Video: Manifest: Thirteen Colonies Exhibition Conversation

Visual artist Wendel A. White photographs objects, documents, and books held in public collections to explore the complexities of American history, slavery, abolition, concepts of race, and Black life and culture. In this program, marking the upcoming exhibition of his work at the Peabody Museum, White engage in a conversation with photographer William E. Williams, whose own images of architecture, landscapes, and African American historical sites, examine similar topics. Both artists share their approaches to documenting complex and painful aspects of U.S. history. They highlight marginalized or overlooked Black and African American stories of resilience, ingenuity, and agency and discuss reconnecting consciousness and memories to places and objects that signify the lives and experiences of Black communities.

Speakers

Wendel A. White, Distinguished Professor of Art, Stockton University; 2021 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University In conversation with William E. Williams, Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor in the Humanities; Professor of Fine Arts, Haverford College

Recorded date: May 15, 2024

Transcript

Manifest: Thirteen Colonies Exhibition Conversation

[00:00:07.68] It's so nice to see people in person now, and I know we also have an online audience, too. So welcome to you. My name is Jane Pickering, and I'm the William and Muriel Seabury Howells Director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, which is located on the traditional territory of the Massachusetts.

[00:00:26.97] It's my pleasure to welcome you to tonight's special event celebrating the opening of a new exhibition, "Manifest, Thirteen Colonies," which is a photographic show that I have had the privilege of looking at already, and you guys will have the privilege of doing it later.

[00:00:47.37] But it features the work of Wendel A. White, who is the 2021 recipient of the Peabody Museum's Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography. So I'm going to say a little bit about that, and then we'll be moving on to this evening's details.

[00:01:05.29] So just to say that the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography is awarded annually to support a practitioner of the photographic arts to create a major book of photographs on the human condition anywhere in the world. And you will have a chance to see the book, just a few advanced copies that we have as well.

[00:01:26.38] But Robert Gardner was an award-winning documentary filmmaker and author. He received both his BA and MA degrees from Harvard University. He served as director of the Film Study Center, was the founder and longtime director of the Carpenter Center for the Arts, and taught at Harvard for almost 40 years.

[00:01:46.34] He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences. And the endowment in his name, with support from his family, has enabled the museum to engage with and support the work of some truly incredible contemporary artists, including Wendel, from around the globe. So we're very grateful for that support.

[00:02:10.33] And tonight, Wendel and Professor William Williams from Haverford College will discuss their approaches to documenting complex and painful aspects of US history, as well as Black and African American stories of resilience, ingenuity, and agencies. And we're delighted to have you both here and have the opportunity to hear from you.

[00:02:34.39] At the end of the program, I hope you will join us upstairs in the galleries on the third floor to preview the exhibition and also enjoy a glass of wine and to really have an opportunity to see this amazing new show. One of my jobs is always to thank people, and there are so many staff members and partners to thank for making this project possible. And there'll be more thanks at the exhibit up in the reception, too.

[00:02:59.90] But first and foremost, to acknowledge Ilisa Barbash, who is the curator of visual anthropology at the Peabody and has been the driving force behind the exhibition and the fellowship, and we are really grateful for your leadership in this.

[00:03:15.55] I'd also like to thank Diana Loren, Catherine Cezeaux, Carrie Van Horn, Mór Madden, Helen Najarian, Angela Ortiz, and Faith Sutter for all their contributions to this project as well. And finally, of course, the exhibition is would not be possible without the leadership of Caroline Fernald, Sylvie Laborde, and the staff of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, who collaborated closely with Ilisa and with Wendel to turn their vision into a reality.

[00:03:47.05] So welcome, and I'm now going to turn the podium over to Ilisa, who will introduce the program and our speakers. Thank you.

[00:03:56.75] [APPLAUSE]

[00:04:03.59] Good evening. It's nice to see a lot of return visitors and to see some new faces here. It's my pleasure to introduce our guests this evening, Wendel A. White and William E. Williams, both celebrated photographers of many things, including Black History.

[00:04:24.80] So what does it mean to actually photograph history? When we hear the words "history" and "photography" together, we usually think about images taken of individuals at the time of an action as it is actually happening. This is what I'd call documentary photography, images which become both a record of and a part of history as they are taken.

[00:04:47.54] But photographing the past to reveal something that was perhaps never photographed and has already transpired is another challenge altogether. Both Wendel and William take up that challenge by using their photographic practice to evoke, interpret, and re-present history.

[00:05:08.41] How they do this, what they photograph, how they contextualize their images and what choices they make about composition, focal points, color or black and white, digital and/or analog technologies, are all a part of their art.

