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The Oxford English Dictionary lists two definitions for the verb collaborate. The first is the more standard notion of working “in conjunction with another or others, to co-operate; esp. in a literary or artistic production, or the like.” The second definition—“to co-operate traitorously with the enemy”—is less common, although it offers another vivid model of co-operation. To collaborate is to co-operate: to work together (with ally or enemy) to develop, refine, and accomplish a goal. Each issue of Exposure, for example, emerges out of intricate collaborative interactions involving the input of the Publications Committee, the hard work of our staff, and the creative energy of every photographer and contributor we engage with. I welcome the challenges and rewards of these ongoing collaborations. These intellectual exchanges are not only the foundation for the kind of engaged and informed dialogue on photography that Exposure works to promote, but also form the very basis of the learning experience: both for our readers and myself.

This issue’s contents are assembled in harmony with the 2014 SPE National Conference theme of “Collaborative Exchanges: Photography in Dialogue.” Hannah Frieser offers a historical account of photographer collaborations, including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman, and Mark and Sonia Whitesnow. West Coast photographer Chris Johnson’s most recent project, Question Bridge: Black Males, is a socially engaged collaborative video installation that not only connects participants and audience in dialogue, but also was created in collaboration with photographer Hank Willis Thomas. As Lisa Arrastía’s essay on Johnson demonstrates, his photographic career was engendered through ongoing collaborative relationships with colleagues.

Whether through a lifetime of collegial collaboration (as in Johnson’s model) or the episodic partnerships between photographers and curators highlighted in this and every issue of Exposure, engaging ideas with a cohort inevitably yields rewards. Even when the process gets thorny, that collective tension fuels change. And just when it feels as if the collaborative exchange risks falling dreadfully apart, that very moment turns out to be precisely when it begins to cohere.

Fortunately, I experience this lucidity at some point with every issue of Exposure. And you, our readers, complete Exposure’s collaborative circle. I encourage your thoughts and feedback on this issue and any other topics related to the state of photography practice and photography education today. I am eager to hear from you.

—Stacey McCarroll Cutshaw

exposure@spenational.org

Editor’s Note

The Society for Photographic Education SPE is a nonprofit membership organization that provides and fosters an under-standing of photography as a means of diverse creative expression, cultural insight, and experimental practice. Through its interdisciplinary programs, services, and publications, the Society seeks to promote a broader understanding of the medium in all its forms through teaching and learning, scholarship, and criticism.

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Institutional SubscriptionsExposure (ISSN 0098-8863) is published twice yearly. Domestic institutional subscription rate is $35 annually; outside the USA, $50 annually. Subscription to Exposure is a benefit of SPE membership.

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Change of Address Send notification to the address above. Exposure is mailed third class, bulk rate, and will not be forwarded by the U.S. Postal Service.

Publications CommitteeArno Rafael Minkkinen, Chair Liz Wells Claude Baillargeon Stacey McCarroll Cutshaw, ex officio

Exposure StaffVirginia Morrison, SPE Executive Director Stacey McCarroll Cutshaw, EditorAmy Schelemanow, Art Direction/DesignAnn H. Stevens, Copyeditor Nina Barcellona, Press Production Ginenne Clark, Production Coordinator

Exposure Cover Design Concept Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Exposure © 2014 by The Society for Photographic Education. All rights reserved. Contents © 2014 by the respective authors, artists, and other rights holders. All rights reserved.

Exposure is the Journal of Record of the Society for Photographic Education and reflects the Society’s concerns; however, the opinions expressed herein are not necessarily endorsed by the Society for Photographic Education.

On the cover Terri Warpinski, Fallow [Qalqilya, E1 Plan area], 2012 (detail), archival pigment print mounted on Dibond, 16 x 28 inches. Courtesy of the artist

Read more about Warpinski’s work and crossing borders beginning on page 18.

