At the Addis Ababa airport in Ethiopia while waiting for a glimpse of dignitaries his attention was broken by a commotion surrounding His Majesty Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia. He was a small man but had such a powerful presence that Mr. Higgins was moved to lower the camera "so I could see with both eyes (129).

Mr. Higgins needed to know the history behind His Majesty and dug into research about his life. The daughter of His Majesty’s Minister of Defense told him that the emperor "held court while standing on a red cushion at the foot of his throne" (129). That was all he needed to hear he ended his prohibition and started wearing red socks and still does in honor of His Majesty. What was his mother’s real fear about the color red? His great-great grandfather was distracted by a red banner while he was alone in the African forest performing an initiation ritual that was demanded by the village when a boy his age reached puberty. Upon investigation, he was seized by a band of slave hunters who shipped him to the Americas and until slavery ended all of his descendants were born slaves. After many unsuccessful attempts he was finally freed in the Civil War when he joined the Union Army.

His mother had never told him the story but he felt that she may have been holding back for another reason, as well. She did not want her son to stick out in the racist South wearing loud, bright colors, so she never encouraged it. For Mr. Higgins red is a color that "represents a direct connection to my past" (131). The color red is represented in each flag of every African country.

What makes Mr. Higgins so successful as a photographer is his ability to capture the Spirit of his subjects from the famous i.e., Susan Taylor, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Queen Afua to the unknown i.e., Muslim young lady in Brooklyn and the high voodoo priestess’ hands.

Chester Higgins, Jr. is a Spirit filled man who has had powerful visions in his life that have given him confirmation along the way that what he is doing is right. He believes in ritual and his life has been filled with it. From the child minister preaching to the masses on Sunday, to the young photographer making photos of the Civil Rights movements and the special people in his life, to the father taking his son through a rite of passage in Egypt, to the grandfather passing the granddaughter over his mother’s grave, to the husband getting married at his favorite uncle’s grave site. His camera is his ritual and his calling was not to lead the flock in church but for Chester Higgins to "set out to record all things dear in the life and culture of people of African descent—the same people to whom I had once ministered". How did Mr. Higgins become a Spirit Catcher? Because the Spirit won’t be denied and what he captures in his subjects is only a reflection of him. It takes one to know one.


Interview with Chester Higgins Jr.
Brenda D. Glassé, July 06, 2006

Talking with Chester Higgins, Jr. is just like talking to an old Spirit and just like Spirit, Mr. Higgins is present at all times and knows just what he is here for.

I had the good fortune to spend the day with and interview Mr. Higgins, Jr. as he prepared for his assignment at the MSNBC studios in Secaucus, New Jersey for the New York Times. A staff photographer for the New York Times since the mid 1970’s, he likes the daily challenge of going "up against what is visually appealing." (Video, Dr. Roscoe C. Brown, Jr., interviewer)

Mr. Higgins is a dynamo. At sixty years young I could hardly keep up with him as we dashed across Fifty-Sixth Street to the Daheesh to see a movie on Napolean in Egypt, which was our next to last stop of the day before returning back to Brooklyn. The last stop was picking up his wife.

He greeted me at the door with red socks on against white slacks which later became a white suit. I was tempted to ask him about the red socks but it was better that I discover it in his memoirs. We did several things that day starting with lunch on Layfayette Avenue in Brooklyn, dropping in to a photography studio in Forest Hills, Queens to pick up prints, visiting a gallery in midtown Manhattan to drop off the prints and to another gallery to look at his work on a photo exhibit about love. We then went to an Egyptian restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen to sit and talk over chai tea and a very delicious appetizer and from there to Secaucus, New Jersey for the photo shoot.

Mr. Higgins like his first mentor, P.H. Polk, makes photography look effortless. He unpacked and packed his equipment so efficiently and the photo shoot, which was done in several locations in the studio, was seamless. The photos which he showed me were phenomenal, catching every facial expression of Keith Oblermann from the program, Countdown. The entire time he was talking and laughing with Mr. Oblermann keeping him relaxed and at ease. Before we actually got inside the studio he bonded with the security woman who was initially taken aback when he told her that he knew what part of Africa that her ancestors were from. She had very distinct features which allowed him to make that determination. Interestingly, when we reached the second guard he had very similar features.

Chester Higgins, Jr. has a way of bonding with people because although the security guard was seemingly put off by his observation, by the time we left they were joking and laughing together. She was waiting for him to return from the studio so that they could talk further. He gave her his postcard photo of a Ghanaian king, the Asantehene, or King of the Asante (Ashanti), as she talked about a girlfriend who was also from Ghana. Both amicable and gregarious it’s understandable why people connect to him.

Readers, please permit me to introduce you to Mr. Chester Higgins, Jr.

Q: Which of your books was most celebrated by the media?
A: Feeling the Spirit. It resonated because of the art and it showed the larger immigrant Black population but did not sell well because Black people are conflicted about their heritage. Non-Blacks appreciated the travel value of it. It was an economic issue because the book was priced at $50. We did everything to create the best product and the publisher went out of its way to promote the book, but it did not receive the response that I expected. Today, on the rare-book market, it sells for $100.

Q: Which book was the most rewarding?
A: All of my books are rewarding for different reasons, i.e. Elder Grace is an extension of love for my favorite aunt and uncle; Black Women I paid homage to the women that I grew up with especially my mother, grandmother and aunts; Drums of Life is the follow up to my Black Women book; and Echo of the Spirit is my memoir and about the process of photography and so on.

Q: When did you know that you were the Spirit Catcher?
A: The Spirit inserted itself into my life in a vision in the middle of the night. What we see is not everything. Spirit is underlying. In order to capture Spirit you can’t humanize or egotize feelings and emotions. Spirit never dies, it resides in everybody and everything, existing within its vibration. Always manifesting itself the Spirit shows up inside everything and everybody, and whenever I make photographs, I try to capture the signature of the Spirit.

Q: Do you make pictures of someone whose Spirit is low. If you liken Spirit to light. What happens when someone’s Spirit is dull like a 40 watt-bulb instead of 75 or 100 watts?

A: My job is to observe. I accept the reality of things and do not judge, to observe clearly without judgment. "Value judging" offends. I try not to have an agenda. I strive for clarity so that each day is not a waste of time.

Q: If you could no longer take photos what would you do?
A: I would write.

Q: If time and money was no object how would your life change?
A: I’d leave New York and travel extensively to different parts of the world. I would rotate my living spaces from Egypt to the Sudan, to Ethiopia in East Africa and to the West Coast of Africa, from Ghana, Mali, and Senegal and to Brazil in South America and, of course, New York.

Q: What do you suggest as a way to get started in photojournalism?
A: Find out who the (editors) gatekeepers are in media or electronic media where you want to have your work appear. Show them your work, which represents your skills and passion. Find out if they have ideas and needs that you can do for them. You must convince them to the value of your ideas and ask that they consider you for future assignments.

Q: Do you have any formal training in photography?
A: No, in the late 60s there were no schools for photography. I trained my eye through mentoring. Some of my mentors were Arthur Rothstein, Ansel Adams, Romare Bearden, Gordon Parks. My first mentor was P.H. Polk the only photographer at Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, and the official photographer for Booker T. Washington. From each of them I learned some of the following techniques: mastering techniques, esthetic vocabulary, and marketplace of photographic ideas. The mentors were experts that you could ask questions or could refer you to someone who could answer your questions, write a recommendation for a grant, pay you to do a job or invite you and your family over for dinner. I went to lectures to hear seasoned photographers and their talks validated what I was doing. They helped to operationalize the photography process and of then, of course, there is the final product.

Q: Where did you get your inspiration to become a photojournalist?
A: When I became politicized. During the Civil Rights movement Black people were projected in the media as thugs, rapists and murderers. A camera held potential to correct those negative images projected by the media. I learned to be adept and competitive in New York where those negative images were given in daily doses. That is where I wanted to make change in New York City and what better place than the New York Times where I had the audience and credibility. I thought that I would be more effective as a photojournalist on the inside than a complainer on the outside. The mass media images from Katrina depicting people of color, is a reminder that the fight against images of marginalization is still one that must be fought and eventually won.

Q: Do you have siblings?
A: I was the only child for fourteen years and then my mother and stepfather had three more children.

Q: When you make pictures of an African Chief, a voodoo priestess, or other sacred people what is the process?
A: Getting access to the person is problematic because they are protected and because you have to create a bond with their staff before you can just walk in and start making pictures. You have to let them know that you like them, respect them and will portray them in the best light.

