#having a black or mixed character is not good representation it needs depth and nuance

[daystarvoyage]

I loved your video on the masculization of Luz Noceda. Gender non-conformity is valid and woc who identify as such deserve representation. What is not okay is that a tomboyish Afro-Latina girl was paired with a feminine white girl which reinforces stereotypes about black women. This wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t so common in fiction. Interracial sapphic couples often have the butch be woc and the femme is white. There are exceptions, but they are far rarer. I would have preferred if Lumity was fem4fem, butch4butch, or Luz was fem and Amity was masc.

I feel this is the problem throughout todays disney media,how stale it reflects there previous works, they have put out that effected this, yes looking at toh, it was fine to have a main poc character contribute to diversity, and ok explore her sexuality which i commend the show does however,

It falls flat of not exploring luz's family,Ecthnicity, & show great cultural represenation like other works in disney like seeing the PS sponsors about different cultral backgrounds, cuisines and heritages.

The three shows did it better (molly mcgee, Moon girl & amphibia were better examples of how to do it right) and felt the crew of toh didnt have a clue or proper reseearch on how to execute a story of differences, ecthnicty & culturals. I mean you live in a fantasy world with over 100 species and your telling me, the show only fcous on the humanoid shape priveldege characters (which fans only pay attention to In beauty standard way. SMH

DO BETTER STAFF

However the big egg on the face after rewatcing the show ad reading the wiki, felt some parts being subpar, the way they potrayed luz and shelved aside, in favor for amity! it gotten to the point where along its writing and potrayal of the two was trite & selfisih writing.

I for one were along with critiques & well minded fans or who get it, that luz's Feminine traits were watered down, to favor amity's fem persona knowing fans would gravitate to her, and times the show pused luz aside (like other characters) in fans favor for the little white girl whos picture perfect and drained of what makes her unique even if the show doesnt catch on yall still find a way to defend her, Like the writing and storytelling of the show was Trite & Fradualent.

at times even if luz didnt had a proper sexuality to show her feminine side cause fans like to based people off sexuality instead of writting oraganic stories nowadays. (it wont matter a bit) cause at the end the potrayal of darker people are always degraded & disrespected,

along with the fandoms distaste and judgement of camilla knowing full well shes doing her duty as a mother! (whos also dark skin along gus so Picture how there portrayed.)

the way the fans and series portray luz without showing her girly side is that of a trope thats been done throughout to show agenda whcih is the girl boss movement to blame, so ima try not to be too long,

but it was foul how they made practically all the toh poc characters more obscured or watered down in writting cause everyone favored more of lighter skin characters as the show went on,

(the eclipse lake episode, HUNTER AMITY AND EDA TAKING OVER THE SHOW WHILE WILLOW AND GUS BE SIDELINED, LIKE THEM IN SEASON 1 FINALE, HUNTER BEING A PLOT DEVICE FOR HUNTLOW TO HAPPEN WHICH DOES NOTHING FOR THE STORY ITSELF INSTEAD SHIPPING DISCOURSE.)

so people need to understand the words favoritsim and bias at this point. cause they way they want to be with the in crowd badly and drawing or potraying luz in a butch way can stifle how we see POCs as nothing but masculine or tomboyish has be tiresome just to show a girlboss agenda yet you dont know WHO LUZ IS.

i thank you for sharing this with me cause i worked hard and loved that video cause its to bring to light of how the gaming industry trend is now leaking into animation now.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS & ENJOY THIS READ ABOUT MORE OF AFRICAN AMERICA MEDIA PORTRAYAL

[ejmcmoon-fanworks]

Writing Black American Stories but not making them Black™️

 Inspired by @lilquill and her post here.

So a lot of times on Tumblr, I hear the phrase, “Write stories with black characters, but don’t write stories about being black.” This seems like a good sentiment to follow until you start seeing characters who are basically white and the only thing that’s black about them is a throwaway line about their skin color. 

Both of these strategies have valid points, but the problem is they’re both misunderstood. 

When we say that we don’t want stories about being black, we mean that we don’t want stories about black suffering. We don’t want stories about living in neighborhoods with gangs and drugs. We don’t want stories about people getting shot and police brutality. 

I can’t even write those stories without help. I never grew up in that environment. I grew up in nice suburban houses where I never had to worry about being in danger (for the most part. There were some crazy people in West Virginia where I lived, but that’s an entirely different thing.)

When we say that we don’t want stories about being black, we don’t want writers to strip characters of their blackness. There are so many great things about black culture that can enrich your character and make good representation without being offensive. 