The Journal of the

FocusThe Bridge Back to Blackness: Chris Johnson 4 and the Art of Social Engagement Lisa Arrastía

ViewInsecure Borders: Terri Warpinski’s Surface Tension 18 Katherine Ware

Tarrah Krajnak: Strays 30 Bill Anthes

LearnCollaborations in Context 37 Hannah Frieser

ConsiderLee Friedlander, The American Monument, 40 and Eakins Press Kim Sichel

DiscoverBending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, 54 and the Citizen and Reading Magnum: A Visual

Archive of the Modern World Reviewed by Derrick Price

See p. 4

Spring 2014 Volume 47:1

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Lisa Arrastía

Focus

The Bridge Back to Blackness: Chris Johnson and the Art of Social Engagement

It is 1996. While the Republican Party gears up for its national convention in San Diego, Arthur Ollman, founding director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and Richard Bolton, a Los Angeles-based artist, make a bold decision: Attract the attention of the media in town by creating a faux newsroom showcasing the most pressing social and political issues facing people in San Diego. They call the exhibition Re: Public; Listening to San Diego, and commis-sion six California artists to produce videos ranging in approach and focus. One artist in particular, Oakland photographer Chris Johnson, presents a way to listen in on a rare intra-racial dialogue between ten poor and middle-class African Americans. In one frame of Johnson’s video titled Question Bridge, viewers witness someone asking a ques-tion directly into the lens (Figure 1). In the next, a different person modestly or righteously responds. The mediated dialogue continues in this way for a little over an hour. The sixteen subjects never meet, except across the black space of a rough video fade, and it is for this reason that the subjects are strikingly plain-spoken, open about their curiosi-ties regarding their black counterparts, and most of all, unknowingly engaged in significant conversations about the intricacies of self, other, and difference.

Today, a nationally celebrated video installation about black masculinity, Question Bridge: Black Males (QB:BM), stands as the evolutionary result of photographer Chris Johnson’s mediated bridge across which (seemingly) socially disparate individuals collectively query blackness, yet never meet. QB:BM is a five-channel video installation created by Johnson and his former photography student Hank Willis Thomas in collaboration with photographer Bayeté Ross Smith and arts administrator Kamal Sinclair (Figure 2). The art project has collected 1,600 questions and responses from more than 160 African-American men in eleven cities throughout the US. Launched at the 2012 Sundance Film

Festival, the installation has traveled to the Site Gallery in Shef-field, England; the Brooklyn Museum and Jack Shainman Gallery in New York; the Oakland Museum of California; the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art; and City Gallery at Chastain in Atlanta, Georgia.1 In fact, the project has already developed a secondary school curriculum under the Question Bridge Education Initiative. Since its launch, the installation has continued its national travels through classrooms and museums large and small, and the artists are currently developing a new interactive web platform to promote greater dialogue around race.

QB:BM has proven to be a timely vehicle provoking dialogue at a moment when a history of racial injustices are once again at loggerheads with American jurisprudence. In the spring of 2013, the United States Supreme Court invalidated a major portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In his opinion for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts claimed that data supporting the act in its entirety are fatuously “based on forty-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.”2 On July 13, 2013, George Zimmerman was acquitted of charges stemming from the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old African American student walking home from a local 7-Eleven armed only with a bottle of iced tea and a package of Skittles. The trial, and Zimmer-man’s exoneration, fueled a national debate on racial profiling and existing “Stand Your Ground” laws that permit the use of deadly force if a citizen is in fear of great bodily harm.3 Before the trial, Judge Debra Nelson ruled that the prosecution could use the word “profile,” but not if the context surrounding the word’s use had anything to do with race. Before he killed Martin, Zimmerman called 911 to report a “suspicious guy” who was allegedly “up to no good” or “on drugs or something.” He concluded, “These assholes, they always get away.” In the face of local and national efforts to

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Above: Figure 1. Chris Johnson, Keyona Johnson from Question Bridge, 1996, screen capture from the digital video. Courtesy of the artist

Right: Figure 2. Chris Johnson and Hank Willis Thomas, Question Bridge: Black Males, 2012, screen capture and jpeg graphics. Courtesy of the artist

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render race obscure, QB:BM emerges as a potent video installation that re-opens the dialogue on race.

Perhaps QB:BM’s most important overarching contribution is that it interferes with the very possibility that there ever was or will be a post-racial subject. In essence, QB:BM is a post-racial repellant. As a transmedia project, it provides stories of individual black men wrestling with the tangled complexities of self, other, and difference. As an aesthetic through which we can lodge a social theoretical analysis, the work unwittingly jimmies inter- and intra-racial understandings of blackness and the effects of class and masculinity on racialized subjects. QB:BM demonstrates the oscillation and variability of intra-racial racisms through the facility and anonymity of audiovisual testimony and the aesthetic frame of moving portraiture. While watching QB:BM, viewers soon realize that monolithic, racialized identities can be understood as intri-cate, complicated, and non-static—and this is something not just understood by the viewer, but also by the very subjects engaged in the audiovisual mediation that is Question Bridge: Black Males.

