It was only fitting that Nona Faustine’s introduction to professional photography was through photojournalism. Although his photos are always thoughtful and posed, their main purpose is to capture a specific moment in time to ensure that he – and we – will never forget it.
His photo series “White Shoes,” his most anchored project in history, is on display in its entirety for the first time at the Brooklyn Museum. The show consists of 43 self-portraits that recall locations throughout the five boroughs of New York City and areas of Long Island with unknown histories of slavery, from spaces as green as Brooklyn’s botanical garden to on the trash-covered asphalt of Wall Street.
In this striking series, the artist is usually blank-faced and nude, except for a pair of white high heels – a nod to the church shoes once worn by Black women as well. the symbol of the predominantly white countries that Black Americans have lived in, and fought to reshape, since the early days of the slave trade. Sometimes, Faustine covers her nakedness with a veil or scarf that covers her head; sometimes he wears an apron around his waist with a frying pan in his hand. She does not always face the camera, but she is always centered in the frame, drawing our eyes to her toned body in the foreground.
“Nona Faustine: White Shoes,” the artist’s first major solo museum exhibition, is also something of a homecoming. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Faustine, 47, has deep connections to the borough. About one-third of the photos in the series were taken in Brooklyn, including “Say Her Name” (2016), a photo she took with her mother in her family’s apartment in Flatbush.
In 2020, about “White Shoes,” Faustine told a crowd at UC Berkeley’s Arts + Design Initiative, “I don’t know if I’ll ever graduate. That’s fine with me.” He began the current project in 2012, while he was in graduate school at the International Center of Photography at Bard College. After reading about Saartjie (or Sarah) Baartman, the indigenous South African Khoikhoi woman paraded by Parisians across Europe as an object of sexual fascination in the 19th century — in an era of scientific racism — I was inspired Faustine to reclaim the Black female body. In some of her portraits, Faustine sits or stands in a display box, reminding us how women like Baartman are simultaneously eroticized and dehumanized. By posing stripped, yet dignified, the artist both commemorates Baartman and his enslaved counterparts while also redressing them. In the hands of a lesser artist, this re-enactment could have been forced. But in Faustine’s pictures, which use props minimally and strategically, the symbolism is subtle and uncontroversial.
The show is not only about the history of slavery in New York — which the text on the wall puts into context for the viewer — but also about Black women, matrilineage and the canon of feminist art history. The gallery where the curators, Catherine Morris and Carla Forbes, set up this show is in the shape of a triangle. When you enter the space, you’ll have to try hard to miss Judy Chicago’s linchpin piece of contemporary feminist art, “Dinner Party” (1974-79), which flanks the right-hand side of the gallery. The proximity of the artworks made me think about where Faustine sits in the very short history of feminist art.
Obviously, the work of Faustine, especially her photographs taken at home, recall the great Carrie Mae Weems’s, particularly the “Kitchen Table Series” (1990), whose staged black-and-white photographs capture Weems and his family as they move in and out of his kitchen at home. A slightly more contemporary in-law of an artist might be Iiu Susiraja, the Finnish photographer whose wry, domestic self-portraits, use the body to encourage the viewer to rely on their own discomfort. Although audiences are probably less familiar with Faustine’s work than Weems, I’ll bet that we’ll one day look back at her with the same level of respect.
The images that open the current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum are the earliest of the series (dating from 2012 to 2015), and also some of its most powerful. In “They Tagged The Land With Trophies and Institutions From Their Rapes And Conquests, Tweed Courthouse, NYC” (2013), Faustine is at the top of the steps of the Tweed Courthouse in downtown Manhattan’s City Hall Park — naked and dressed in white shoes. . He is in a lunge position, arms thrusting against one of the building’s massive stone columns in a Sysiphean battle against the built environment. As the text on the wall tells us, in 2002, archaeologists discovered 23 skeletons below the sidewalk in front of the Tweed Courthouse, likely the remains of enslaved people buried in the African Burial Ground, whose remains runs under most of present-day Lower Manhattan.
The very process of taking these pictures reminds us of the danger involved in being a Black person in America. As Faustine mentioned in public speaking, while taking pictures like “60 Center Street, Supreme Court, NYC,” another nude taken on the courthouse steps, she had to strip herself and take her portrait for just a few seconds while being blocked a group of his friends a police booth nearby. If the authorities catch him, he can be arrested. Such an act would make anyone vulnerable, but the risks are only heightened for a Black woman.
In another photo, from 2013, “From Her Body Came Their Greatest Wealth, Wall St., NYC,” Faustine stands on a wooden box in the middle of the intersection at 74 Wall Street, between Water Street and Pearl Street, where, from 1711 to 1762, slaves were auctioned for profit in today’s financial capital. His hands were tied as the taxi rumbled behind him.
“We had to shoot between traffic lights,” Faustine wrote of the process in his book in series. Looking into his eyes, you expect fear, but find a unique expression. How? Why? There is almost a requirement to learn more.
This is the power of “White Shoes”: to force us to pay attention and ask more questions. The last pictures in the show — the latest additions to the series, all from 2021 — strike a more cheerful chord. In “Guardian, Colored Burial Ground, Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, NY 2021” and “No Resting Place For My Weary Soul, Corona, Queens,” Faustine’s entire body is wrapped in a shimmering golden cape. He has his back to the camera, and looks like he’s about to fly. He protects his ancestors as they visit these sites of pain and pleasure, we learn.
In the final image of the show, “Gentle spirits, who traced the steps with bare feet from this world to the other,” Faustine’s body fades from veiled to invisible. We are left with an image of her empty white heels digging in the dirt. We are compelled to remember the Black women lost in this world. This is a lasting image that we must get rid of, so that we don’t forget what happened in our own city.
Nona Faustine: White Shoes
Through July 7 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000; brooklynmuseum.org.
Alana Pockros is on the editorial staff at The Nation and Cleveland Review of Books.