So without further ado, here are some things about being black that don’t include drugs, gangs, and police brutality. 

Disclaimer: When I say “black culture,” I mean Black American culture. I don’t know a thing about what it’s like to be African, Caribbean, or black in a European or Asian country. I’m also writing this from a mixed-race and multicultural standpoint since I really didn’t grow up in predominantly black communities. 

More will be under the cut. 

Music

Listen, Stevie Wonder was my childhood. My Dad is a baby boomer, so I grew up on all the oldies. The Temptations, the Isley Brothers, James Brown...those are all my childhood. There’s more to black music than just hip hop. 

Not that I’m talking trash about hip hop, though! I have plenty of black friends who do listen to hip hop and that’s a big part of being black. I’m just saying you have plenty of options. 

This is gonna be a big theme throughout this post, but a person’s music taste just depends on where and who they grew up with. I grew up in white neighborhoods and schools with older parents, so I really didn’t start listening to modern, black hip hop artists until high school. But your black character can listen to hip hop at an earlier age if that’s how they were raised.

And I know incorporating music is hard because using lyrics in books (and sometimes even song titles) can lead to copyright shenanigans. But you can still mention bands and artists. Maybe your black character is helping with a 70s themed school dance and they recommend Earth, Wind, and Fire. Maybe your black character is about to have a romantic dance in the house with their SO and they turn on Al Green (gosh, I can’t wait to do this someday hjdshjklh). 

Because if there’s one thing black people are proud of, it’s our music. 

Hair

This goes without saying. Hair is a big thing for black people. 

First of all, you DO NOT brush curly hair. You comb it. Please do not have your black characters brush their hair. That’s not how it works. 

Also, nightcaps are a thing. You don’t sleep on curly hair either. That makes it more tangled and even harder to comb through in the morning. In terms of writing, you could add in something simple like this: 

“I didn’t like it when you said that to me earlier,” said Freda, frowning as she put her nightcap on.

So include nightcaps! They’re helpful! (They come off at night, though. Nasty little buggers).

My next point is going to include some of my experiences from being mixed-race. My mom is white and she had no idea what to with my hair at first. She figured out a lot along the way with research (Continuing that point for the white people and non-black POC. If you do nothing else, just research. It helps so much). 

But despite my mom’s effort, most of my in-depth knowledge about curly hair came from older, black family friends. A lot of them spent time doing my hair. Doing someone’s hair is a great bonding experience. When you need to have two black characters talk over something, have Person A do cornrows for the other person. 

Also! Because my mom sometimes struggled with my hair and my dad also had a glorious afro back in the day, my dad does my hair sometimes! He also helps me wash it, oil it, etc. I just think it’d be really cute if a book had a scene with a black father and child talking while he’s doing their hair.

And just to wrap this part up, even while having black hair, there’s a lot I don’t know. I don’t know jack about dreads and different types of braids and how to take care of them. So I’m not going to talk about that. The black community by itself is very diverse and everyone has different experiences!

Anyway, that’s it for right now! I know this post only has two things, but I’m tired and the other things are too nuanced and complex for my brain right now. And I definitely want to do them justice. This is definitely a part one of many!

Just remember, not writing stories about being black doesn’t mean stripping characters of their blackness.

[i-just-like-commenting]

Themes in Luke Cage s2: The Quest for Control

What separates the good Netflix MCU seasons from the weaker ones are how well integrated their themes are into the setup of the story. Daredevil‘s first season did it well with its exploration of the thin lines between heroes and villains, the difficulty of choosing what is good. The first season of Luke Cage focused heavily on the idea of not being able to go backwards, only forwards. The first season Jessica Jones and even the deeply-flawed Punisher tried to tackle issues like sexually assault, survivor’s guilt, and PTSD. But none of them ever quite reached up to the level of that first season of Daredevil.

Then along came this season and I’ve got more themes than I can wrap my head around. I’ve only watched it through once, so take this as a preliminary digestion of what I saw and feel free to add your thoughts and nuances to my arguments.

I’m going to start with the theme that is central to Luke’s character arc for this season: the quest for control, and particularly the idea that this quest is futile. This idea that one can achieve omnipotence is the hubris of classic tragedy, and make no mistake that this season is a tragedy.