QB:BM is stylistically uncomplicated. Consisting only of talk-ing heads, the format allows viewers to experience a dissonance between the social messages viewers hold in their minds about the black male and the personal experiences the men share openly in the video. Subjects are foregrounded as in photographic portrai-ture; they ask and answer questions in front of vacant gray, beige, white, or green backgrounds. Each subject wears his own cloth-ing. Although seemingly unremarkable, dress is unintentionally in high relief as it reveals how each man engages in a performance of his identity. One preacher sits in a regal red chair. He wears a light blue button-down shirt. A young professor who identifies as gay wears a V-neck sweater. Incarcerated men are punctuated only by the orange overalls of confinement. What we see and think we know of black men is what we get: preachers, prisoners, plumbers, professors, in addition to those who are popular, such as British actor Delroy Lindo of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and Fox Channel’s Chicago Code, Jesse Williams of Grey’s Anatomy, and former Atlanta mayor and UN Ambassador Andrew Young. But within this simplic-ity we see complicated performances of racialized and gendered identities in addition to individuals struggling to comprehend who they are and who they might have been, had notions of race, gender, class, and sexuality not interrupted the advancement of their humanity.

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Like the straightforward format of QB:BM, the questions its sub-jects pose are spoken directly and without reluctance. Some ques-tions are concrete, like “Are you threatened by black gay men? Do they make you uncomfortable?” or “Why is it so difficult for black men to go to the doctor on a regular basis to check out physical health or our mental health?” Some questions “may seem silly” as one subject notes before he asks, “I want to know if I’m the only one that has a problem eatin’ chicken, watermelon, and bananas in front of white people?” But other questions like “What are you scared of?” or “What is the last word that we can remember you by as a black man for the last day on this earth?” are existential. All of the questions asked are complex. They represent suppositions and postulations that reveal individual efforts to analyze the intersec-tions of race and masculinity. The very structure and methodol-ogy of QB:BM opposes any individual or cultural efforts at racial ascription. The roots of this complex dynamic can be found in the idiosyncratic journey that photographer Chris Johnson made in the late 1960s from Brooklyn into the arms of the doyens of West Coast photography in San Francisco.

Johnson grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, in the Gowa-nus projects, a 12.57-acre complex of fourteen buildings built in 1949.4 When Johnson was a teenager in the 1960s, Bed-Stuy, as it is known, was an African-American community of working people, many of whom worked in the neighborhood. Fair-housing laws had been passed by 1968 when Johnson was eighteen and preparing to leave New York. At this time, African Americans had experienced gains in employment as well as occupational standing.5 These fac-tors precipitated the out-migration of professional African Ameri-cans from the community. The combined effect was a dramatic shift in the social and economic conditions of life in Bed-Stuy. In a November 3, 1985, New York Times Magazine article, novelist Paule Marshall describes the transformation of Bed-Stuy in this way:

The once safe, gracious old neighborhoods of Bedford and Stuyvesant Heights had become Bed-Stuy, a ghetto with the largest concentration of blacks in the country after Chicago’s South Side and a name associated in the public mind with the worst in urban decay. When black America exploded in the 60’s, Bed-Stuy also took to the streets in two major uprisings, the first precipitated by a policeman’s slaying of a 15-year-old schoolboy in 1964 and the second following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. four years later. The burning, looting and window-smashing—the eruption of a people’s just rage—left uptown Fulton Street looking like a war zone.6

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Sociologist Loïc Wacquant describes the results of the economic and social shifts in Bed-Stuy that Marshall recounts as the “caste consciousness [and] cleavages” between poor and middle class African Americans.7

