No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 August 2010
Joseph Rodríguez re-creates and represents African American experiences which yet remain hidden or elided in mainstream memorializations of Hurricane Katrina. Intent upon giving “a voice to the voiceless,” Rodríguez relies upon an aesthetics of rupture and juxtaposition to create multiple narratives resistant to any reformist impetus towards cathartic trajectories of moral uplift. Fragmented and elliptical, his photographs, diary entries and textual captions operate in slippery relation to one another to signify upon unimaginable traumas. Rodríguez's subjects maintain agency by engaging in political, cultural and social acts of resistance. Signifying on the documentary mode, he creates self-reflexive compositions which rely on a symbolic visual language to challenge white mainstream tendencies towards depicting African Americans as types rather than as individuals. Refusing to objectify, appropriate or colonize private black testimonies by documenting the black body as a spectacular site of suffering, he turns instead to individual identities as intertwined with family histories as the only effective way in which to begin to explore the atrocities enacted in the aftermath of Katrina. Anti-explication, anti-exhibition and anti-sensationalism, Rodríguez's Still Here is a work of disjuncture, reimagining and experimentation.
1 Quoted in Joseph Rodríguez, Still Here: Stories after Katrina (New York: powerHouse books, 2008), 7. Subsequent references will be included in the text.
2 Joseph Rodríguez in telephone interview with the author, 15 Sept. 2009.
3 Joseph Rodríguez, East Side Stories: Gang Life in East L.A. (New York: powerHouse Books, 2000; first published 1998), 30–31.
4 Telephone interview.
5 Ibid.
6 For the full text of Langston Hughes's “Mother to Son” see http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/matoson.html, accessed 21 Sept. 2009.
7 Ibid.
8 Telephone interview.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Rodríguez, East Side Stories, 179.
12 Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” in Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis, eds., Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (New York: International Center of Photography, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003), 84.
13 Joseph Rodríguez, Spanish Harlem (New York: National Museum of American Art, 1994); idem, East Side Stories; idem, Juvenile (New York: powerHouse Books, 2004); Joseph Rodríguez and Rubén Martinez, Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City (New York: powerHouse Books, 2006). For further information regarding Rodríguez's exhibition “Spirit and Flesh: Mexico's Sexual Revolution” on view at the DRKRM Gallery in Los Angeles early in 2009 see http://zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/mexsex/01.html, accessed 14 Sept. 2009.
14 See Rodríguez's website for further information: http://www.josephrodriguezphotography.com/, last accessed 16 April 2010.
15 Ibid.
16 Telephone interview.
17 Rodríguez, East Side Stories, 182.
18 Ibid.
19 Lindahl, Carl, “Publishing up a Storm: Katrina Book Notes,” Callaloo, 29, 4 (2007), 1543–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1544.
20 Hurricane Katrina has also been the subject of numerous art exhibitions. See Katrina: Mississippi Women Remember: Photographs by Melody Golding, on view at http://www.melodygolding.com/katrina.html, last accessed 16 April 2010; and Traces: In the Path of Hurricane Katrina, by David Burnett, available at http://www.contactpressimages.com/exhibitions/pdfs/Katrina.pdf, last accessed 16 April 2010.
21 Larry Towell, In the Wake of Katrina (London: Chris Boot Ltd, 2006); Chris Jordan, Bill McKibben and Susan Zakin, In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006); Thomas Neff, Holding Out and Hanging On: Surviving Hurricane Katrina (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007).
22 Dan Burkholder, The Color of Loss: An Intimate Portrait of New Orleans after Katrina (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008).
23 bell hooks, “In Our Glory: Photography and Black life,” in Deborah Willis, ed., Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994), 46.
24 Richard Ings, “The Improvisational Image,” unpublished typescript, 2009, 4. Kindly lent to the author. For further information see the website titled “Project: Lives Out of Context: A Hurricane of Race,” which can be found at http://www.soros.org/resources/multimedia/katrina/projects/HurricaneRace/, last accessed 15April 2010.
25 Ings, 4.
26 Erina Duganne, “Transcending the Fixity of Race: The Kamoinge Workshop and the Question of a ‘Black Aesthetic’ in Photography,” in Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford, eds., New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 199.
27 For a full reproduction of Williams's Another Black Blue Story see: http://www.soros.org/resources/multimedia/katrina/projects/BlackBlues/story_BlackBlues.php, accessed 7 Sept. 2009.
28 Ibid.
29 Rodríguez, East Side Stories, 126.
30 Telephone interview.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Henry Box Brown and Charles Stearns, Narrative of Henry Box Brown (Boston: Brown and Stearns, 1849). A full reproduction of this text is available at: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/boxbrown/boxbrown.html, accessed 14 March 2010.
34 Telephone interview.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Cheryl I. Harris and Devon W. Carbado, “Loot or Find: Fact or Frame?”, in David Dante Troutt et al., eds., After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina (New York: New Press, 2006), 93.
40 hooks, “In Our Glory,” 53.
41 Gordon Parks, Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 180.
42 Ibid, xiv.
43 Rodríguez, East Side Stories, 31.
44 Rodríguez, Juvenile, n.p.
45 Ibid.
46 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952).
47 Telephone interview.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Rodríguez, East Side Stories, 31.
51 Telephone interview.
52 Rodríguez, East Side Stories, 108.
53 Telephone interview.
54 Parks, Voices in the Mirror, 180.
55 Telephone interview.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Quoted in Rodríguez, East Side Stories, 30.
59 Telephone interview.
60 Rodríguez, East Side Stories, 184.
61 hooks, “In Our Glory,” 46.
62 Telephone interview.