Luke’s journey is probably going to be the most controversial element of this season. I get this, to a certain degree. Sometimes you want your heroes to be paragons or to triumph over adversity. Sometimes you want them to skirt the dark side. It’s certainly best if you can have a mix of both, but there aren’t many black superheroes out there. It’s easy for me, as a white woman, to appreciate Luke’s struggle with the dark side this season because I have, at this point, plenty of representation of white women both noble and messed up available for me in media. If that is not what you want right now, I respect that. That same issue is why, as a person with a mental illness, I dropped the second season of Legion once I started seeing where it was going (though rest assured, Luke doesn’t do anything nearly as awful as what David does by the end of that show).

Luke throughout the first season was a very reactive character, partly because his story didn’t actually begin that season. It began in the first season of Jessica Jones, where Luke is a very active character, actively hunting down his wife’s killers. And what does he get for it? Well, he finds out that a woman he cared for was involved in Reva’s death and had been lying to him the whole time, and then he gets his mind controlled by a telepathic supervillain who tries to force him to kill Jessica just like she was forced to kill his wife, and he is only stopped by a shotgun blast straight to his head that nearly does him in.

It is thus perhaps understandable that Luke Cage didn’t want to be a hero anymore and was trying to live a quiet life. His arc for the first season was realizing he loved Harlem too much to do that. In the meantime, though, he was a highly reactive character. This is not always a bad thing for superheroes; go too far in the other direction of actively hunting down bad guys and you get Frank Castle. It did mean that the villains drove most of the plot rather than Luke himself. (spoilers follow...)

In the second season, motivated I believe by being so out of his depth with the Hand in The Defenders and seeing Misty lose an arm, Luke tries to take back control of his life. The problem with that no one is ever really in complete control of their lives, and in trying to get total control, Luke winds up becoming more controlled than ever.

We open with Luke attempting to hunt down every stash house selling heroin with his name on it – not because this drug is particularly more lethal than any other, but because it is using his name without his permission. This focus on controlling his image is one that hounds Luke throughout the season. He’s reluctant to sign promotional deals not so much because he doesn’t want to make money, but rather because he doesn’t want to be “bought.” He doesn’t want Nike or whoever to have any control over him. He wants to be his own man.

Yet thanks to not copyrighting an app early on, he is easily found by almost anyone, most of them armed with cameras. While Luke is sometimes able to promote himself – his “Yo, I’m Luke Cage” speech with all its chest-thumping and dabbing being the most prominent – it also means that when Bushmaster wipes him out, the video goes viral, and is sold without his permission to ESPN, leaving the narrative entirely out of Luke’s hands.

Unable to have control of his public life as a hero of Harlem, Luke shifts his focus to control of his personal life. He refuses his father’s efforts to reach out to him, and when Claire pushes for them to reconcile he dismisses her. When Claire questions his excessive force with Cockroach, he accuses her of “castrating” him. Given that Luke doesn’t much demonstrate many other signs of toxic masculinity, I think this hyperbole has less to do with her “unmanning” him and more to do with taming him, making him docile, under someone else’s control. While I firmly believe Luke was never in any risk of hurting Claire, he does get angry enough to break her wall, losing control of himself and losing her. Once again the quest for control backfires on him.

Even the fan-service-y cameo episode with Danny Rand serves toward this theme of need for control, as Luke works on self-control of his anger through Danny’s advice. To a certain degree this works; Luke is in much more control of his emotions towards the end of the series than towards the beginning, but that doesn’t solve his biggest issue, his frustration with trying to control the criminal world that swirls around him.

Much of his vigilante work involves him chafing at the restrictions and controls presented by legal options. He’s not alone in this. Misty Knight has a similar path of trying to determine how comfortable she is with following the law versus going her own way. She was this close to going full Scarfe and planting evidence when the lawful means of going after a domestic abuser weren’t working, and turned in her badge because she felt that she’d crossed a line and could no longer be police. She scorned at Ridenhour’s compromises, and started assuming a vigilante role.

Misty, however, has power thrust upon her unexpectedly when she is made the temporary commander of her precinct, and in being in actual control makes her realize how much she misjudged the people who had been in control of her before. Heavy lies the crown as they say, and instead of becoming more rogue in her new role, she becomes more conformed to the establishment, more willing to strike deals and work in the system. The downside of this is her having to accept that her “wins” might be fewer and far between. The upside is that she probably the only character in this season to come out in a more positive position than she was in the beginning. To gain control, she has to give up some control, albeit on her own terms.

Contrast this to the walking disaster that is Mariah Dillard Stokes this season. Mariah’s miserable childhood has left her unable to develop trust with anyone, and so she takes on all decisions by herself and keeps control of her assets in her hands, despite repeated efforts by Shades to convince her that he wants to help her share her burdens. Probably due to the stress of taking all of this on herself, Mariah spends about half this season drunk and thus very not in control of herself, making more and more bad decisions as the series progresses. Trusting someone else means giving up control, and when she’s done that she’s been hurt, horrifically. So she trusts no one, betrays everyone, and winds up alone and dead.