In middle school, Johnson had one best friend in his neighborhood. Stephen Phillips was a boy like Johnson: A loner, a lover of books, and a young person open to anything new and different from life in Bed-Stuy.8 Phillips’s mother worked for a leftist political institu-tion, and his family exposed Johnson to art, museums, and folk music. Johnson and Phillips read the existentialists, frequented folk music bars in the Village, and worked toward becoming musicians who would one day croon like Bob Dylan. As Bed-Stuy went from a close-knit community to an isolated ghetto, Johnson, with his unique interests and burgeoning bohemian mindset, be-came more and more distant from the boys and the limited options there. In Johnson’s experience, Bed-Stuy boys stole, sold drugs, and died violent deaths. Johnson says he remembers being “scared all of the time. Scared that something would happen to me or someone I knew.” In addition, Johnson’s mother Marion was strict and physically abusive. She did not understand her son’s curiosity about life or why he would not play outside but instead read in the stairwell of their building. And once he began to spend time with Phillips in the Village, Ms. Johnson felt she had lost control of her

son. Unable to bridle behavior she felt was unorthodox, Johnson’s mother tried to make him a ward of the state. Fortunately, the family court judge who reviewed the case realized that Johnson was just a curious young person unable (and unwilling) to fit into the developing black male Bed-Stuy culture. The judge dismissed Ms. Johnson’s application, and encouraged her to be grateful for the boy she had raised during such turbulent times. His mother’s attempt to subdue him effectively dissolved, Johnson finished high school at Wingate in Crown Heights, then mustered the courage, and moved out at seventeen. He never returned home.

Many of Johnson’s early portraits are of the women in his life or himself. Sometimes the images are layered with text and photo-graphs of family (Figure 3). All are catharses that offer ways of look-ing through the intractable frame of his past. Positioning himself at the center of four generations of child abuse, Johnson’s 1989 Untitled Triptych (Figure 4) is his attempt to undo the Gordian knot of family and notions of the good black boy. Untitled Triptych is a photographic reenactment of a punishment his mother performed after he had burned dozens of matches in the broiler pan of the family stove. In the center panel of the triptych lies Johnson’s tied up, naked body, which is bracketed by a self-portrait depicting the inner constraints of obedience in the third panel, and images of fire juxtaposed against spectral figures of his mother and grandmother

Figure 3. Chris Johnson, Mother Triptych, 1974–1980, gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the artist

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in the first. At age five, Johnson had satisfied his curiosity about matches and “the way a bead of water seemed to lead the flame from one end of a match to the other,” but he did so in defiance of a woman whose rules were not to be transgressed.9 Johnson remembers that his mother delivered the consequence for his dis-obedience with an eerie calm. She told him “she would punish me in a way that I would never forget.” Without metaphor or allegory, the center panel of Untitled Triptych renders the infliction of Ms. Johnson’s stolidly dispatched albeit extremely violent retribution.

After Johnson left home at age seventeen, he got a job as a mail boy in a financial services company near Wall Street, but he had no-where to live. So Johnson rode the subways until he was exhausted, and then spent his winter nights sleeping on the benches of the Staten Island ferry building. When the weather was warm, Johnson slept in Ft. Tryon Park by the Cloisters in Washington Heights. Tired of his transient life, Johnson sought shelter in a Midtown Manhattan seminary when he was eighteen. It was there that he met his “first lover,” Paula Neff, a white VISTA volunteer who was two years his

senior.10 Neff worked in Bushwick, Brooklyn, just a few blocks from where Johnson’s mother and twin sisters lived. In the fall of 1967, Johnson and Neff moved to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Five years after Johnson arrived in California, a friend in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco introduced him to a monograph by Edward Weston that helped change the course of his life. Upon seeing Weston’s photographs, Johnson notes that he realized “seeing itself could be a creative act.” He immediately began experimenting with photography as an art form and land-scape photography in particular. That winter he went to Yosemite National Park in order to attend the first of three Ansel Adams Winter Workshops.

Johnson was very much a neophyte in the world of landscape photography, and he was new to the kind of young people at the Adams Workshops who were actively extending and re-innovating the pure photography lineage.