[00:05:26.91] As you will see in the images I will show you in a minute as I read their biographies, each artist makes very different choices in how he photographs history. At the risk of oversimplifying, while Wendel's work focuses on relics and belongings, William turns his gaze more toward place and architecture.

[00:05:48.64] And by making these and other photographic choices, they both remind us that history is not just something that has already happened, but it is also something that lives on. So I will show you-- give you a little bit of taste of what you're going to see this evening by starting with a few images of Wendel as I give you his biography.

[00:06:16.88] Born in Newark, New Jersey, Wendel A. White was awarded a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and an MFA in photography from the University of Texas at Austin. White is currently a distinguished professor of art and American studies at Stockton University in New Jersey.

[00:06:40.28] Wendel's awards and fellowships include an honorary doctor of arts, Oakland University, the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, a Guggenheim Fellowship, fellowships from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, and Grants from CENTER Santa Fe and the Graham Foundation.

[00:07:03.85] Recent projects include "Manifest, Thirteen Colonies," which is what you're going to see this evening upstairs; "Red Summer"; "Schools for the Colored"; "Village of Peace, an African American Community in Israel," "Small Towns, Black Lives," and other work.

[00:07:26.91] Turning our attention now to Willie Williams, who is very graciously, although a wonderful photographer in his own right, he's going to have to cede the spotlight a little bit more to Wendel.

[00:07:39.37] [LAUGHTER]

[00:07:41.73] Well, we'll see how that works out, right?

[00:07:45.72] William E. Williams is Audrey and John L. Dusseau Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Fine Arts, and curator of photography at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He received an MFA in photography from the Yale University School of Art. I'm giving you a little bit of time to read the captions.

[00:08:11.55] His photographs have been exhibited at the Cleveland Museum of Art, George Eastman House, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the National Gallery, and the Smithsonian. They are in public collections, including at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Baltimore Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Williams has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and has been a Pew Fellow, among other honors.

[00:08:50.38] I got one more. Here we go. So I'm going to leave this up as I invite Wendel White to the stage, followed by William Williams.

[00:09:09.41] [APPLAUSE]

[00:09:14.76] How do we start, Wendel?

[00:09:15.82] I have no idea.

[00:09:17.51] [LAUGHTER]

[00:09:19.35] Actually, the way it starts is I've known Wendel for decades. And I'm not quite sure where we met because it's been so long ago. That's how long we've known each other.

[00:09:33.02] And I think you can see from the slides that our work is very different, but it has a very similar theme. And we were invited here by Ilisa to talk about our common interest in African American, American, and the allied cultures that go with that, is why we make photographs.

[00:10:03.52] Now, I'm unabashedly a fan of Wendel's. He has produced a remarkable body of work. And as you heard from the prizes and awards that he's won, the most significant, I think, is the Gardner prize, because it comes at a very important critical juncture in his career, which is that he is moving towards objects in a very specific and significant way and reinvesting them with meaning.

[00:10:41.75] And I thought about, well, what could-- I think of-- thinking about Wendel, what he's doing historically, and I thought that the thing that most parallels what he's doing is Carter Woodson's book. It's called The Negro in Our History.

[00:11:03.77] And what it basically is-- it's first published in 1922. And it laid the basis for what was first Black History Week and then became Black History Month and then, a generation later, became Black Studies. And Woodson was the second person to receive a PhD from Harvard in 1912. Of course, the first was WEB Dubois. So a person of color and an exceptional scholar was Woodson, as well as an activist, as well as Dubois.

[00:11:43.20] And that action was manifested itself in this book, which is very approachable. And it has the essential information that you would need to know about the Negro. And I love the title, The Negro in Our Culture. So there's an equivalency there. And not only is it an equivalency, but he gives you the facts from the very beginning to the end.

[00:12:14.17] And I think, in some extent, that's exactly what you get from Wendel's work. The other thing I can say, Wendel, is when people look at your work, the objects that you've photographed, unless you know the scale of them, it's totally different.

[00:12:34.85] And I think the part of our conversation we were talking earlier-- we had a Zoom meeting because Ilisa wanted to make sure that we did a good job when we got up here to have our conversation.

[00:12:53.34] [LAUGHTER]

[00:12:55.67] And one of the questions was, like, how is our work different? I've already said one way of how it's different but it's the same. But that question came up, and it's best summarized by looking at Thomas Clarkson, who was a Quaker advocate and abolitionist. And he did primary work in finding what the horrors were of the slave trade by going to taverns in Bristol and taking firsthand accounts from the sailors.