These two parallel paths offer two possible models for where Luke goes after the end of this season. This season ends with Luke deciding to take absolute control of Harlem, taking Mariah’s place as the power-broker keeping a wall around the neighborhood and making deals with the bad guys to keep them out.

Yet the utter irony is that Luke only winds up taking this position of “dictator” (more on that term later) as an option of last resort. He is forced by Mariah’s machinations to take her position, with Mariah specifically having chosen him as her “heir” over her own daughter. He loves Harlem as much as she does, and Mariah finds he is the only person to be reliable around her - reliably against her, that is. And of course she also chooses him out of spite, to see how long he can remain incorruptible if he follows her path.

It is a trap. Donovan tells him so, bluntly. But Luke walks into it because he believes he’ll finally get his control in the end, and because it is the only option he sees left.

And try as I might, I have a hard time imagining what alternative he really had. He stops a gang war by becoming the boss of crime, he ends bloodshed, and the scale of what was unleashed on Harlem was beyond anything anyone was prepared to handle by other means. So perhaps this is the best choice among bad choices – for now.

Less forgivable is his decision to turn away Claire in the final scene (and if I can criticize the show for a moment, I really wish we could have seen her to know how she reacts to that rejection). That is a decidedly Mariah move, pushing away the one who loves you because to love is to let someone else have some control over you, if only your heart. (There are direct scene-for-scene parallels between some of Luke’s moments with Claire and Mariah’s with Shades for precisely this reason).

This arc for Luke seems to borrow heavily from Bendis’ run on Daredevil where Matt Murdock declared himself the new Kingpin of Hell’s Kitchen, and established a peace by force much as what Luke is planning. It did not end well for Matt; he wound up losing all his friends, his girlfriend, and going to prison. I hope it doesn’t go that far for Luke. At the very least, he seems open to continuing to work with Misty Knight, though that door-closing shot (a direct reference to the end of The Godfather) doesn’t bode well for that relationship continuing. But we also got a glimpse of connection between him and Danny Rand that promises maybe, maybe he can be convinced to be a true dictator.

Because, as anyone who has seen The Dark Knight knows, ancient Roman dictators were an emergency position created to deal with crises, at the end of which they were supposed to give up their power. Can Luke make the hard choice, the truly strong choice, and know when it’s time to relinquish his quest for total control, to be vulnerable, to allow himself to not be omnipotent?

I guess we will have to wait and see. Though I have other reasons to hope, but that will require another post on another theme of this season: families, both good and bad, found and hereditary.

[fakesam]

Belated Black Panther Thoughts

Everything happening regarding Black Panther right now feels like a miracle. You can only congratulate a giant, increasingly powerful conglomerate so much for realizing black money runs the same as white money, but it is still a moment to be celebrated. Seeing a movie this proudly black in the limelight, with such a large budget and plenty of promotional backing, is delightfully paradoxical given the toxic whiteness infecting the national atmosphere from the top down. This movie dropped at the right time. The biggest individual piece of promo comes courtesy of Black Panther: The Album, curated by Kendrick Lamar and the rest of the Top Dawg Entertainment braintrust. Licensed movie soundtracks have experienced something like renaissance over the last couple years, a business maneuver congealing the interests of film studios looking for anything to boost social media traffic and musicians to get some extra exposure and a decent payday. The results of these partnerships has been mixed at best, even when the Best Rapper Alive is involved. Remember when Kendrick rapped over an overly macho remix of Tame Impala’s “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards”? Most people don’t.

Even with this project, it was easy to develop some cynicism about the final results. Kendrick has become more and more intransigent about being the voice of the voiceless, but he’s hasn't been above easy mainstream pop dollars in the past. Man gave verses to Taylor Swift and Maroon 5, and performed with Imagine Dragons. “All The Stars”, the most successful single off The Album, is a pleasant enough pop-rap hit that struts perfectly over the end credits of a blockbuster, but it lacks the depth of feeling that has made Lamar the current Poet Laureate of Black America. There’s also “Pray For Me”, a Weeknd and Kendrick collab that sounds like it was salvaged off the Starboy cutting room floor. These songs are fine, but eminently forgettable. Thankfully, these tracks are clear outliers, the lone examples of mainstream genuflecting across the entire project. The uniqueness and specificity that makes Black Panther so appealing as a film is also apparent in the sprawling sonic odyssey of its soundtrack. It’s better than anyone could've hoped for.