Figure 4. Chris Johnson, Untitled Triptych, 1990, gelatin silver print, 36 inches x 6 feet triptych. Courtesy of the artist

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I worked really hard to make pictures that were as wonder-ful and as beautiful as Edward Weston’s . . . I made them as beautiful as I could, but I couldn’t make them as beautiful as I wanted. I tried to blow them up but they’d get really fuzzy. I knew I had to learn more. I found out Ansel Adams offered workshops. So I packed up my 35mm camera, my tripod, and my cable release, and I drove to Yosemite. When I walked into the room at the Workshop, everyone else had cameras much bigger than mine; they were using 4 x 5 view cameras. I had recreated the aesthetic of view camera photography, but I was using a modified 35mm camera. I was really embarrassed. I felt not just out of my league, but humiliated. But what in fact happened was that I was embraced, not as an artist or a great image-maker, but as a human being. Instead of rejecting me or laughing at me, we had earnest conversations.

Johnson states that the mentors, acolytes, and young people of the West Coast photography milieu, all of whom were white, embraced him. Elders of the tradition like Imogen Cunningham,

Ansel Adams, Al Weber, and Wynn Bullock, shepherded Johnson. The newer generation of West Coast photographers such as David Bayles, Judy Dater, Robert Langham, Sally Mann, and Ted Orland became his friends and colleagues. Johnson learned to cultivate a serious art aesthetic where photographic investigations into nature and the human spirit were central. In 1973, Orland, an Adams Workshop instructor, started the Image Continuum (IC), whose six founding members included him, Johnson, Bayles, Langham, Mann, and Boone Morrison (not pictured) (Figure 5). Bayles describes the IC as “a generic group of not very radical ’70s progressives, the middle of the bell curve for the left.”11 The group lasted until 1980 as an artists support group “concentrating on the private publica-tion and circulation of original collaborative artists’ portfolios, journals and letters.”12

Johnson says his “race wasn’t an issue” among West Coast photog-raphers. In his opinion, he was “just another skinny young person in the presence of these great masters.” For example, Johnson argues, the very idea of having a conversation about race with

Figure 5. Ted Orland, The Image Continuum, 1974, gelatin silver print, 6 x 8 inches. From left to right: Chris Johnson, Ted Orland, Robert Langham, Sally Mann, and David Bayles. Courtesy of Ted Orland

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Opposite: Figure 6. Judy Dater, Chris Wet, 1972, gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 inches. © Judy Dater. Courtesy of the artist

Figure 7. Judy Dater, Chris and Tea Cup, 1978, C-print, 14 x 11 inches © Judy Dater. Courtesy of the artist

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Imogen Cunningham “would have been funny.” Perhaps it was not so much that “race wasn’t an issue,” but that Johnson had discov-ered a group of white colleagues who had the social and economic freedom to commit to something besides race, i.e., something more abstract and creative than the seemingly quotidian conditions that issues of race and poverty might oblige in a direct discussion be-tween blacks and whites in the 1970s. While Bayles attributes this to the 1970s being “the utopian era in West Coast photography,” former Adams Workshop instructor Judy Dater—whose work in the 1970s concerned the concept of gender—argues that the group’s seeming disregard for race was due to a sort of cognitive disso-nance experienced by white West Coast photographers regarding their cultural presumptions about African Americans:

When I started taking classes in photography at San Fran-cisco State University in 1963, there were no blacks in the art department or in photography. None! We assumed it was because any black person going to college would not want to be an “artist” because they would want and need to make money; they would go into a field where they could be assured of a decent job when they graduated. Many, if not most of the art students were from middle or upper middle class homes, and they could afford to take the risk of being a starving artist, because their parents would not let them starve.13

Influenced by the artistic philosophy of Adams, Cunningham, and other pure photographers, Dater’s photography in the 1970s tried to apprehend the intrinsic nature of her subjects, especially those abstract elements that a viewer might use to determine the subject’s identity and character. Dater used contrasts to highlight these abstractions. Of the young West Coast photographers, Dater was one of the only image-makers who dealt more directly in her work with a category of identity like gender. Although she, like her peers, never directly addressed race during her friendship with Johnson, her intimate photographs of Johnson compel viewers to query their presumptions of a subject’s nature when forced to observe racial and gender constructs that are incongruous with white heteronormativity. In her Chris Wet and Chris and Tea Cup, Dater uses racial, gendered, and material contrasts—the gentility of water and fine china placed beside Johnson’s dark masculin-ity—that serve to agitate viewer preconceptions (Figures 6 and 7). Dater explains how she thought about these contradistinctions in her work at the time: “What I was thinking was that here are all these delicate things, very feminine, fragile and floral, and here is Chris, very strong and masculine, but not like a bull in a china

shop. I wanted to use the feminine to set off the masculine. Also, the whiteness of the cup and teapot against the blackness of his skin. A study in contrasts. I also could see that the color of his skin worked perfectly with all of the other colors in the scene.”