Q: How long did it take to make the picture of the Ghanaian king, on your postcard, or the voodoo Priestesses hands that are exhibited at the "Engulfed in Katrina" exhibit at the Nathan Cummings Foundation?
A: It took four years to bond with the king and five years working among the Asante to make the picture. There were about twenty people in his entourage at the photo shoot to protect him, the sacred stool, and all of his gold jewelry. My son was the only person assisting me and he handled the lighting. Making a picture of the Priestesses hands took a few days. You have to let people know you appreciate them and that you are on their side.

Q: Do you teach photography anywhere?
A: No. In the early 1970s I taught at NYU. Now, I give lectures about my photography in settings similar to the ones that I went to when I was learning photography.

Q: Have you made the shift to digital cameras and what was it like?
A. Yes, now I only use digital but I was the last person on the New York Times staff to change from film to digital. Digital cameras cannot offer depth but you can use light to give the effect of depth.

Q: How many pictures do you make for one subject?
A: Until I have it. Until I have captured its Spirit and represented the subject in a compelling way.

Q: What do you do at the New York Times?
A: My schedule is from Sunday through Thursday and I either have one assignment or sometimes two assignments a day and I write articles for my Lens series in Wednesday’s Metro section.

Q: Do you watch television?
A: Mostly news, including French news. I also like to look at www.watchingamerica.com and www.alternet.org because it is good to see how other cultures look at us. I will also watch Boston Law, the Sopranos, Gray's Anatomy, and with my wife, Desperate Housewives.

Q: What websites do you go to for photography?
A: I am interested in the business of photography so I look at www.pickphoto.com which talks about the changing business trends in photography and www.pdnonline.com for colorful stories about the latest visual trends in photography.

Q: What do you do for fun?
A: Hang out with my bride, listen to music, read, do yoga and travel.

Q: What is your logo and what does it mean?
A: It is the Egyptian eye traveling on a cosmic sailboat looking for the eye of the spirit. It is cruising on the cosmic wind stalking the spirit of things that exist.

Q: Do you have any rituals?
A: I study world religions, culture and Egyptology. Maintaining a real relationship with my wife, my children, and my stepdaughter is important. I stay focused, constant, and disciplined and do all that it takes to make those things happen.

Q: What you working on now?
A: I have an ongoing project about the evolution of religions. The inventors of religion are Africans. I am a student of Egyptology, which is a nature-based theology system. The evolution has gone from the naturalism of African belief systems to sacred ancient Egyptian Religion to Judiac, Christianity and Islam.

Q: Where do you see photojournalism going in five to ten years?
A: For the past decade, photojournalism seems to be experiencing a shrinking market in the print world. I see a lot more journalism on the web, in photographers’ websites of web magazine sites. Photographers are still in love with the need to tell the story in photographs, but the delivery systems have changed. It is so expensive to make a magazine survive in the marketplace. Television eclipsed magazines and now the web is even eclipsing television. Photojournalism will always have its appeal, but can you make a living at it, is the question. Answering that question and finding a way to make it pay for itself, is the challenge.

Works Cited: Higgins, Jr., Chester. Echo of the Spirit. Japan: Doubleday, 2004

MY PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECTS
Brenda D. Glassé
Photojournalism Final Project
Prof. Mel Rosenthal
Summer 2006
- Brenda D. Glassé  09/12/2006
See MAGAZINE LAYOUT Concerned Photographer AT:
http://www.chesterhiggins.com/magazine_layouts.html

The International Center of Photography, (ICP) New York City
Fall 1995 Exhibition of 'Feeling the Spirit'
Interviewed by the Director, Willis Hartshorn

Welcome to ICP’s Fall Programs — our twenty-first consecutive year of exhibition and education offerings. This year, as in the past, the schedule is filled with the diversity and breath of programs that speak to the richness of the world of photography.

This October, ICP will host a major exhibition and a series of educational programs surrounding the work of Chester Higgins Jr. It is ICP’s honor to feature this highly regarded photojournalist and his vibrant portrait of African identity. Through photographs, Chester tells the story of the life and times of people of African descent, dispersed throughout the world. I took the opportunity to catch up with Chester on a humid day in July to discuss his life-long photographic project. It is always revealing to talk with Chester, for his enthusiasm is captivating and inspirational.

WILLIS HARTSHORN: All your work shares the universal themes of respect, reverence and spirituality. Yet throughout the world we witness so many injustices. Could you talk about the internal and external forces that have guided your career in photography?

CHESTER HIGGINS JR: I began photographing in my hometown in Alabama. When I was coming of age politically, I found that the portrayals of my community in the media were one-dimensional. What I saw was limited and biased — images of my people that were pathological or showed those on the fringes of society. We are human, and as humans, we share all the many different manifestations of life.

At the time I was coming to grips with this discrepancy, I was trying to figure out what my participation in the civil rights movement would be. I was not a soldier of the civil rights movement, so to speak — I was not the person going in front of cops, but I knew I wanted to be a participant. At Tuskegee University I had the good fortune to meet the photographer, P. H. Polk. His work showed me what photography could be — that it could give me the ability to make pictures that were never represented in the media. When I first realized this, I did not intend to make a statement about African Americans. But by photographing my community — at home and at school — I got involved in all of our lives, and all of our lives were about civil rights.

WH: It is revealing that your interest in photography grew from you desire to participate in the civil rights movement, a movement in part sustained through the power of media images. How useful is photography in correcting a biased, often negative image of African Americans?

CH: Civil rights was the catalyst that started me photographing. Photography came into my life as I was becoming more and more aware that one did not have to accept racism — one could fight it. I began to see photography as a vehicle for my own personal growth.

Because it is a universal language, photography presents information to which people can immediately respond. As such, photography was the perfect medium for me to communicate with both the black and white communities — to be a connector, a bridge. I search for images that show the decency, dignity and virtuous character of my people — images that reflect moments of solace. It’s almost like using the photograph as a sanctuary.

WH: Your perspective is unique, because I think that typically people feel that the best way to rectify a wrong is to show images of violation…images that are negative. Yet, you have taken the position of showing photographs that project positive images. And you have been working over many decades, through which there was a period of great optimism and now a period of increased pessimism and concern over what was and is racism in our country. Why do you choose to take that positive point of view and ignore the more violent and oppressive things that are going on?

CH: Because the positive in the African American community is not being looked at enough I concentrate on what is neglected and goes unseen. I am not needed to tell the negative part of the story because so many people tell it so well. The negative point of view has a purpose, as does the positive. The negative can encourage humanitarians to make change. But I believe that real, lasting change comes from within. I want to provide a positive model — to show what can be and inspire change from within.

It’s important to understand the limits of constantly exhibiting violent or oppressive situations in a community. At some point it can create paralysis. It can discourage people by making them feel emotionally overwhelmed and unequipped to remedy a situation. Too often people are defined by their condition and their humanity is overlooked.

I believe freedom comes from within.

Oppresses people can only be freed by themselves. We have to determine how to take complete responsibility for our actions and how to find renewal within our own individual psyche. In my work, I look for positive reinforcing models. I’m saying look here are some examples — ordinary people living ordinary lives but they have an extraordinary sense of who they are and what they are about. Salvation has to come from the people. The people must see themselves as a means of their own deliverance.

WH: This is an incredibly complex project. It’s taken 26 years?

CH: Yes. 26 years. And it will take the rest of my life.

WH: You’ve taken this journey. It’s no longer just in Tuskegee, and it’s no longer just in New York, it’s all over the world. You have said that your goal is to pull together a collective portrait that captures the essence of the African and human personality. What made you decide on this?

CH: Because it doesn’t exist. Taking on a challenge that is immensely rewarding to me. I see a vacuum in need of filling. It is important that African Americans have some sort of connection to who we are and what our potential can be. With my camera I have tried to reconnect the world of diaporan Africans with continental Africans.

With a knowledge of what our culture has accomplished historically, we can begin to see ourselves within a timeline — to learn to put into perspective the period of bondage. I am simply reconnecting African people — telling a new story of an ancient people.

WH: How do you think people respond to pictures that show a more positive view of life and strength within the community?

CH: Among African American people, the response is a feeling of enhanced self-esteem. The positive image becomes an lighthouse on the horizon. Among European Americans, I think these positive images can reveal something that they may never have thought of when considering African people. I believe this new information can affect our awareness of each other and ourselves. It can make the whole act of living — what I call the whole genius of living — a little more exciting and show that even though we may be different, we are still very much alike.

WH: How has this photographic project changed the way you perceive yourself and your community?