The playlist era of album design, gives credence to the worst impulses of people just trying to get paid, narrative coherence be damned. Migos’ Culture II was ruined by an engorged tracklist that led to a runtime comparable to most of the nominees for Best Picture at the Oscars. Twenty-four songs was at least ten too many, but who needs an editor when the penalty for choosing quantity over quality is so minimal? But it’s the perfect format for a movie soundtrack.

Kendrick’s ability as a tastemaker has never really been a thing to consider until now. His albums are hermetically-sealed portraits of his psyche, exploring his personal tensions and how they’re informed by his personal history and the lineage of black strife in America. This intricate exploration of his inner self doesn’t leave much room for other voices - the featured artists welcomed into his world are brought in for a very specific purpose. Kendrick is also very selective about the songs of other artists he’s willing to jump on. Combine that with his social media reticence, and the lists of contemporaries that Kendrick listens to are tantalizingly vague. There’s an undeniable intrigue to learning who a near-consensus superstar genius deems worthy of the aux cord. Consciously leeching on to the burgeoning movements of younger rappers is a tactic that Drake has perfected over the years. The two current titans of hip-hop have been acting out a musical cold war for the last couple years, so it’s tempting in a sense to think of Black Panther: The Album as Kendrick running with Drake’s idea of a “playlist project” that he tried to make happen with the release of More Life.

But it’s much more tempting to talk about the sumptuous quality of this music on hand. The litany of artists brought together to assemble this album, a mix of established stars, burgeoning upstarts and total unknowns, bring disparate genres and musical approaches to the table, all cohesively strung together under the diasporic flag of black excellence.

It’s obvious in hindsight to see why Kendrick was so attracted to the project that he asked to oversee the entire soundtrack after watching snippets of the film during its production. The divide between T’Challa and Killmonger’s views on progress mirrors the internal strife that has Kendrick has been ruminating on his entire career. TDE took their role as gatekeepers seriously, drawing delineations between the conflicts of the movie and the endless struggle that is sadly inherent with the black experience. Black Panther could never have the intimate complexity of a solo Kendrick record, but it details the black experience with more nuance than many albums told from one perspective. The strokes are broad, but the completed painting is still worthy of admiration.

Most of TDE shows up in some form. SZA provides the hook on the aforementioned “All the Stars”, Schoolboy Q reminds us of his undeniable charisma on “X”. Ab-Soul puts together his first good verse since his 2012 album Control System on “Bloody Waters”. We even get a glimpse of the lesser seen, frivolous Kendrick on “Big Shot”, a bouncy, “New Freezer” interpolating Travis Scott collab that doubles as the latest entry in the “Dope Rap Songs built around a Flute Sample” pantheon. from rap to pop to heavily indebted house music from South Africa. But it’s the newer faces that making their formal introduction to larger audiences that makes this album genuinely exciting. SOB x RBE have received most of the acclaim for their scene-stealing performance on “Paramedic”, and that praise is warranted, but they’re not the only up and comers who killed it. Jorja Smith makes a war march sound like heaven on “I Am”, and South African artists Yugen Blakrok and Babes Wodumo make their case for international renown on “Opps” and the South African house jam “Redemption”. Kendrick is present on every song - his contributions ranging from being the best rapper alive to windy background vocalist - but he’s very much a secondary figure in the works of others.

It’s bears repeating how remarkable it is that this thing has been allowed to exist. That Future inhales a bunch of helium, interpolates Slick Rick, and asks for a blowjob with one absurdly entertaining turn of phrase. Someone at Marvel signed off on all of this. We should all be thankful for that man or woman or committee of persons. What could’ve been a simple cash grab for TDE becomes something much more stirring and exciting thanks to a commitment to take the source material seriously enough to use it as a launching point for work that is both evocative and entertaining. A perfect table setter for the main event.

As I sat in the chair of the theater waiting for the movie to start, I was slightly nervous about the quality of the movie. The hype cycle had spun into overdrive had built the movie to stratospheric heights. Black Panther stopped being a movie and became a religious communion. That’s a lot to live up to. Aside from the inescapable expectations created by fans, Marvel’s cinematic spell lost their power over me years ago, as the negative aspects of the “Movies as TV episodes” system became more glaring. Nothing of consequence ever happened and the action scenes were overwrought and anticlimactic, antiseptic, CGI-soaked action that put me to sleep. The last comic book movie I enjoyed without much reservation was the first Guardians of the Galaxy, way back in 2014, 87 years ago. Even Wonder Woman, one of the rare superhero films allowed to take some risks - as much as giving women the chance to be all-powerful warriors without the prompting of a man counts as a risk to some people - lost me during the third act when Gal Gadot fought a Bloodborne boss yelling corny “Give In To Evil and Join Me!!!!!!!” dialogue in the middle of a flaming airfield. When comic book movies go extremely comic book-y, I lose all interest. My expectations were middling despite the widespread adoration of the movie that compelled me to go see it in the first place. Not quite as cynical as I tend to be, but not wearing a T’Challa costume to the theater.

