Experiencing the ‘map of blackness all over the world’

PICTURE this: a black woman 100 years ago is photographed by white men. Maybe she is naked. Maybe not. She does not speak their language, but she is subject to their whims. They are stronger than her. Maybe they are kind to her. Maybe not. What goes through her head?

This idea so incensed Ayana Jackson, 36, that she put herself in that black woman’s shoes. Literally. This smooth and confident woman goes into her studio to reconstruct colonialist images by making herself the subject. “The beauty of being able to link the computer to a camera is that they are all me and I am the photographer.

“Photography started in about 1836, as did colonialism,” says Jackson, who is doing a residency with the trendy Momo Gallery in Johannesburg.

She did not start out as a photographer. “Born in New Jersey [in the US], I studied sociology at Spelman, historically a college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia. While reading for my master’s degree, I realised that writing doesn’t have the same impact as taking photographs. An image you will remember forever. I became interested in the African diaspora and how it fits in with the rest of the world. I was taking photographs to experience the map of blackness all over the world.

“My interest was focused on late 19th- and early 20th-century photographs taken during the period of European colonial expansion. I drew on the Duggan Cronin collection created in South Africa. It’s a collection of photographs of unknown subjects, as well as a documentation of reconstructed villages and ‘native’ performers that were touring Europe’s human zoos.” The collection is housed in Kimberley.

“And then I had to ask myself: Is this really about other people or is it about me? In 2010 I was doing a residency in Paris. I didn’t speak a convincing French and was struggling to get subjects to agree to be photographed, and I kept running into barriers. So I turned the camera on myself.

“My work is a journey” — she has been coming to Africa as often as she can since 2001 — “and it has enabled me to leapfrog into multiple identities. I can be a slave, a woman, a photographer. My process involves identifying themes in the original images and reconstructing them. I live between spaces.”

She cites Berlin, Mexico, Cologne and Paris as the most recent places she has called home.

So her work is about photographs of black people from the beginning of the 20th century. But these are not common or garden snaps and neither are they photos she has found. “I restage existing images as nudes. My intention is that the viewer is simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the originals.

“But,” she insists, “these are not self-portraits. My work is received as unsettling. To some it’s sexual. For me, the images aren’t sexual. It’s how our education has taught us to see it. Things are changing; we still suffer the consequences of an unfortunate moment in history between black and white people.”

She refers to Saartjie Baartman, the 19th-century Khoisan woman known as the Hottentot Venus, who so fascinated colonialists because of her large buttocks that they took her to Paris to exhibit.

“I know there’s a hard-boiled quality to my work,” she concludes, grinning.

It certainly makes you look.