Unpopulated Images: Absence of Figure and Presence of Voyeur

Abstract

Lorna Simpson, an African-American artist and photographer, has explored various media and techniques, including two-dimensional photographs as well as silk screening her photographs on large felt panels. Simpson had earned her reputation for the repeated images of ‘blackness’ as the antithesis to a white supremacist view. She was often engaged in the issues of race and gender by exploring black female bodies and juxtaposing the images with provocative text in her work. In the mid-90s, however, Simpson entirely removed figures her photographic images serigraphed on felt panels. Her felt photographs were replaced by gloomy shots of cityscapes—urban parks, buildings, etc.—and paired with text panels also printed on felt. Seemingly objective photographs do not allow the view’s efforts to decipher a meaning of the image. The juxtaposed texts further obscure possible interpretations of each image without ratifying a particular reading. The felt serigraphs destabilize traditional rules of reading and looking photographs and present a photograph as a relational, unstable image rather than a fixed and static image. In the absence of figures, Simpson explores the dynamic relationship between image and text and the role of photographer, subject, and the viewer.