All Grants | Cycle 3 –
Alisa Prince is a scholar, artist and curator of visual arts and artifacts of the Black diaspora. Her work focuses on the history of photography, the roles of race and gender in identity construction, Black Feminist traditions, archival theory, and artistic forms of resistance. Her dissertation takes up vernacular photographs of Black people, particularly those with origins in the family album, and explores the forms of value to which they are subject in different spaces. She has taught courses on Black identity, feminism, photography, and cultural capital and serves on the Editorial Board of InVisible Culture, a journal for visual culture. From 2021 to 2022, she jointly held the Henry Luce/American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship in American Art and the Chester Dale Fellowship in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Links
Profile Links
Boston University Faculty Webpage
Research Links
“Can’t Kill the Soul:” The Value of Black Vernacular Photographs in the Domestic Archive and Beyond (Dissertation, University of Rochester, 2022)
Other Links
10×10 Research Grant Presentation Video (Alisa Prince—00:32:35)
Summary of Research Supported by 10×10 Photobooks Grant:
“Tomorrow is Here”: Image & Text in The Harlem Book of The Dead
Research Interests
My research examines Black vernacular photography and the forms of value it engages in various spaces. I am interested in investigating the ways Black vernacular photographs are circulated, the processes of Black self-making or subjectivity, and their myriad intersections. Photographer James VanDerZee (1886-1983) is a key figure of my research because his work straddled the public and personal sphere; the artistry demonstrated in his commercial practice has landed his photographs in numerous spaces including family archives, museum exhibitions, private collections of photography, and publications. The James VanDerZee Archive is housed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a Chester Dale Fellow in the Department of Photographs there, I have closely analyzed much of his oeuvre.
Project Summary
My research project investigates The Harlem Book of the Dead, a book published in 1978 in collaboration with artist Camille Billops, poet Owen Dodson, and author Toni Morrison that uses photographer James VanDerZee’s portraits from the 1920s to 1940s to illustrate the mourning practices of Black people in Harlem. The apex of VanDerZee’s post-mortem photography, the book includes an expansive collection of his mortuary work coupled with poetry written by Dodson on most of the book’s pages. The book begins with a foreword by Morrison and concludes with a 1978 interview with VanDerZee conducted by Billops, and the photographer’s notes on the photographs.
The Harlem Book of the Dead moves the genre of post-mortem photography beyond its prescriptive function—to remember the deceased—and toward the construction of futurity. This project examines the symbols of Black subjectivity in the book. To understand how these symbols are produced, it is necessary to consider the book’s use of time and anonymity. This project explores how the book marks time, specifically by assessing how the temporal clauses and verb tenses used in the poetry coalesce with the photographic medium. It is a study of how photographs—objects ostensibly always of the past—speak to the present and future. Together, the texts and images in The Harlem Book of the Dead insist on the presence of Black subjectivity in the future as a given, a must. This is evinced by Dodson’s poetry throughout the book, which, engaging in a method that contemporary critical theorist Saidiya Hartman coined “critical fabulation,” simultaneously holds spaces at which the individual subjectivities could emerge and affirms an eternal presence of Black subjectivity, without making definitive statements about the unnamed sitters. This project is invested in reading Dodson’s poetry as a radical pairing with VanDerZee’s photographs: his poetry functions as more than narration. My central claim is that it is through the temporal grammar of the text and the anonymization of identities that the sitters depicted in the book become symbols of Black subjectivity. I ask: How might we think about post-mortem photography beyond objects of mourning and remembrance? How does the genre carry Black subjectivities through time and space, effectively giving rise to Black futures?
Through his careful attentiveness to portrayals of death and the dead, VanDerZee developed a unique style and established a name for himself as the select funeral photographer for Harlem residents. Decorative compositions, religious texts, honorific passages, and montages of imagery linking Black life and death: each of these image-making techniques served to maintain an appreciation for Black individuals in life and in death. VanDerZee’s post-mortem photography enabled a form of private resistance in the midst of a social climate that trivialized Black death in the public sphere and served a particularly critical function for families that were separated as a result of the Great Migration. The publication of The Harlem Book of the Dead heightened what VanDerZee had already been doing in his commercial work. It made the post-mortem photographs more public, and perhaps more lasting too (in that books are not as easily lost as a lone photograph might be). It is a book that is both for and about Harlem, but grants outsiders a view into the community, too. The audience of the images is expanded as they are used to speak to the community’s treatment of the dead more broadly. Through the book, the images no longer only ‘belong’ to the original mourners of these individuals, but to the community of readers. Moreover, the publication’s reproduction of these images makes them more affordable and enables them to be more widely circulated.
Significance
The Harlem Book of the Dead is the only photobook of VanDerZee’s work to pair his images with poetry. The post-mortem photographs that comprise the book depict unknown sitters. The photographs were made several decades before the book was published; thus, the images of the deceased exist in multiple distinct cultural contexts. The images first lived primarily in the domestic sphere and were circulated among loved ones and relatives of the deceased sitters. Compiled in The Harlem Book of the Dead, the sitters are anonymous and available for public viewing. This shift, how it was made, and its implications for the photographs demand further speculation.
Camille Billops and her husband, historian James V. Hatch, invested much of their lives in chronicling the life and works of Black artists. Together, they conducted hundreds of artist interviews and logged thousands of photographs and film footage. The Harlem Book of the Dead, particularly Billops’s interview with the photographer in the book, has yet to be understood within this context. This project places The Harlem Book of the Dead within a more expansive view of Billops’s life’s work to understand why this body of photographs was selected from VanDerZee’s oeuvre to produce a book.
Methods & Research Goals
My methods include visual and textual analysis of The Harlem Book of the Dead. My analyses engage Tina Campt’s theory of Black feminist futurity, Saidiya Hartman’s conception of critical fabulation, and Christopher Pinney’s postulation of surfacism. Additionally, I visited the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives at Emory University and the Owen Dodson Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Through spending time in the Billops and Hatch Archive, I unearthed the context of Billops’s involvement in the making of the book. In the Dodson collection, I searched for evidence of his perception of VanDerZee’s post-mortem photographs and his method of creating poems for the book. I examined his writing to conduct comparative analyses of his stand-alone poetry and his poetry in the book, focusing on themes and point of view (first, second, and third person).