CH: It has broadened my view of myself — forced me to see beyond my neighborhood, my city, my country. I appreciate our world community; we African Americans are members of the larger African Diaspora. When I travel to Africa, I see people who truly have a sense of themselves, not because they’re black but because they know their Africanness. By showing this whole African world, I hope to broaden our sense of the world — to show the African personality unfettered by American racism. We’re all in need of replenishing. We’re all in need of positive inspiration. You know, life is short, too short. Happiness is hard to come by. But skills and awareness can make life better and encourage new young minds to continue to explore and discover their identity.

WH: Thank You.

Educational Programs
In Conversation

In Conversation is a three-part series of dialogues which celebrates the extraordinary vision of people of African descent and is held in conjunction with the exhibition, Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa, by Chester Higgins Jr.

In what ways does religion serve to link people of African descent? What common threads are woven through this fabric of spirituality? How is the image of women of color shaped by men and society? Who defines the image of African Americans and how do these definitions serve to maintain the status quo?

1. Mirror of African Spirituality
2. Redefining the Image of a People
3. Imaging Women: Female representation
- Willis Hartshorn  10/28/1995
See MAGAZINE LAYOUT AT:
http://www.chesterhiggins.com/magazine_layouts.html


Cassie Baum
African-American Art History
Lafayette College
December 1, 2003

Chester Higgins, Jr. is a contemporary, well-known and established African-American artist who currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. Along with being a photographer (which is what he is most well known for), Higgins is also a recognized author and speaker. He has composed numerous photo collections, is a staff photographer for the New York Times with featured photographs in several acclaimed magazines and newspapers, has displayed exhibitions in many museums including the Smithsonian Institution and is a recipient of a number of awards. Higgins is also a member of the influential and prevailing Authors Guild. He has offered his expertise and opinion in photography as well as world events and issues on many television shows including “Eyewitness News.” Curiously, his education consisted of obtaining a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Management from Tuskegee University in Alabama. His main focus in his photography is humanity and the origin of human decent mainly from the African culture. Although the subject matter of his photographs includes people of all races, his underlying theme that runs throughout his portfolio is the connection with humans and African roots. His photographic philosophy is that the photograph reflects the photographer and the photographer should go about taking pictures in a way that allows his or her personality to show through, no matter what the subject matter is. Higgins’ self-proclaimed mission to being a photographer is “to show the decency, dignity, and virtuous character of people of African descent.” The major theme that runs throughout his photographic portfolio is the attempt to illustrate and accurately document the African Diaspora.

Chester Higgins, Jr. has many influences that come through in his work and his art. He has mentored in photography under numerous acclaimed photographers including P. H. Polk from 1967 to 1969, Arthur Rothstein from 1969 to 1978, Cornell Capa from 1970 to 1980 and Gordon Parks from 1971 to 1980. He has also mentored in art under the contemporary African American artist, Romare Bearden from 1972 to 1980. In his photographic projects, Higgins has been inspired by many subjects and images that reflect his universal and worldly interests. These inspirations not only hold true to his philosophy of portraying the African in an earnest and positive light, but also draw references to many other walks of life. His most recent project, titled “Elder Grace” completed in 2000, is a portrait of numerous elderly women and men who, according to Higgins, “are beacons, in my mind--perhaps even national treasures, which we as a society need not only to appreciate and applaud, but to study and emulate.” One of his earliest projects, titled “Drums of Life” from 1974 is a powerful collection of photographs, which tells the narrative of the black man, as well as brings out the personality of Higgins himself. In this compilation, Higgins portrays the relationship between black men through their interactions with each other, their environment, their families and their own individuality. Although barely any of the pictures contains a drum in it, Higgins sees the drum as an ever-present force that connects the people in his portraits to the feelings he is trying to portray. He states, “I see the Drum as the number one spiritual mover in the universe. It has always been a dominant force in the heritage and culture of Black folks. Because of its force, we move to its power as it permeates our whole being. The life force, that ability to touch everything with power and love is what I celebrate in the lives of the Black men in this book.” This connecting “force” (although not always in the form of a drum) is a constant theme in Higgins’ work. Higgins states that his artistic goal is to “share this vision of African peoples and to highlight our extraordinary and remarkable cultures and traditions, similarities and differences that deserve celebration and have been the stimulus driving my photography for the past three decades.” One of his biggest influences, or rather agents of curiosity is the way in which people interact with each other and the subsequent attitude that comes forth in their presence from this interaction.

One specific portfolio that Higgins has accumulated in his career that I feel is especially interesting as well as reflective upon the artist’s personal philosophy is his collection titled “Vital Forms.” This is a compilation of photographs of the beauty and form of the African female body. This includes many nude images, close-ups on specific parts of the body, and pictures of the body adorned with African jewelry. In these pictures, the body is a very dark, almost indistinguishable shape against stark white and gray backgrounds. Two photographs that I particularly find fascinating as well as representative of this body of work are “Diva” and “Repose.” The picture “Diva” is that of a black woman, sitting with her hands wrapped around her knees that are bent against her chest. Although this image is placed against a white background, there is a strong use of shading, which makes the body appear mysterious and statuesque. Her eyes are closed in a calm, pensive way with her chin pointed upward which gives the woman a confident and almost regal appearance. In the picture “Repose,” Higgins creates a more abstract image of the female form. He uses an eye-level perspective looking directly at the head of a woman lying down with her body behind her. Her shoulders and breasts are silhouetted against the background, creating an almost non-human shape. There is a slight source of light that comes from the right illuminating the woman’s body in just the way to identify the image as a human form. As in “Diva,” the face of the woman is tranquil and strong, evoking dignity and assurance in her pose. Higgins uses these images to portray women and the female body in a positive and powerful light. He idolizes them and places them on an iconic, goddess-like level.

Through his previous as well as his most recent work, Chester Higgins, Jr. has proven to be a permanent fixture in the history of contemporary American art. His positive philosophy on the way one views the world has and will forever be a major influence on future artists and audiences alike. Because of his strong and sincere beliefs in what he values as beautiful, powerful and important in life, Higgins has the staying power and the credentials to become an artist that will be studied in American and African-American art history books for many years to come.


- Cassie Baum  12/09/2003
Critical Reactions to the books, Black Woman and Drums of Life

(The New York Times, 16 June 1974).

Black Woman: "has a charm of its own…Yet while the subject is black womanhood, its appeal is not exclusively to black women, or black men. Not only are Higgins’s subjects vibrantly alive, his casual images intensely felt and spontaneous, but the book reveals much about being a woman — and indirectly, about being a man — of any color in America today. Higgins has something to say to all of us." (The New York Times, 01 January 1970). Drums Of Life: "Higgins makes a positive, universal and artistic statement about black men…In the faces of his old men, wisdom shines like sunbeams." (Washington Post, 08 August 1974), "Drums…picture blacks in a variety of life-styles and stations of life. The beauty, majesty and mystique of a baby at the moment of birth and the melancholy and gloom of the bereaved at a funeral. In between, black celebrities, politicians and ordinary folk are seen with their families or at work. One section of the book has caught the elderly with faces that bespeak wisdom and an eternity of life experiences." (The New York Times, 14 June 1974). "In his new book…he extends significantly the personal documentation he began with his first book…Higgins is essentially a portraitist, carefully tuned to the nuance of gesture, expressions and body language, alert to the dynamics and rhythms of group interactions. Almost infallibly, Higgins particularizes his subjects and affirms their individuality; in images involving more than one person he is adept at describing relationships. These are emotional images, not at all dispassionate, but the photographer rarely slips into sentimentality or cliché. Nor does he force his subjects, or his images, to fit into a single overriding visual style. The consistency of these photographs is not one of graphics but rather of gentleness, warmth and precise responsiveness to the uniqueness of human beings."

(The New York Times, 16 June 1974).
- The New York Times  06/05/2003
See MAGAZINE LAYOUT Visual Revelation AT: http://www.chesterhiggins.com/magazine_layouts.html Profile of Chester Higgins By Sarah Barrick... Upon first meeting Chester Higgins, he was wearing a cream suit with a blue shirt, a red beret and a pair of funky tennis shoes. Though the time was approaching for him to begin his lecture at the Atlanta History Museum, he took a moment to introduce himself to those in the front row. With the appearance of a confident African American male, I expected a firm handshake and a strong voice. His handshake was one of incredible strength, but his voice was soft and friendly. While he was being introduced, he took a seat next to his granddaughter and gave her a small gift from his pocket. It appeared that his entire family had come to hear him share his work with others.

