Apertures
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 nonjudgmental 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 Nyota at Philae, Egypt
Olmec head, Yucatan, Mexico
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 verifying 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 resonating 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 Atlantic Ocean, Accra, Ghana
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?
Merkuts (pyramids), Giza Plateau, Cairo, Egypt