Although Dater never states that her intention was to force viewers to challenge their assumptions about black male identity, her photographs of Johnson oblige the viewer to do so regardless.

In an e-mail to the author on July 2, 2013, Bayles states that what permitted “Chris [to] fit right in” to the West Coast photography scene had to do with regional photography standards and social traditions of the 1960s and ’70s: “The regional aesthetic conven-tions included respect for the lens-made image, mastery of craft (which is all about aesthetics), and a preference for pictures that are found over those that are made. The social conventions were those of the ’60s—communitarian, anti-sexism, anti-racism, deep doubts about capitalism and so on.”

Johnson agrees it was about the craft, but he also feels that the acceptance he experienced was due in large part to the fact that West Coast photographers were looking for a way to “dispense with all the guilt, awkwardness, and baggage that they routinely felt when encountering African Americans.” He suggests that he offered these artists “[a] foil for a less fraught way of interacting with a black person. It was something about the way in which I re-sponded to them that unpacked a lot of those issues, and allowed us to be human beings with each other as opposed to solely black and white people.”

Dater supports this idea. She remembers Johnsons’s open disposi-tion and the incredulity his presence at the workshops might have induced: “Chris was completely non-threatening, non-political, not angry. His lack of apparent anger and disinterest in the racial politics of the day was a bit of a surprise…. It was odd enough to even see a black person in the park [Yosemite], let alone one taking a workshop…”

What remains in high relief in the reminiscences about West Coast photography culture by Dater, Bayles, and even Johnson is a seem-ingly unconscious positioning of Johnson as the black heteronorma-tive other. Johnson’s apparent civility and mild temperament, artistic curiosity and willingness to be trainee and recruit perhaps provided the obverse of their more hyperbolic fantasies of the black male.

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Figure 8. Imogen Cunningham, Chris through the Curtain, 1972, gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches. © 2013 Imogen Cunningham Trust

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Johnson’s friendships with white West Coast photographers were genuine, and most endure through the present day, but as they remember Johnson, amidst the racial and political, countercultural turmoil of the 1970s, their memories obfuscate race. In order to make sense of Johnson within the West Coast photographic scene, these artists transposed him as a black male subject to white cul-tural norms of decency, safety, masculinity, and sentience.

During the 1970s, Johnson’s work was racially apolitical, as was most West Coast photography.14 But this is not to say that the subjects of West Coast photography did not have the potential to provide an open platform for thoughts about race. Many West Coast photographers of the 1970s adhered to an art-making aes-thetic concerned with the “universal” subject as well as the material world, leaving any interpretation of difference—between place, object, or individual—up to the viewer. Notice for example the accentuated details in the mock curtain’s “fabric” in Cunningham’s Chris through the Curtain, 1972 (Figure 8).15 The curtains moder-ately part at the bottom of the image to reveal Johnson peering out. It is as though the viewer is caught watching Johnson as he spies the viewer, or perhaps Johnson is looking out at a white world looking back at him. Or further still, maybe Cunningham had no intentions for us at all beyond capturing the human spirit amidst a seemingly ordinary textile.

Under the close friendship and guidance of photographers Imogen Cunningham, Wynn Bullock, Al Weber, and Ansel Adams, Johnson moved from being a landscape photographer with Westonian aspirations to a fine art portrait photographer who practiced the principles of West Coast photography (Figure 9). Cunningham’s mentorship helped Johnson attempt to capture on film a subject’s seat of emotions or spirit:

Imogen Cunningham valued me as a friend. I would go over there and show her my work. The work I was doing then was more nature photography, because I was still under the influence of Ansel. One day, Imogen asked me, “Chris, don’t you think that a landscape without a person in it is lonely?” That question cut right to the heart of my career as an artist. There’s a cleavage that I’m talking about here between nature-oriented

photographers like Wynn Bullock, Edward Weston, Ansel, and artists of the human spirit like Judy Dater, Sally Mann and Imogen Cunningham. There’s a division there that I understood in one flash, because what Imogen was saying to me is that for certain people, the presence of the human spirit adds something that was missing in my photographs. From that moment on, portrai-ture was at the center of my life as an artist. I never considered myself a landscape photographer after that. From that moment on, the effort to try to embody the essence of human spirit was my mission as a photographer, and I’ve never looked back.