As Higgins began to speak, after an impressive introduction, it was clear to me that he was a citizen of the world. After growing up in a small town of 600 in Alabama, his travels have taken him all over Africa, Central America, and South America. On these travels he created a collection of photographs now published in a book entitled; Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa. He shared these images with us and explained them with a clear knowledge of every place he had visited. Though Higgins is most well known for his three decades of photo journalistic work for the New York Times, I take him to be not only a photographer, but a historian and anthropologist as well.

Though inspired by his travels, Higgins refers often to the importance of his experiences as a child. He attended segregated schools in the south and drew inspiration from his teachers, older relatives, and all the heroes and martyrs revealed to him through these people. His career in photojournalism grew out of his student years at Tuskegee University in Alabama during the late 1960’s. The civil rights movement kindled a political sense of purpose that became entwined in Higgins’ artistic expression.

Higgins proclaims that most of his work is focused on the goal of making a visual record of the life and times of people of African descent. His mission is to combat stigmatized images that neglect to show decency, dignity and character in the experience of people of color. He agrees with me that in true form, he is a cultural anthropologist with a camera. Upon first visiting Africa, Higgins remarks that he was "..full of anticipation. Finally, I was to discover for myself the parallel black reality I had long nourished in my imagination. I was exhilarated at suddenly finding myself in the majority" (Higgins 2000).

Though Higgins is known for this plight for African Americans, I think it is important to reveal that he is interested in people of various cultural backgrounds. His latest book, Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging, is a collection of images of people who had to meet a set of specific guidelines. All of his subjects had to be over 70 years old with white hair. The most important prerequisite for his models was that they were required to have a countenance of dignity in their spirit and mental awareness in their eyes, or as Higgins put it: "Their eyes had to be connected to their minds." Higgins created a vast collection of photographs of people from various cultural and religious backgrounds who met this criteria. Unfortunately, because of his established reputation as an African American photographer as well as a photographer whose goals are associated with representing African Americans, the only publisher willing to produce Elder Grace required that the book was to only include his images of African Americans.

This is very disappointing, especially because of the fact that the images Higgins captured for "Elder Grace" were meant to deal with issues of aging and societal representations of the elderly, not of African Americans. This censorship of his photography is intolerable. He is not strictly a photographer of African Americans. He is a photographer of the world who makes a strong connection to individuals of various ages, backgrounds, and cultural identities.

Another fault in how Higgins is represented by others is of special concern to me. It seems to be ill mentioned that his photography is art, not just a political statement. The art aspect of his work seems only to be addressed by Higgins himself. While describing his "Elder Grace" imagery to the audience, it became clear to me that he paid attention to detail. Higgins has a very set way of making his photographs. Whenever possible, he is committed to as little manipulation as possible. Being introduced to me before his lecture as a ‘future photographer,’ Higgins addressed me while speaking of how he changed a woman’s hair before photographing her. He told me as though he felt guilty for altering the scene. Whenever possible, Higgins moves around his subjects and often speaks to them while photographing to make them feel more comfortable and to create a situation in which he is able to capture their inner light.

Higgins uses Ilford film and shoots mostly with a Nikon. His equipment is not important to him in comparison to his vision. He thinks of the eye as a muscle which must remain in a constant state of training. He is a down to earth photographer who often works and travels with his family. For Elder Grace, his wife interviewed each of his subjects and his son worked as his lighting technician. Before the publication of his book, Higgins selected phrases from his wife’s interviews which he thought to be the best representation of character of each of his subjects. These phrases and quotations accompany the images in the book, Elder Grace, which also includes a forward by Maya Angelou.

I am compelled to remain focused on the stereotype that has been placed on Chester Higgins and his work. While conducting further research on Higgins, the general focus of his career on African Americans became a greater realization. Though Higgins receives acknowledgment from and is able to exhibit at places such as the Smithsonian Institution and the New-York Historical Society, his work is most often shown at museums that have a marked focus on African Americans. I wonder why his images are never shown in a gallery setting. Perhaps this is an issue of Higgins’ supposed, intended audience.

Higgins creates dramatic and dynamic imagery which attests to his ability to captivate the viewer into making a connection with the subject. His work goes beyond being aesthetically pleasing, as I have mentioned before. For this reason, I believe fully that Higgins’ work should be shown in museums and historical societies, but I wonder why they couldn’t be equally appreciated on the walls of contemporary galleries. This issue of intended audience makes reference to a contemporary critic’s view of the gallery world: When these perceived characteristics of gallery audiences and spaces are combined with the "educated" gallery-goer’s expectation that modern art will provide her/him with a "purely" aesthetic experience, there is little likelihood that gallery audiences expect or are willing to participate in a communal experience that demands they rethink social categories...(Grover).

As Grover addresses, there is an existing stereotype that "gallery-goers" are not capable of thought beyond formal aesthetics. This assumption is insulting and ignorant. There is a much stronger focus on conceptual ideas and social issues within the walls of contemporary galleries than many critics believe.

Those who visit galleries are just as capable as those who visit museums and historical societies of "rethinking social categories." Higgins presents the ability to do so with his illustrious and beautiful images of the elderly. He challenges social and commercial stereotypes, which suggest that signs of aging must be masked and youthful beauty must be maintained. Higgins believes that the lines on our faces tell a story of wisdom and experience. With the use of lighting that creates a tactile, sensual feeling, Higgins captures the beauty of the aging body in subtle details.

While exploring the differences between gallery and museum settings, I was confronted by another issue. Though it seems to be assumed that those visiting a museum will have either prior or provided knowledge of the work they're viewing, it seems important to establish the fact that this depends on the museum being visited. Establishments labeled as museums may not necessarily provide their visitors with information from an educated staff. Even so, a knowledgeable staff does not ensure an unrestricted view of what is on display. It is important to understand, that no matter how many facts we are provided with, we are still, to some notable level, locked into our own cultural views.

Museums in the past were supported by the wealthy and displayed only those things that promoted their views. Museums today must strive to move past this history and represent objects and images in a non-biased light. This does not, however, mean presenting them strictly as art objects. Cosmopolitan museums often encounter this problem, while some smaller cultural centers find a successful balance and are able to embody challenges to authority from ethnic, local, and regional sources.

Because my focus here is primarily on Higgins, I decided to ask him whether he preferred galleries or museums. Because of my confusion towards his intended audience, I wanted to know if his work was shown mostly in museums at his request. Chester explained to me that he prefers museums: "They often times offer the ability to do a solo show on your own works. At other times their curators have ideas to build a show that highlights the seminal importance of photography. They sometimes have a production budget that allows you to make great prints and not worry about the cost. Generally, their shows often last longer, so one hopes to reach a larger audience."

These factors of focus, time, and budget are properly considered by Higgins. His aversion to galleries is based purely on business reasons. He seems more concerned with sharing his work and the importance of photography with as many people as possible, regardless of the politics of the venue.

I take this research and the simple answer I received to my question of intended audience as a lesson. While the local galleries that I'm accustom to visiting provide the community with a variety of contemporary art work, they are limited in their ability to present me with everything I am interested in absorbing. Higgins has taught me to keep this in mind. I must seek out artwork in all venues by keeping my eyes open and active in order to discover other artist's work as well as my own.

Selected Bibliography

Barrick, Sarah K. E-mail interview of Chester Higgins. Atlanta, Georgia, 17 November 2002.

Grover, Jan Zita. "Dykes in Context: Some Problems in Minority Representation." The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography. (1989): 163-203.

Higgins, Chester. "Through the Camera." Aiken Lecture at the Atlanta History Center, 9 October 2002.

Higgins, Chester. "Pilgrimage to the Past." Archaeology 53 (2000): 3-4.

Karp, Ivan, Steven D. Lavine. eds. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Smithsonian Institution, 1991.

Keller, Judith. "Divine Works in Progress: The Elder Grace of Chester Higgins JR." Aging Today 47 (2000): 17-18.

Rexer, Lyle. "Chester Higgins Jr.’s Photographs: A Closer Look at Age," New York Times, 25 February 2001, sec. 1D, p. 2.
- Sarah Barrick  06/05/2003
CURRENT BIOGRAPHY/ June 2002

Chester Higgins Jr. Nov. 1946 Photographer; writer Address: The New York Times , 229 W. 43d St., New York, NY 10036-3959

I'm a cultural anthropologist with a camera . . . Chester Higgins Jr. told a writer in an interview that appeared on the Web site abesha.com‘ You know when you write something it's– limited to the language that you write in, whereas photographs, it's not limited to English speakers, French speakers, Luciphone speakers, Amharic speakers . . . everyone knows what a photograph is.

