Whitney Biennial 2019
May 17–Oct 27, 2019
John Edmonds
15
Floor 5
Born 1989 in Washington, DC
Lives in Brooklyn, NY
Making Black queer collectivity and self-awareness central to his work, John Edmonds explores the aesthetic possibilities of intimacy and desire in his photographs. Recalling earlier eras of studio photography, he carefully choreographs his subjects and settings to create portraits that engage and challenge the art historical canon. Edmonds uses a 4x5 studio camera or a medium-format Hasselblad, which heightens the staging and details visible in each image. The photographs’ pristine clarity and meticulous compositions highlight the complicated relationship between photography and Black subjects.
Referencing the legacy of Harlem Renaissance portraiture, and using African objects (some drawn from traditional contexts and others manufactured for decorative purposes), Edmonds recenters people of color as self-possessed individuals, in contrast to narratives prevalent in modernist photography of the 1920s and 1930s that often objectify Black bodies. By carefully lighting and arranging each composition to emphasize the glow of a sitter’s skin, the edge of a cheekbone, or the sheen of a wooden statue, Edmonds creates portraits that interrogate and celebrate Black identity and expressive culture.
The Villain, 2018
John Edmonds, The Villain, 2018. Inkjet print, 30 × 24 in. (76.2 × 61 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Henry Nias Foundation 2020.40. © John Edmonds. Image courtesy the artist and Company, New York
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John Edmonds
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John Edmonds: I'm using photography as a tool to index and make portraits of friends, these sculptures that are from a home in Brooklyn, as well as sculptures that are from West Africa.
Narrator: Artist John Edmonds.
John Edmonds: I want to think about this interplay of portraiture and still life, while also introducing these photographs that reimagine these different kinds of Surrealist photographs that were made in the 1930s where artists such as Man Ray, Carl Van Vechten, were using African art and incorporating and appropriating African sculptures into their work.
I think that they were completely taken out of their context and used simply for the purpose of decoration, fetishization. And in my pictures, what I'm interested in is the spiritual potential that these objects could have in the contemporary world.
Narrator: Not all of the photographs incorporate African sculpture. Take a moment to find a photograph that focuses on the top of a woman’s head.
John Edmonds: I really love this picture because the way in which the waves are on the top of the head brings me both to this idea of landscape but also fingerprint too. In many of these pictures I'm using the human figure, not only to talk about representation or history, art history, but also to think about place, and think about the body as a kind of landscape.