Cunningham’s insight provided an impetus for Johnson that began his movement away from the West Coast photography aesthetic. But it was Johnson’s close mentor and friend Wynn Bullock, and his work with performance artist Suzanne Lacy, that provided the spiri-tual and intellectual inducement for the relocation of his artistic practice to an art form that is committed to social engagement. Bullock’s singular pursuit of Kantian ideas of transcendence within the realm of photography influenced Johnson’s thinking about self, being, and image. Johnson notes with profound admiration that Bullock was “unique among the masters of West Coast photogra-phy. He embodied in his work and in his thinking a transcendence of conventional approaches to nature photography and portrai-ture.” Suzanne Lacy invited Johnson into the field of performance art, and together they created the groundbreaking work The Roof Is on Fire in 1994, which sought to make the voices of Oakland youth of color heard by the mainstream adult world as the young people sat in parked cars atop a roof in the city.

Between 1977 and the present, Johnson’s career has been one of active public engagement. With only a high school education, Johnson was invited to become a professor of photography at California College of Arts (CCA) located in Oakland. Gaining tenure, he later became chair of the photography department at CCA and president of the faculty senate from 1980 to 1990 while also serving as president of San Francisco Camerawork Gallery. From 1999 to 2005, he was the chair of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Commission under eventual Governor Jerry Brown, who was the mayor of Oakland at the time. Johnson also served as chair of the Oakland Art Gallery, and from 1997 to 2000, he led the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography. One of the few people at the time who understood and was able to teach Ansel Adams’ zone system, in 1982 Johnson self-published and sold in local camera stores The Zone System for the Complete Amateur. Four years later, after leading workshops out of the home

Opposite: Figure 9. Chris Johnson, My Hand, 1975, gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the artist

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of photographer Margaretta Mitchell, the major textbook publisher Focal Press approached Johnson and published his book “as is” under the title The Practical Zone System.

Johnson’s life since his move away from the practice of modern West Coast photography has been one of teacher, mentor, and socially engaged artist. He admits that before his work on The Roof Is on Fire, he did not have an explicitly racial consciousness, and this is evident in his photographic work before 1994 (Figure 10). But since then, Johnson has created work like the first Ques-tion Bridge and QB:BM, which integrate a deeply philosophical practice with Johnson’s own personal questions about race, class, and gender. Bullock is very much the progenitor of Johnson’s way of seeing. His ideas continue to deeply influence Johnson’s art, studies, and life now as a practicing Buddhist. Bullock himself was not a Buddhist, more like a photography mystic, but his beliefs very much echo the general principles that underlie Buddhism. Bullock believed that beneath appearances there exists a reality beyond that which society compels us as viewers, witnesses, and observers to ascribe to individuals. This is very much the basis or the impetus for Johnson’s The Roof Is on Fire, Question Bridge, and now QB:BM. With QB:BM, Johnson urges viewers to approach a transcendent reality, that place beyond race and gender categories and beyond ascriptions or categories of identity, but never does Johnson do so in his projects by rendering obscure the very real social, economic, political, and emotional consequences of race and masculinity.

Johnson’s Question Bridge concept is fundamentally, or perhaps spiritually, about the basic human need to belong. The project is an exploration of human consciousness as it attempts to deal with productions of race and identity. QB:BM’s subjects seek to discover how they fit into the larger American body, how they might begin to accept each other in the face of their own internal racial monologues, and why belonging as black men is a seeming social, economic, and political impossibility. The audiovisual medium and process undergirding QB:BM construct an almost inadvertent “zone of no consequences,” as Johnson calls it, where men who identify as black are able to catechize the social, economic, and political conditions reifying “the black male identity,” “blacks,” or “the black community” monoliths. Throughout the video, black men continu-ously raise questions of race, place, subjectivity, and capital, and thereby chip away at fallacious beliefs that a history of racial and economic assaults can be made to disappear by, for example, the election of a bi-racial US president or a feeling of progress. The men of QB:BM attempt to find meaning and coherence in the actualities

of black masculinity; they explore social formations of blackness and the very grammar of black masculinity.