Higgins has been a staff photographer for The New York Times since 1975. He has five books of photography to his–credit: The Black Woman (1970), of Life (1974),–Some Time Ago: A Historical Portrait of Black Americans–1850-1950 (1980), Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for– the People of Africa (1994), and Elder Grace: The Nobility of– (2000)--all of which explore and celebrate, in different–ways, African-American or African heritage, culture, and identity.

Higgins's photographs have appeared in Art News, New York Times Magazine , Newsweek , Fortune , Essence , Archaeology in addition to the New York Times Chester Archer Higgins Jr. was born in November 1946 in Lexington, Kentucky, and grew up in New Brockton, Alabama. He was raised by his mother, Varidee Loretta Young Higgins Smith, and his stepfather, Johnny Frank Smith. In 1970 he graduated from Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), in Tuskegee, Alabama, with a bachelor's degree in business management. While an undergraduate at Tuskegee, Higgins was Mentored by P. H. Polk, the school's official photographer; Polk gave Higgins lessons in photography and interested him in his African-American heritage.

Higgins told Clarence Peterson for the Chicago Tribune (December 4, 1980), I became a photographer in 1967 because there were things I thought should be appreciated that were not being seen, and I figured they would only be seen if I went out and shot them.

Some of his first pictures were of his great-aunts and great-uncles. In 1968, around the time that Higgins bought his first camera, there were civil rights protests by black students at Tuskegee, and Higgins documented the event, compiling his photographs under the title , Student Unrest at Tuskegee Institute.

After graduation–Higgins was in New York showing some of his pictures to various magazine editors when he met Arthur Rothstein, then director of photography at magazine.– Rothstein became another mentor to Higgins, who discovered, at this time, the work of such master photographers as Alfred Stieglitz , Henri Cartier- Bresson , and Gordon Parks.

In 1970 magazine sent Higgins on his first assignment; his job– was to follow and photograph a young civil rights leader named Jesse Jackson as he toured various cities and gave speeches. Higgins was quoted in The New York Times (June 9,1996) as–saying, It got so I could predict how the audience was going to react at a particular moment in the speech, so I could pick a face and be ready with my camera.

In 1970 Higgins published his first book of photographs, The Black Woman , as a response to the prevalence of–stereotyped and negative images of black women. He told Angela Terrell for the Washington Post August 8, 1974), danger of the media was that it could condition people's minds to what other people are supposed to be.

Drums of Life (1974), a follow-up to The Black Woman, features the–photographer's positive images of black men, with an accompanying text by the writer Orde Coombs. Much of Higgins's motivation was to help counterbalance what he saw as the dishonest fantasies in the common depictions of black men. Higgins commented to Terrell that he was interested in the need and desire to project black life, and in having viewers see that my life (the black man) is a full and natural life. In the book, Higgins showed black males as children, young adults, fathers, and husbands.

He worked as a part-time photography instructor at the New York University School of Fine Arts from 1975 to 1978 and took a job as a staff photographer at the New York Times in 1975. In the meantime he continued his artistic–quest to present more realistic images of blacks.

Higgins recalled to Jacqueline Trescott for the Washington–(December 16, 1980), A teacher of mine told me the–story of a man who used to read a bedtime story to his son about a fight between a man and a lion. The man always won and his son asked how that was so, since the lion was king of the jungle. And the father said the lion will win when he writes his own book.

In 1980 Higgins again wrote his own book: Some Time Ago: A Historical–Portrait of Black Americans 1850-1950. For this project Higgins–searched over the course of four years through more than 40,000 images--pictures that he found in places ranging from cigar boxes and old trunks to the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C., and the New York Public Library's Schomburg collection.

From these he culled 200 of his favorite photographs for his book, which contains no pictures taken by Higgins himself. Some Time– features the work of such famous photographers as Dorothea– Lange,Gordon Parks, and Walker Evans and includes pictures of famous African-Americans, including the abolitionist and women's rights activist Sojourner Truth, the singer Marian Anderson, and the educator Mary McLeod Bethune. There are also photographs of a barber and his customer, a chain gang, children at prayer, and the whip-scarred back of a man who lived during the era of slavery. Higgins told Clarence Peterson about the book.

Because the records are there, you can go back and see for yourself what people were doing, how they lived, and even how they withstood the conditions that were sometimes intolerable. It makes you feel good to see that, against all those odds, those people survived. And it gives you a sense of continuance, of belonging, that you're part of a long tradition.

Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of– Africa was the result of more than 25 years of Higgins's traveling– the world to take pictures that represent the African diaspora. This 303-page book captures in more than 200 photographs the traditions, spirituality, and daily lives of people of African heritage--everyone from tribal dancers in Mali, to voodoo practitioners in Haiti, to black Jews in the Harlem section of New York City, to Yoruba people worshipping in Brazil, to black men and women in rural Alabama.

Two major exhibits of Higgins's photographs from Feeling the Spirit followed the book's publication. One exhibit,– which shared the book's title, was held at the International Center of Photography, in New York; the other, organized by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, was titled Invoking the Spirit: Worship Traditions in the African World

The photographs include those of a Brooklyn man holding a Bible, a Ghanaian man blessing his son on a beach, a Mexican statue of a person with African features, the face of a Trinidadian schoolgirl, and a man resting in his boat on the Niger River in Mali, as well as the Door of No Return in Senegal, through which enslaved Africans were sent on ships to the Americas. Higgins told Diane M. Bolz for Smithsonian (Fall 1997), We are Africans not because we– are born in Africa, but because Africa is born in us.

He added, It's the people's characters themselves speaking through the film, through the lens, that tells the story. Eddy L. Harris reviewed Higgins's book for the New York Times (November– 20, 1994), writing, Feeling the Spirit is a beautiful book. It– is a big book of photographs, all of them in black and white, all of– them caught by Mr. Higgins's careful and patient eye. They are images that capture the sometimes difficult, sometimes joyous, sometimes painful, sometimes routine daily lives of black people everywhere.

Higgins's latest book of photography is Elder Grace: The– Nobility of Aging, which includes photographs from Higgins's– travelling exhibit of the same name. The book, with a foreword by Maya Angelou, contains 80 individual portraits of elderly African-Americans. Higgins's wife, Betsy Kissam who interviewed the subjects, supplied a quotation from each below his or her photograph.

Higgins told Lyle of The New York Times (February 25, 2001), want people to see my pictures and ask, How can I look like that when I get to be that age?' You can't deny the next day, so accept it, embrace it. wrote, Mr. Higgins has assembled a gallery of the beautiful, the pensive and the noble. . . . By lavishing attention on his subjects and by seeking to apprehend what he calls their shine, or inner light, he captures qualities that continue to make them physically attractive into late age: humor, elegance and dignity.

During the course of his career, Higgins has had one-man exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of African Art, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Schomburg Center, the Newark Museum, the National Civil Rights Museum, and the Field Museum of Natural History. His photographs have also been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, and in American embassy galleries around the world. They are included in the permanent collections of the New York Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and the Schomburg Center. For his photography Higgins has won a United Nations Award, an American Graphic Design Award, a Graphics Magazine Award, and an Art Directors Club of New–York Award. Higgins was the subject of the PBS film American Photographer: Chester Higgins Jr. , and his work has–aired on the Sunday Morning News,The News on PBS, and the ABC programs Like It Is, Freedom Forum .

He has received grants from the National–Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission. Higgins has lectured on photography at Harvard University and Dartmouth, and he did special photography for Gordon Park's film Shaft's Big Score (1972).

Higgins married and divorced Renelda Walker, with whom–he has a son, Chester III (also called Damani), and a daughter, Nataki. Higgins's second wife is Betsy Kissam, a magazine journalist. He lives in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York. -- C.F.T.

Suggested Reading:

Chicago Tribune I p13 Dec. 4, 1980,– with photo;

New York Times VII p13 Nov. 20, 1994, with– photos, C p6 Nov. 24, 1995, II p48 Feb. 25, 2001;

Washington– B p4 Dec. 16, 1980, with photos, C p1 Feb. 19,–

Who's Who Among African Americans 1998-99

=Selected Books:

Some Time Ago (1980),

Feeling the Spirit (1994),

Elder Grace (2000)
-   06/05/2003
The Gordon Park’s Legend Award To Chester Higgins, Jr. Presented by E. Ablorh-Odjidja The Exposure Group’s Sixth Annual Awards Dinner Marriot Wardman Park Hotel, Washington, D.C. June 21, 2002. "My first impression of Chester Higgins, Jr. was some 25 years ago when he sped down a flight of stairs in his brownstone house in Brooklyn to welcome me to his home.