By the time the entire elite class of Wakanda was shimmying from on high while T’Challa fought for the throne of this Afro-futurist utopia (the first time this happens), I realized how wrong my assumptions were. I didn’t realize how much I needed this movie to exist. Just witnessing this much blackness - a proud, intelligent, secure version of blackness - actively enriched me while I was watching it. The power of representation isn’t lost on me, but I believed I was past the point where I would experience such gratification from a giant blockbuster. I underestimated how affirming it would be to see this much black prosperity on film. It���s amazing how impactful the casting of black actors in roles usually given to white people can be. I’m jealous of little kids who can look up to Shuri or T’Challa or Nakia and feel a little less ashamed of themselves at a young age. M’Baku’s capacity to be large and menacing and also capable of telling jokes about cannibalism is magical. I would watch all of these characters do anything for hours. Instant icons, all of them.  

Black Panther also solves the eternal villain problem that’s been flummoxing superhero films since Heath Ledger died. Killmonger is incredible. He is still a villain, since his endgame of choice is to start a literal race war, but his motivations and reasoning up to that point are totally understandable. From an outsider’s perspective, Wakanda is this hovel of selfish conservatism that does nothing to stop systemic oppression and kills anyone who whispers about their existence too loudly. Sitting pretty in their Vibranium-powered towers above the struggle. It’d be easy to resent Wakanda if you’ve never seen Shuri pranking T’Challa in her lab. The most logical emotion for him is anger. He went out like a G, too. That last line was perfect. I would have liked to see more of a conversation between Killmonger and T’Challa before he took over, but you can only hope for so much civil rights philosophizing in a blockbuster. It was enough to feel like the obligatory third act battle was had actual stakes. Black Panther finally made the Game of Thrones fandom sensible to me. Political maneuvering can be way more engaging than I realized. Blame George Lucas for that train of thought.

I find it hard to think about this movie in any critical sense because I’m so happy that it was allowed to exist in this form. After sleeping on it, I will concede that the South Korea sequence didn’t need to be that long. The “Andy Serkis is a Soundcloud rapper” goof was an airball. But anyone who would rather complain about about the scene’s usefulness as a plot device more so than celebrate the badassery of Chadwick Boseman and Danai Gurira is not to be trusted. Same goes for the fact that this movie has a sense of humor that can’t be reduced to just Tony Stark saying something snarky or tryhard quirkiness, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 style. They really let Ryan Coogler do that shit. Black Panther is the first Marvel movie that was clearly in the hands of an auteur, with a vision uncompromised by studio notes or the compulsion to tie itself to the rest of Marvel Cinematic Universe. This movie never feigns interest in the machinations of the Avengers or whatever wold-destroying portal they need to destroy, and thank god for that. The narrowness of the story lends itself to much more in-depth character development and a sense of place. It rarely feels or looks like other Marvel movies. Wakanda is too good for reality, but the open designs of the shopping areas and the impeccable fashion of the citizens tied into the history of African culture in a way that's easy to intuit. Shoutout to the Codeine Crazy-esque skyline in T’Challa’s first herb-induced vision. Shoutout to the guy with the giant disc in his mouth. Man had fits for days.

Even my mom loved it. I saw the movie with her and Danai Gurira’s performance was so good that she thought about shaving her own head in her honor. She also said she wanted braids like Angela Bassett’s character, but quickly decided against it because of the time commitment to getting such a hairstyle. But getting that level of inspiration from a Marvel movie spells out how special Black Panther is. I rarely watch movies with her anymore. Our tastes have mostly split as I’ve grown up. I haven’t seen her that giddy walking out of the theater since… ever? Her love of the movie really made it clear how special this moment is for the culture. I kinda hate that I said for the culture, but I don’t know how to end this.  Many thanks to Ryan Coogler and company for giving me that moment. Uhhhhhhhhhh bye.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: The Vibrant Palette of Raghubir Singh’s India

Raghubir Singh, “Crawford Market, Bombay, Maharashtra” (1993), photograph copyright © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh

Something apparently minor but revelatory happened when I was with Raghubir Singh in Mumbai (when it was still called Bombay) in the early 1990s. We were in a fascinating place called ‘The Crawford Market,” a vast compendium of stalls filled with local produce. Wherever you looked there were spectacular things to see. (I define “spectacle” as a sight unusually rewarding to the eye.) I was excited by all the action; Raghubir, on the contrary, seemed utterly calm.