[00:13:33.27] One of the things that is very important about African American history is that it's very painful. And the Clarkson book with its documentary evidence, one of those is a very complicated drawing of the Brooks slave ship, which was made in Liverpool and was serviced in Liverpool. And I think that's probably the best example of how it works different, but also how it has many of the same ingredients.

[00:14:05.20] But more importantly, in Wendel's work, he doesn't show you that horrific diagram of the slaves. Instead, he shows you the book, and it's partially opened. One picture that I really loved was it's open, but you don't see any part of the diagram. You just simply know that that's what it is, and you'll know what it is because of the caption.

[00:14:32.27] So I think it's very much the works are powerful in themselves, but once you have the context for what they are, they become even more so in terms of-- probably, depending on where you're thinking and where you're situated morally, they have the capability to open up a whole series of personal and ethical questions.

[00:14:59.26] So I think that's what I would say to you about your work and what it means to me and what I've gotten out of it. And what I've gotten out of it, really, is also your friendship, which is probably as important as having an artistic practice is that the friendship has meant a lot. And we worked together at SPE it was falling apart. And--

[00:15:33.87] When was it ever not falling apart?

[00:15:36.45] Well, it was really-- when we were involved in it, it was really falling apart, and slowly brought it back to some sense of renewal and sustainability and being important to photography educators, so.

[00:15:55.43] Earlier today, we also talked about the fact that you had been at that location in Liverpool where Clarkson met and talked with soldiers. And those are some-- also, that is a place that you had photographed. And so that was another connection.

[00:16:14.51] Some of the images that you're seeing on the screen right now are all images of the Clarkson book that exist in two different volumes. So they're not all the same book-- and certainly different editions. And what happened to me was early on in the project, I came across this book in the collection, actually, that was held in Salem, New Jersey, that came from the Goodwin sisters, who were Quakers and abolitionists and ran an Underground Railroad site in New Jersey.

[00:16:51.44] And one copy of the book was in the historical library collection. And I made a photograph for a project that we were working on that was apart from-- it was really more of a landscape project, but I wound up making this photograph of the book. And then, gradually, as I continued to work on the images for this project in particular, it was a piece that I wanted to continue to return to.

[00:17:19.43] And it seemed important that so many different people had collected this book and it had survived and ended up in archives in different places. And every one has a different appearance. I mean, there are hardly two of them that I encountered that had the same appearance.

[00:17:39.00] And so all of that was a way to underline one of the things that I've been looking at in terms of the experience of encountering archival material, which is the degree to which history and time transforms the objects that we're looking at.

[00:17:55.08] And this was a wonderful way to underline that because here were these objects that were ostensibly similar at one point in time, and some of them a little bit different, and the way in which they all evolved in different ways over time, depending on the way in which they were kept and maintained and handled over time.

[00:18:16.14] So it just became a very important way of thinking about the story. It also became important as a way of considering that complexity of a set of ideas about the way in which race and abolition and enslavement and all of those components, for African Americans in particular, was bound very tightly with ideas that came through in the white population in this country and in other countries, in England and the United States, and what that meant in terms of a belief about the psychic impact of those activities for everyone, for the entire society.

[00:19:10.04] So all of that was, I felt, being expressed in those particular books. And so we've been just sort of repeating this individual set of books for a couple of minutes because we wanted to start with this particular connection, the way in which Willie had been present at some of the places where the origins of these conversations took place on the other side of the Atlantic and made photographs there and the way in which those conversations ultimately played out in a publication that ended up, often, in the homes of a variety of different people, obviously, but certainly a popular text among abolitionists in the United States, regardless of whether they were Quakers or not.

[00:20:01.13] You heard it.

[00:20:01.99] [LAUGHTER]

[00:20:06.58] So I think-- are we going to continue?

[00:20:09.15] Yeah. And so maybe we can switch over to the other images, just so that you have other-- we're not going to stay so tightly attached to the images at this point forward. But we thought this was a wonderful point to just make that connection between us.

[00:20:25.90] The other part, obviously, that has even been brought up in the introduction is the degree to which we have both looked for the residue of Black life in America, and beyond, in your case, without making photographs of the faces of different people. And maybe you'll want to start with how you do that.

[00:20:54.49] Well, I guess I'll have to go back, and you'd have to know that my early work was about what my present work looks like. And then it took a dramatic change where I photographed very consciously high society and the demimonde.

[00:21:19.19] And I was very interested in how people behaved at parties. And so I photographed that for about 12 years. And at some point, I felt like I'd come to the end of photographing people at parties and what all that represented.

[00:21:41.51] And about 1984 or '85, the monuments at Gettysburg started to be refurbished in anticipation of the 150th anniversary of the Battle. And so I started going to Gettysburg and photographing the monuments.