I called his father, the late Chester Higgins, Sr. in Washington, DC, immediately after to complain about his son’s disregard for personal safety.

I said to Old Man Chester "one misstep on those steps, at that speed, and Chester, Jr. could have broken his neck."

Ladies and gentlemen, were I a good reader of character, I would have known at our first encounter that Chester’s speed and sure footsteps on the stairs were indications of confidence in his own abilities.

I would also have known that Chester had the assurance and the self-belief that would propel him to the top of his profession. All this escaped me back then as I spent time worrying about his neck.

Thank heaven I was wrong. Now after watching Chester’s artistic growth over a period of some 25 years, I think I know a little better. By virtue of a special brand of wisdom called "hindsight" I am now able to read the man I saw on the stairs many years ago.

There are great photographers. And there are great artists. But, there are very few who combine artistry with the intellectual vigor that Chester has shown throughout his career as a professional.

I speak for many in the African world today who are grateful for the way Chester has portrayed the African image.

I could tell you more about Chester’s achievements. I could also recall many of the missed opportunities on my part to grasp the essence of this artistic giant.

And I could tell you about some details of his trips to Ghana, and the great leaders, and grand occasions that were the subjects of his portfolio. Mandela, Mbeki, Annan, Powell -- The burial of the late Asantehene, and the coronation of his successor, the current King of the Ashantis of Ghana…The many sacred places that Chester has been with his camera -- places which very few privileged Africans have ever seen. I could tell you all that. But Chester warned me to make this speech short. So I shall rush on.

With "Elder Grace," my reaction was now Chester has really burst the envelope! To skip all these beautiful "young black, gifted men and women" to dwell on senior citizens for beauty, in an age that is obsessed with athletic bodies, does not make good sense. It is suicidal!

But, there I was again; worrying about Chester’s safety and not his art and his constant drive to create something sensible --- something meaningful – something that endures.

True to every project Chester has promised, he has each time gone on to produce a masterpiece. With " Elder Grace" he has transformed old age into a metaphor for beauty…Beauty as expressed by the artistry of a master photographer.

I call Chester a true patriot and a passionate lover of African heritage because his photographs on Africans wherever they are have left many with wonder and awe about the magnificence of that continent and its people.

Beauty, some say, is in the eye of the beholder. But that is an excuse for those who have not had the privilege of seeing Chester’s work. Work that is propelled by the greatest attribute of all, COURAGE.

The courage to create. The courage to negotiate those steps … the ability to maintain balance and perspective, and to survive in a field that is brutal in the selection of its heroes. This is what Chester has accomplished. The vast majority of us will accept beauty when it is presented by an artist with the courage to match his great talent. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Chester Higgins, Jr. "
- E. Ablorh-Odjidja  06/02/2003
Feeling The Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa

The photography of Chester Higgins Jr.

By Arnold J. Rampersad, literary scholar

The photographs seem to be extraordinarily evocative of the world explored by a wide variety of black writers and writers who have chosen Africa, the Caribbean, and African-America among the major settings of their work and among their major themes. The Photographs are human-centered at almost every point and almost every instance, whether we are seeing a solitary outline or the bent backs of worshipping men and women.

When the pictures are portraits of individuals, their quality of human centeredness is of course at the forefront of graphic activity, but the quality is just about everywhere. There are no lanquid landscapes here, that exist without relation to human beings, machine-scapes either. Always human beings hold the high ground of definition, and I take that in its most positive aspect to reflect the principal quality of the literature of Africa and the African diasporic world.

If we leave aside the reflections in these pictures of the worlds of African writers such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, we see the strong ways in which what we might call diasporic concerns are reflected. I am thinking of such writers as Braithwaite, Aimee Cesaire and Nicholas Guillen among the West Indians; Langston Hughes, John A. Williams and William A. Kelly and many others among African-Americans. The pictures call us to the world they have reproduced and made vivid, and to the fierce spirit of dignity, commonalty, traditionalism and progressivism that generally inspires their literary endeavor.

We don’t see images here of famine and misery, which seem in recent years to have become the main ways in which Africa and the diasporic world have been represented. On the other hand, there is very little that is mainly cosmetic here. This is a collective portrait of life as it is lived within the black world, in the face of sometimes adverse, more often joyous circumstances: the stuff of life itself. It is honestly reflective of the collective panorama of fiction and verse about the lives of black people. Indeed, more than simply reflecting, these pictures brilliantly illuminate the writings with which I am familiar.
- Arnold J. Rampersad  06/02/2003
See MAGAZINE LAYOUT Apertures AT: http://www.chesterhiggins.com/magazine_layouts.html NYU AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY INSTITUTE

 NATIONAL GRADUATE SEMINAR 1996

Chester Higgins Jr., Feeling the Spirit

Synopsis by Barbara Lucero Contreras

Prior to being hired as staff photographer for The New York Times in 1975, Chester Higgins Jr., had already started his exploration of African-American spirituality, which eventually led him across the U.S. and to more than 30 other countries. He produced a book based on this ongoing journey entitled Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa, published by 1994.

Animated and enthusiastic, Higgins infused the seminar room with energy. He invited participants to take a visual journey with him as he shared his historical knowledge and spiritual insight into the images from his book. He prefaced the presentation by explaining that he chose this mission of photographing "his people" because he wished to counteract the negative depictions of African-Americans in the media during the turbulent 1960s. It was his intent to help reinstate a sense of decency, dignity, and character to the body of African-American imagery. By visually exploring what he considered an area which lacked these qualities he hoped to inspire publishers to see something they had not seen before. This new vision could then contribute to a national debate about how we view people who are different from ourselves. From 1983 to 1994 he decided to fill gaps in this large body of work which encompassed 26 years of traveling and photographing in order to bring clarity of a diaspora of African people living on both sides of the Atlantic.

Having given us a historical, religious and spiritual perspective from which to view the images, Higgins set the stage for this inspirational journey of his connection to other people and cultures from many different parts of the world including the multicultural African-American communities right here in the United States. Many of these images were celebratory, depicting scenes of ritual, community activity and everyday life. Sometimes they conveyed the sense of sadness and tragedy of a people who have continued to endure in the face of great obstacles.

Higgins explained that he began each of his photographic journeys by arriving during times of celebrations and public festivals; this made entry into foreign environments easier. By doing a great deal of research prior to each trip he was able to foster acceptance of his presence. He gained approval for making photographs by speaking with community elders in as much of their local language as he could learn. He also made instant polaroids and gave them to key members of the community. Higgins pointed out that a non-judgmental attitude, faith, and an understanding of protocol was absolutely necessary to be successful in creating his work. He stated that he could not do this project alone. Two people are required to make the image: the subject and himself.

When asked what he looked for when creating images, Higgins responded that, "a sense of spirit-something invisible that connects who we are." He also stated that his intent was to elicit curiosity on the part of the viewer and that this quality made a successful photograph in his eyes.

In closing, Chester Higgins made a statement which affected me, and which I hope never to forget: When pushed further to discuss his commitment to photographing African people, he said his great-uncle had once told him that, "it is important to make a statement on life, or else you could very well die, undeclared."

Analysis by Glen Wilson

The role of the family photo album as a keeper of memory and as a primary tool in verying personal histories and narratives, reflects the resilience of our cultural belief in the photograph as an index of truth. The force with which images bind our stories together, provide missing links or evidence, and protect against the threat of erasure, is an indication of the photographer’s ability to function at the intersection of lived experience and constructed memory. With a strong and intuitive understanding of the photograph’s status in our culture, Chester Higgins has produced Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa as a record of his twenty-six year pursuit of an African diasporan family.

Beginning with his own family in the rural south, Higgins set out to make photographs reflecting "decency, dignity and character," elements which he felt were typically lacking in representations of black people. It is this conscious desire to represent, and Higgins’ awareness of his own subjectivity, that frames his visual investigations and raises interesting questions about his representations.

Following the format of the book, which is divided into eight chapters, including Most Ancient Place, Middle Passage, The Living Water, Sanctuaries, Spirituality, In Our Manner, Rites, and In Each Moment, Higgins presents his work within specific thematic concerns. Higgins’ photographic inquiring has prepared him to teach, a role he fulfills in sharing his work. At times the text functions as poetry inspired by the images; at other times the images seems to function as illustrations for lessons in natural theology, African transatlantic history, or religious syncretism.