Suddenly, the revealing thing happened. He whipped his 35mm camera up to his eyes, and snapped it, apparently without having taken stock of the scene itself. There had been no pause for judgment or framing, and no duration in the taking of the picture. The moment was over, as it seemed, before it had begun.

How often have we heard about the stealth of street photographers, their agility, the speed of their varied attentions? Raghubir was of their breed, but faster still, and I think, for good reason. He had to reconcile his need for the most precise depth of field with his use of the slowest but most fine-grained of films, Kodachrome 25. To extend his lapidary focus from the nearest plane to the farthest out, he had to narrow the aperture of the lens. To reckon with the available light, he had to compensate by lengthening the time of exposure, which endangers any image to the hazards of wobble and blur. What I had seen that day at the market was the steadiest grip, capable of holding its operations absolutely firm for a period as improbably lengthy as a sixtieth of a second. The photographer himself was blasé about this skill, which enabled him to do justice to the most layered and dense figurations of his Indian homeland.

Raghubir Singh, “Man Diving, Ganges Floods, Benares, Uttar Pradesh” (1985), photograph copyright © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh

Speaking of them, at some other point, I remember asking him if he were ever fatigued by the inexhaustible exoticism of his subjects. For Raghubir, the exotic would be some small town in Ohio or Iowa. The dictionary defines “exotic” as “of foreign origin or character, not native, introduced from abroad but not fully naturalized or acclimated.” “Exotic” requires some psychic distance, some feeling of “otherness,” perceived by the viewer. The adjective often implies a source of attraction but not necessarily of approval, depending on those involved.

I can’t help quoting Susan Sontag on this subject: “The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” This remark stems from the 1970s, when some writers took an adversarial approach to what they assumed to be the colonizing drive of Western photographic culture. Superior technology — so goes the argument — induces a stereotypical overview of unfamiliar lives, leaving them in false, submissive categories. When I suggested to Raghubir, in an interview, that his publishers were packaging his work as appropriate for tourist appetites, he replied that such a notion “has nothing to do with me. I mean, I grew up in India. My basic education has been in India […] I would be out of my mind to see [my work] as travel photography. I think the notion of travel photography […] means passing through.”

But to be a tourist in one’s own reality, as Sontag suggests, is a statement that goes too far in its implication of a self-deceiving mindset on a superficial journey to visit itself. On the contrary, this kind of trip might just unmask the familiar by revelation of the exotic that lies within.

Raghubir Singh, “Ganapati Immersion, Chowpatty, Bombay, Maharashtra” (1989), photograph copyright © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh

Also, I have never thought that the term “tourist photography” was derogatory — we have museums that literally tour us through investigations of our past and present, and even sponsor trips to foreign lands. Photography incarnates that impulse to travel, documents and legitimates it as an agent of our existential wonder, by virtue of its great pictorial capacity. I view Raghubir’s career as knowingly in the service of that wonder —and as a creative extension of it — relayed out to his own background.

Interestingly, as his art got underway in the 1960s and ‘70s, a new documentary impulse was energizing American photography. He had significant contacts with it, personally and professionally. But even before he became acquainted with some of its innovational figures — Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand — he’d been working on assignment for National Geographic, and had been influenced by Life magazine telephoto reportage. These were useful outlets for him to learn his craft, as well as idioms worth rejecting on behalf of his art.

In order to explore Indian lives, he could employ Life’s monumental pictorialism and mix it with the expansiveness of the new documentarians. Nor should we forget that Raghubir, a student of photographic history, admired Henri Cartier Bresson and was sympathetic to the Magnum Agency’s blend of aesthetic self-consciousness and journalistic responsibility. Charged up with this mélange of genres, he set out on a path that would lead him to become the visual poet laureate of the subcontinent.

Raghubir Singh, “Monsoon Rains, Monghyr, Bihar” (1967), photograph copyright © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh

This happened within the nominal mode of street photography, an aspect of which has not been well understood. Since the invention of the camera, scholars have long taken note of the dialogue between painters and photographers. These cultural workers most evidently converged at that moment in time dominated by the movement called Realism. Photography appealed to realist sensibility by virtue of its seeming ownership of material appearances. Of course painting had the higher status in this conversation, since it could rely on its prestige as freely created vision, whereas photography offered only a mechanical copy of outer worlds. Useful as this was in the acquisition of knowledge, the copy was considered inferior or at best only a handmaiden to imaginative art.

