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Many things can be true at once. It can be true that Viola Davis is a stunning goddess of divine inspiration and we should be lucky to walk the planet alongside her. This is obviously true.
It can also be true that Dario Calmese has an incredible gift. It can also be true that Vanity Fair doesn't get a gold star for making this their first cover by a Black photographer.
It can also be true that some images are too devastating to be recreated and reclaimed. Is that what is being worked out here? I don't know. I don't think so, but I don't know.
Because it can ALSO be true that the visual archive of slavery is deeper and denser than Gordon's back and/yet maybe we come back to him and to his tree (h/t T.M.) because we don't know how to walk deeper into that archive.
And it can ALSO be true that if we superimpose Gordon's back on the visual archive of slavery, all we see is a 19th century moment, a U.S. empire, a commodified and caricatured man made into artifact, a dispossessed mode of Blackness that is/also gendered (masc)--
who isn't speaking back, who isn't even looking at us, is looking past some old wound (because his were "healed" keloids of terror which means they weren't the first or the last but also timeless because who can account for the damage and who is there to account for it)
and if that is the mode of Blackness we are faced with, if that is the history we are asked to confront in recreating the image, it can also be true two missteps may have bn made: 1) asking Gordon to carry the weight of an entire story *just as he was asked to do at the time* &
2) asking Davis to carry his weight and hers as the Black femme presenting body, our #WickedFlesh, is asked to do all the time, in every time and place.
Which is to say, there is a visual archive of enslaved Black womanhood to be drawn on that is both here (in the almost bared shoulders) and also missing (in the unbared and unseen breasts). This tweet, via @ParisNoire's intervention, is an example of it. https://twitter.com/ParisNoire/status/1283096330139664384?s=20
Which is to say, if the goal was to turn this image inside out and upside down (I am not saying that was the goal, I don't know), many things can be true. This cover does that, because Davis.
And it does not do that, because enslaved Black flesh femme'd and bared to the world is as DEVASTATING (for all it portended and offered) as old scars on a healed back. Because the almost promise of a dark shoulder to the slaveowner is also part of the slavery's visual legacy.
Which is to say, Davis is stunning but the image is also superimposed on a lexicon of abused Black (masc) flesh that comprehends the meaning Gordon's back offers, but makes it (and therefore Davis) a metanarrative of violence without quite touching the actual violence of it all.
I'm not against the cover. I'm frustrated by a historical shorthand (in this case visual vocabulary) that asks Black women to be and hold centuries of violence, but never delves deeply into the way that violence is personal, physical, and metaphysically enacted on our own selves.
I'm also frustrated that Gordon had to be referent for Blackness here instead of what I thought this was before I knew the inspiration: A recreation of an iconic old Hollywood pose that, of course, Davis pulls off with might and ease. Did we need "Gordon" here for this? Idk. /fin