Somewhat strategically, he organizes meaning around his images within a set of organic metaphors that reinscribing this perception? Is photography resonate with universal cultural ideas. For Higgins, water is a central metaphor. He describes this element in much the same way he might describe his encounters with the Nile or the Mississippi; it is "the confluence of the mystical, the divine, and the earthy." Employing such metaphors allows the artist to link the image of the House of Slaves on the island Goreé, off the coast of Senegal, to the image of two men making offerings to the Yoruba deity Yemenja on the coast at Coney Island in Brooklyn. People and places separated by oceans are connected through Higgins’ work; painful memory of the Middle Passage is recovered and a spiritual healing is offered.

Though his images appear to be spontaneous, whether isolating moments from elaborate ceremonies, or focusing the ritual on the everyday, Higgins has an evolved sense of process that relies upon building a rapport with his eventual subjects. He explains that much of the success of his images depends upon his ability to secure a relationship with members of the community that he is photographing. Before he photographs a community, he does research on the region’s particular history and cultural practices. While his project is one which seeks to explore the connections between Africans throughout the diaspora, this need to establish trust, and to build bridges, is an acknowledgement that Africa may not be constructed as a monolith. In this sense, his project is as much a process of recovering the full complexity of the global African presence as it is a search for unity or commonalty among people of African descent.

It is also a project of resistance, the creation of an imagery which disrupts not only the steady stream of negative images which have served to reinforce a typically pathological or exoticized construction of Africa and Africans, but likewise the tide of systematic erasures and denials which are a condition of European colonial memory. Much like historian Chiekh Anta Diop’s writings, Higgins’ imagery and the way in which he organizes meaning around it create a visual narrative that reinscribes the presence and connectedness of the African diaspora throughout North, South, and Central America, Europe, and the continent itself. Higgins is both a participant and an observer with a formalized visual code and system of symbols. Together his images tell multiple stories of struggle, survival, cultural resistance, and resilience.

Thus Higgins fuses two impulses in his work: the impulse to document and the impulse to construct a memory for the diaspora. Rooted alongside his many predecessors, such as James Van Der Zee, Richard Samuel Roberts, Gordon Parks and Eudora Welty, to name only a few, his documentary concerns are overtly interwoven with formal and thematic impulses. In his search, Higgins not only remembers, but constructs meaning and memory of a people from whom this was stripped.

Questions for further discussion:

How does this work intersect or diverge from the history of ethnographic or anthropological modes of representation, and the problems these modes imply? Is the effective use of text, and its interplay with the images part of this response? Given the historical colonial tendency to construct Africa as a monolith, how does one identify an African diaspora visually without the most useful medium in this project?


- Barbara Lucero Contreras  06/02/2003
See MAGAZINE LAYOUT AT: http://www.chesterhiggins.com/magazine_layouts.html Chester Higgins Jr.: A Study of Art and Politics Intertwined with Feeling the Spirit.

By Elizabeth Kissam
Cultural Studies, Duke University, 1995

Preface

In this study of a book of Chester Higgins Jr.’s. entitled Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa there might be some confusion in regards to my use of the author’s words. I would like to use this space to clarify this issue. Often I speak about the intent of the author, or quote or paraphrase his opinion without mentioning his book. In these situations I am using information obtained in an interview I conducted with the author. When I specifically mention his book I am quoting or paraphrasing from the text of his work.

Chester Higgins Jr.: A Study of Art and Politics Intertwined with Feeling the Spirit.

Numerous images of African-Americans, Africans, and black people living in many parts of the world are displayed on the pages of Chester Higgins Jr.’s book. The book is entitled Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa. Using his photography coupled with his text, Higgins intends to challenge the pervasive one-dimensional image of African-Americans in our society. His photographs depict black people engaged in many different everyday activities including child-rearing, swimming, bathing, or smiling. His intent is to use these images to create a multi-dimensional image of his people. An integral part of his message is that black people around the world should be proud of and claim their African heritage. The artist is using his control as a talented image maker to tell a story about his people which is often ignored or scorned.

Discussing this photographer only in terms of his political goals would be to perpetuate the one-sided images of black people that he has spent almost his whole life combating with his camera. Chester Higgins Jr. as a strong activist with pressing and important political goals is a significant cultural figure. On the other hand Higgins as a skillful photographer should not be overshadowed or buried by this former figure.

The use of the term ‘black photographer’ illustrates a trend in the discussion of the author’s work to overshadow the artistic merit of his photographs by emphasizing his political goals. The term works to marginalize Higgins’ art. It places him outside of the mainstream white photography world. In addition it devalues his skills as a photographer.

The author objects to the label and explains that the qualifier black, in the context of our society, is often used to shed negative light on the object that it is describing. This situation can be paralleled to the qualifier woman or lady. In our society woman and lady are signifiers for adjectives such as weak, feminine and sometimes stupid. It seems when people use such terms such as lady cop they are implying that it is necessary to denote that this cop is a woman because she is inferior to the men who hold her occupation. As with the word ‘woman’ many people in our society equate ‘blackness’ with inferiority so Chester as a ‘black photographer’ presents the same implications as the term ‘lady cop,."

In short the term ‘black photographer’ when applied to Higgins implies that as a photographer he in inferior. Furthermore because Higgins is inferior as a photographer the only aspect of his work worth discussing is his political perspective concerning African-Americans in our society. This point of view is reflected in the first review of the book. The author of this review focused on the political aspects of the photos. Bell hooks addresses this issue in her compilation of essays entitled Art on my Mind. She asserts that people often talk about black art in terms of the type of image it portrays of black people and not in terms of its aesthetic quality (7). Discussing only the political aspects of this photographer’s work insinuates that his message is the only reason his photographs are in a book and not the fact that he is an artist.

The beginnings of his career as a photographer were sparked not by a passion for the field of photography itself but by an interest in recording a particular subject. Andreas Feininger writes in his photographic guidebook entitled Photographic Seeing that he has ‘found again and again that people interested only in ‘photography’ get nowhere…and never produce a worthwhile photograph." He further elaborates on this point by asserting that "interest is the indispensable factor which sparks any creative activity" (132). This young man’s passion for recording images of his people, whom he finds beautiful, helped him to develop his techniques as a photographer.

He grew up in Alabama and it was only during his years at Tuskegee University that he began photographing. After seeing photographs of African-Americans who reminded him of his own relatives he felt the need to make pictures of members of his family whom he loved and respected. He saw photography as a ‘way of holding on to a precious memory."

In addition to this intimate drive to make pictures he also saw photography as an instrument through which he could create images which could counter the numerous one-dimensional images of black people in our society. These mainstream images have been created by white people and have changed throughout time. Genres such as black face minstrelsy have reinforced one-dimensional stereotypical images of black people in the United States. These stereotypes have been continued in the present day by the cartoon-like images of black-Americans such as "Aunt Jemima," and "Mrs. Butterworth" and "Uncle Ben."

All these images have a common link. They portray only a shallow side of a people. They do not delve deeply to show that the subject being portrayed has a personality. It is these types of images that perpetuate stereotypes and reinforce racial prejudice. In discussing this point the author remarked that in the beginning of his career he wanted to show black people doing everything even brushing their teeth. He feels these types of images may counter the effects of the mainstream images of black Americans that this country is usually faced with. If people are forced to see black people carrying out their everyday activities they may be more apt to see African-Americans in a different light. They may see them as fully equal humans.

Bell hooks elaborates on this relationship to photography which she feels many ‘Southern black folks’ lived while they were growing up. She argues in her compilation of essays entitled Art on My Mind that the photos on the walls of rural Southern black homes were a form of protest: The sites of contestation were not out there, in the world of white power, they were within segregated black life. Since no ‘white’ galleries displayed images of black people created by black folks, spaces had to be made within diverse black communities. The camera was the central instrument by which blacks could disprove representations of us created by white folks (59).

The images which bell hooks describes are ones which create people with depth and personality. These are quite different from the one-sided cartoon like images of African-Americans which were ever-present in mainstream society when Higgins was growing up in Alabama and which are still with us today.

In bell hooks description of these "sites of contestation" she raises a very important issue concerning the juxtaposition of the image this artist creates and those which bell hooks discusses versus mainstream one-dimensional images of black Americans. The relationship between the subject and the photographer is what defines the nature of both types of image. The photographs that she discusses which appear on the walls of rural Southern black homes are created by black people of black people. In most of these photographs of family members the photographer loves the person being photographed. As a result these pictures portray images of people with many sides to their personalities and life. On the other hand images such as ""Aunt Jemima" are created by a hostile mainstream mainly white America. In this situation the relationship between the photographer is not one of love but of hostility and the image reflects this. This type of picture is riddled with stereotypes and does not convey a multi-dimensional representation.