The inevitable next step in the weakening interaction between the two media came with the advent of modernism. Painting’s retreat from, or dismissal of, material appearances became one of its cardinal traits. And let’s not overlook another casualty produced in general by modern art: its demotion of story content in painting, even representational painting, later marginalized by abstraction. Viewers were prompted to search for internal conceptual meanings rather than for illustrational clues to behavior in likely schemes of cause and effect.

The many practices in photography were, by contrast, invested in such schemes, reflected by their specific social utility. Group portraiture, political reportage, wedding pictures, combat photography, etc., are genres we know very well. They shuffle us around the world in mundane narrative containers, most often accompanied by textual fill-in. Certain questions were answered: who was there, for what purpose, and on what date? We also might learn about the doings that preceded or succeeded the scenes at issue, of which these pictures represent an instance, whether central or incidental.

Raghubir Singh, “Victoria Terminus, Bombay, Maharashtra” (1991), photograph copyright © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh

Not so street photography! In characteristic examples of its kind, the view is populated with incidentals and the discursive context acts as mere caption, at best. There tends to be a notion of continuities active beyond the frame, as important in their absence as whatever presences are shown within it. There is no necessary appointment between the picture makers and their motifs. Street photographers enjoy wide latitude in this respect. It’s up to them, at the moment or in retrospect, to determine a picture’s worthiness of being released to a public. In other words, they themselves initially decide if the work is expressive enough of their concerns to warrant being attached to their names. No wonder that photographers with artistic ambitions were drawn to the street genre. Its openness to capricious possibilities becomes an incentive to workers unwilling to tell stories and yet be still highly engaged with the world. They are lyrical opportunists, caught up with the challenge of finding memorable nuance in the psychology of space, or in the moody atmosphere of their own feelings, or even in the tension of being stared back by their subjects. There is no story line to such observations, snatched from multiple, program-free proceedings. They are understood as things that simply happen. You could say that photographers who range this way are modernists without portfolio.

I hope I’m not being presumptuous by fitting Raghubir Singh into this idiom. True enough, he has his own named territories and stated themes, which he often introduced by writing serious historical and social essays to accompany them. None of his readers would escape the impression that he had an investigative regard for his material. He was not playing around in the hope of finding weird, floating anomalies, like his American colleagues. But he brought to his work an element that helped to change the temper of street photography to come. And by that I mean color.

Raghubir Singh, “Boy at Bus Stop, New Delhi” (1982), photograph copyright © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh

There was once a period when you could cite grievances that certain photos were “about” color, although never would you hear that a photograph was about black-and-white. We now look back upon black-and-white photography as a pictorial report of situations and relationships that occurred in the irrevocable past. This retrospection is not caused by decreased use of the medium but rather because its gray scheme contracts sensory recall, like memory does, fading across time. A kind of melancholy arises from this encounter, often suitable to evidently sad situations. Thus, when I first saw the color pictures of the American Depression by FSA photographers Russell Lee and Jack Delano, I was shocked by their charming, pastel tints: in cases like these, color can very well have its own narrative impact that transgresses received notions of emotional proprietary.

In Raghubir’s case, color functions as the core illumination of his great surveys. He was able to take immediate advantage of strong, varied palettes because they were inherent in his subjects’ presentation to themselves and to the world. No matter what misery might be evident, the ensemble could still be very decorative and upbeat if permeated by religious fervor. By recognizing color’s ability to moisten a scene at the point of the spectator’s contact with it, the photographer often manages to suggest that time is extended, from the antiquity of ritual to the “now” of the present moment. The epic and the intimate cohabit in his books, each of them adorned by the peacock flutterings at their turfs.

The exultation of these Indian sagas reminded me of a high point in my own experience: years ago, I used to jog through Southern Manhattan, playing a tape of a great romantic symphony in on my Walkman cassette player. How to synchronize the elated entrance of the soprano in the last movement with the highpoint of my exercise: the apex of the runway on the Brooklyn Bridge? In hindsight, I should have realized that this reach for the sublime was anticipated by the sound of a little click in a Bombay market.

Raghubir Singh’s work is currently on view in Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan), which will continue through January 2, 2018.

The post The Vibrant Palette of Raghubir Singh’s India appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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