QB:BM comes out of Johnson’s commitment to reconcile his past through a socially engaged artistic practice as well as his genuine hope to provide “meaningful insight into the nature of black male consciousness.” West Coast photographers of the 1930s and 1970s who influenced Johnson attempted to investigate the true essence of humanity and the natural world. And so does QB:BM. The project is a passionate exploration of nature, as it must exist unto itself under gendered and racial conditions. It is Chris John-son’s ultimate bridge back to self.

Lisa Arrastía is a lecturer in the Writing and Critical Inquiry program at University at Albany, State University of New York. Her fields of concentration are critical educational studies and critical ethnic stud-ies, and her research examines the intersections of race, social class, and educational policy. She is the co-editor with Marvin Hoffman of Starting Up: Critical Lessons from 10 New Schools (New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2012). larrastia@albany.edu

The author would like to thank Chris Johnson, David Bayles, Judy Dater, Robert Langham, and Mark Nowak for their assistance with this article as well as their generous support and candor throughout its writing.

1. QB:BM was also installed at Juxtaposition Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin; and Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas; in addition to being featured in or on Aperture, The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Ebony, BET News, and public radio, among other media sources.2. Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, Attorney General, et al., 570 U.S. 21 (2013).3. Cora Carrier, ProPublica (22 March 2012), http://www.propublica.org/article/ the-23-states-that-have-sweeping-self-defense-laws-just-like-floridas (accessed July 2, 2013). 4. New York City Housing Authority. NYCHA Housing Developments. See http:// www.nyc.gov/html/nycha/html/developments/bklyngowanus.shtml (accessed September 10, 2013).5. Sociologists Michael Hout and William Julius Wilson provide evidence that “ghettos” in the US both emerged from and were solidified by the economic and political gains of African Americans due to civil rights legislation and economic shifts in the US toward a service economy. See Hout’s “Occupational Mobility of Black Men: 1962 to 1973,” American Sociological Review 49, no. 3 (1984): 308–22, and Wilson’s “Another Look at the Truly Disadvantaged,” Political Science Quarterly 106, no. 4 (1991–1992): 639–56.6. Paule Marshall, “Rising Islanders of Bed-Stuy,” The New York Times (3 November 1985).7. Loïc J.D. Wacquant, “Urban Outcast: Stigma and Division in the Black American Ghetto and the French Urban Periphery,” The International Journal of Urban and Re-gional Research 17, no. 3 (1993): 375.8. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations and personal historical details regarding

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Johnson’s life are taken from discussions between the author and the artist between 1997 and 2013, and an interview conducted by the author on February 26, 2013. 9. This quotation is taken from Chris Johnson’s narrative that accompanies Untitled Triptych, http://www.chrisjohnsonphotographer.com/aboutrip.html (accessed March 1, 2013). 10. VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) was an anti-poverty national, domestic service program dreamed of by President John F. Kennedy and finally implemented in 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson under the Economic Opportunity Act. In 1993 it was absorbed into the now-extensive AmeriCorps national service programs created by the Clinton Administration.11. David Bayles, e-mail message to author, July 2, 2013.12. Under the Image Continuum Press the group published Art and Fear in 2001, which was co-authored by David Bayles and Ted Orland. See Image Continuum Press at Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, http://www.cbsd.com/ (accessed July 19, 2013).

13. This and the following quotations from Judy Dater are taken from an online inter-view conducted by the author between July 6 and 27, 2013.14. It should be noted that photographer David Johnson was the first African-Ameri-can student of Ansel Adams at what is now known as San Francisco Art Institute. John-son is renowned for documenting African-American life in the Fillmore district of San Francisco during the 1940s and 1950s, before the district’s infamous and protracted redevelopment. I thank Judy Dater for providing this important historical detail.15. This image does not depict an actual fabric curtain with Johnson looking through it. Johnson explains the original construction of Cunningham’s photograph: “The curtain effect is actually the result of a failed Polaroid negative. What Imogen did was photographically print me into the space provided accidently by the way in which the Polaroid negative happened to appear. Even after age 90 Imogen was experimental in the way she created images. She used a similar process when she printed me behind a desiccated leaf in the image of me called ‘Chris, 1972.’”

Figure 10. Chris Johnson, Sindu, 1982, gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the artist