The powerful effect that the relationship between subject and image maker has on an image can be illustrated using Higgin’s work. This relationship can also be discussed in general terms concerning the art world at large. The attitude of an artist toward his subject as having a major impact on the outcome of his/her work has been noted and described by many. In Photographic Seeing Andreas Feininger cites "the attitute of the photographer" as an important aspect of the "photographic seeing" (112). In Ways of Seeing John Berger points out that the difference in class between Frans Hals and his subjects in two of his paintings creates a "drama" the viewer often feels in looking at them (15).

It is important to keep in mind the artist’s relationship to his subject when discussing the actual image he creates. Higgins points out about his art that his "frame of visual reference is one of acceptance." The author wants his people to be proud of themselves and feel dignified in their identity. A prominent aspect of this work is the assertion that black people in all parts of the world have roots in Africa that they can be extremely proud of. He positions himself as the "we" in this construction. He declares in his book that "We are not Africans because we are born in Africa, but because Africa is born in us. Look around you and behold us in our greatness. Greatness is an African possibility; you can make it yours" (233). In claiming these roots black people can become a part of the African community. According to Higgins black people in any part of the world are African inherently and this awareness can make their lives more meaningful. Being a part of a beautiful culture will bring meaning to their lives.

The first chapter of the book is entitled "Most Ancient Place." The photographs in this chapter depict sites in Africa rich and ancient history and tradition. The succeeding chapters of the book are not divided by country. His pictures are grouped under headings such as "Spirituality" and "In Our Manner." Under these headings images of African-Americans, Africans and black people in other countries are all interspersed throughout the chapter. This type of grouping reinforces the author’s concept of a worldwide African community.

This photographer’s construction of an African community seems to be a way to resolve a dilemma voiced by W.E.B. DuBois. DuBois voiced this dilemma at the turn of the century, however, it is still alive in the work of this photographer done the end of the twentieth century. In his book entitled The Souls of Black Folk, .DuBois writes: One ever feels his two-ness—an American and a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings… The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the old selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his skin in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world (8-9).

White mainstream American society often denies or alters the history of Africa and the history of African-Americans. As a child I was given a paper cut out book which depicted Egyptians. The Egyptians in this book were obviously white even when it is more likely that Egyptians were in fact black. Higgins would like to reclaim African history for African-Americans. His drive is to correct widely held false beliefs about this history and in the process bolster the self-esteem of his people.

He sees his people as beautiful and he attempts to convey this sentiment to the viewers of his photographs. He conveys this emotion using his skills as an artist. Higgins never talks about taking a picture; he talks about making a picture. The latter expression denotes the photographer’s knowledge of the skill involved in creating an aesthetic image.

In the text of his book the author discusses his feelings about making photographs. The photographer attempts "to become invisible" when he shoots. He wants "to become one with water" in order "to slide into crevices yet continue to flow from one space to another, going around and between the moments that comprise each situation" (60). His photographs lead one to believe that Higgins did indeed become invisible. His portraits of people dancing and groups praying exemplify this invisibility. Many of his photographs are of intimate personal scenes. Even in these more personal scenes such as a mother and a daughter leaving their home, or a man sitting on his bed reading a letter it seems that the subjects are unaware of the camera.

This move of invisibility holds two possibilities and in this particular situation both are probably true. The technique is an artistic move which allows the viewer of the photograph to stare at the people who comprise the photograph without feeling like an intruder. This aspect of Higgins’ photos also help him to convey his message effectively. The people in his images do not appear to have been affected by the photographer. In the eyes of the viewer of the photograph this untampered with appearance makes the photograph seem more "real" or "representational." When a set of images seems to be natural, that is containing almost no construction, they are often extremely powerful. James Kavenaugh reports that when an ideology seems natural or is confused with common sense it is extremely affective. Whether consciously or unconsciously this photographer makes use of this aspect of ideology.

Chester Higgins, as do most people, sees through the prism of his ideas. He sees black people as beautiful and dignified just as a person who believes African-Americans to be inferior may see them as ugly. Feininger discusses a type of "seeing" with the minds eye involved in artistic photography. He states the obvious point that in order to photograph a subject, first, you have to know that it exists. Secondly what a photographer sees in his subject determines how this subject is portrayed (127). This is certainly demonstrated in the photographs of Chester Higgins Jr. Looking at the people he has photographed one can see the beauty that inspired the photographer to make these pictures.

On the other hand one might argue that the photographer is using the technique he has acquired as an artist to create an illusion which is not present in his actual subjects. One might also say that he should simply represent his subjects in order to be objective. In photography, however, objectivity cannot be realized. One must choose how to represent a subject and in making this choice the photographer has entered the realm of subjectivity. Furthermore, the value of art is centered in its subjectivity. Gordan Graham affirms this ideal in his essay entitled "Value and the Visual Arts" (1-2). He writes that "the best visual art enhances our understanding of experience." Art is meant to please us with aesthetic beauty but it is also a vehicle for new ideas and ways of thinking about the world around us. An integral aspect of the value of art is how it changes parts of one’s thinking about the world.

This photographer hopes that his book will help black people look at themselves in a more positive light. He wants them to see themselves in a more positive light. He wants them to see themselves as truly African-American—as part of a larger African community. He would like white people and people of other races to view black people from an angle which they can see what black people have to offer. He hopes the book may stop some people from viewing African-Americans through a lens filled with stereotypes. He hopes people who see his book will come away from it with a new knowledge about people and themselves. He wants to imbue black people with a sense of pride in their heritage and white people to learn something about his people that they may not have known. In other words he’s attempting to enhance "their understanding of experience."

Higgins is using the realm of art to convey new ways of thinking about African-Americans. In our society every image making arena including film, television, newspapers, etc. has become a sight of struggle for black Americans. Bell hooks asserts the importance of image making for African-Americans in this way: The history of black liberation movements in the United States could be characterized as a struggle over images as much as it has been a struggle for rights, for equal access (57).

Jannette L. Dates and William Barlow claim in their book Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media that a split in the images of African-Americans is occurring in our society. Hostile mainstream images of black people are side by side with images that black people themselves have created of themselves. (16). This struggle is intense and the stakes are extremely high.

In Ways of Seeing Berger points out that often women view themselves through the dominant ideology. The eye of mainstream society is not always flattering and the adjectives I cited earlier, which are often associated with the word "women," testify to this fact. This type of vision also holds true for African-Americans and it is this type of vision that makes this struggle over images so pertinent for Chester Higgins Jr. and black people. If a group of people can be so affected by mainstream images of themselves than it is extremely important to the self-esteem and pride of these people to have the ability to control these images.

The author’s view of this struggle over the control over image-making can be illustrated with the child’s tale he recounts in his book. The story was told to him by one of his professor’s at Tuskegee University. He cites this story at the beginning of his book to show how the telling of history is affected by interpretation. The story starts with a father telling his son a fable concerning the meeting of a lion and a man in the jungle. When the two meet the man kills the lion with his knife. The story continues with a conversation between the young boy and his father: The young boy expresses his bewilderment to his father about the story’s outcome. The lion is bigger than the man, and he has sharp teeth and four paws armed with fierce claws. Isn’t he the king of the jungle? Why doesn’t the lion win? The father responded by telling his son, "The lion will win when he writes his own story" (11).

The story depicts poignantly and simply what Higgins is attempting to do. He is retelling the story of African-Americans and he is doing so with images that he has created. He wants to help African-Americans to reclaim their history which has for so long been denied in the public sphere. In Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa (Bantam 1994) Chester Higgins Jr. has effectively told a story of his people. Through his art he became the lion narrating his own story.

Works Cited

Text Analyzed

Higgins Jr., Chester, Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa: New York, Toronto, London, Sydney and Aukland: Bantam Books 1994.

Secondary Sources

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Great Britain: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penquin Books, 1972.

Dates, Jannette L., Barlow, William. Split Image: African-Americans in the Mass Media, Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1993.

DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. First Vintage Books/The Library of America Edition, 1990.

Feininger, Andreas. Photographic Seeing. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973

Graham, Gordon. "Value and the Visual Arts." Journal of Aesthetic Education. V28 N4 (1994): pgs 1-14.

Hooks, bell. Art on My Mind-visual politics. New York: The New Press, 1995.

An interview with Chester Higgins Jr.
- Elizabeth Kissam  05/31/2003
   

Text Copyrighted Chester Higgins Jr., All Rights Reserved