[00:22:03.01] One thing that's very important you have to know about my particular biography is that early on I came under the influence of Walker Evans as a college student. I was introduced to his book, American Photographs, by one of his colleagues, a woman named Silvia Saunders.

[00:22:25.99] And I was born in Mississippi, and I grew up in Ohio. And the part of Ohio that I grew up in was the Connecticut Western Reserve. And Walker Evans photographed in New England, and he photographed in Vicksburg. Some of the most memorable pictures that he made were in Vicksburg.

[00:22:44.64] So those environments, both of them were ones that I grew up in. And so when I saw that book, it connected in a lot of different ways. And eventually, when I started photographing at Gettysburg, the movie Glory came out.

[00:23:01.61] And way back when I lived in Boston, I lived on the back side of Beacon Hill. And I worked at the Boston Public Library. So I'd always go either walk down to the BPL and Copley Square, or I would take a subway. So I always went by that monument.

[00:23:21.37] And I got a book-- I bought a book called Lay This Laurel by Lincoln Kirstein, and it's a book about the 54th Massachusetts and that monument that's on Boston Common. And I read the book, and I saw the monument. And at some point, I made a number of pictures of it, most of which I've lost, and I continue to look for them.

[00:23:51.20] And I remembered that book in 1989 and the 54th Massachusetts because when I was at Gettysburg, I didn't see any monuments to any Black people there. There was nothing.

[00:24:08.23] And I wondered about that, because there was a book and-- the book and then the film. And I said, why isn't there any pictorial representation of this? And that's when I started because there was this great void. There was no pictures of battlefields with Black soldiers or any of that.

[00:24:31.33] And that serially led into a number of projects after that. First of all, the Black Civil War soldiers, "Unsung Heroes," was published in 2007. But, again, it was about a decade of work photographing Black soldiers. And then that led into the Underground Railroad. And eventually, that led back to slavery, the visuality of slavery.

[00:25:03.53] And that's been how it's worked for me serially about filling in these voids. So if you know Walker Evans's work, you know that it's silent. But it's only silent in that it presents you with a paradox, that you're looking at something that doesn't exist or will exist or did exist. So you're simultaneously traveling in time.

[00:25:31.87] So the pictures that you saw earlier, the ones in England and then the ones that I'm doing right now in Old Lyme, Connecticut, of slavery that happened, or enslavement in places that happened in the 1700s and the 1600s in New England. So that's a part that I don't think many people are aware of, what slavery was like in New England, what it was like here in Massachusetts.

[00:26:09.08] And so as an artist, I started looking at that. And that's how I came to photograph or have been photographing what I've been doing now for decades. So that's how I got into decades. How did you do it? How did you get into that?

[00:26:29.17] Well, interestingly, in a very different way. But also, I had a seminal project that was-- and Ilisa referenced it-- was the "Small Towns, Black Lives" project, in which I concentrated on Black settlements in the southern part of New Jersey, historic settlements going back to the 18th century, and then some as newly settled as the 20th century.

[00:26:55.20] And I was photographing everything about those communities. They were mostly portraits of people in their homes and also in civic settings and activities and a range of different things. But in the process, there were a number of things that came up, artifacts that became part of the project-- the importance of schools in the community, what had been left behind in the segregated schools.

[00:27:22.43] And so that project becomes-- and also, I spent about a dozen years on that project. And that project then becomes a kind of seedbed for all these other projects. So I began first coming out of this experience of talking to people about their segregated schools, the complexity of the segregated schools within their community.

[00:27:46.94] And that led me to thinking about what was left behind. And so that became a landscape and architectural project that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River, but always in the north, and always looking at what was left behind of these schools that had once served the segregated school systems in these states-- New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

[00:28:12.49] And in that process, it just evolved gradually out of these conversations that I'd had during "Small Towns, Black Lives." Also, during "Small Towns, Black Lives," there were artifacts that I was coming across, remnants of cemeteries that had markings of US Colored troops.

[00:28:37.45] And, in fact, the first project that I did that led me into the archive was a small set of four or five headstones in what is now an all-white community. But those headstones were marked as USCT. And so at the time, I hadn't really done any archival research, and it was before any of that material was online. This was 1989, 1990.

[00:29:04.81] And so it led me to a trip to the National Archives to pull their veterans' folders to try and-- and, locally, nobody really knew the story of the community that had once been there. There had obviously once been a community there that had disappeared.

[00:29:21.04] I discovered that it pretty much died out around 1925, somewhere in the 1920s, '25. And then finding these veterans folders and all the different affidavits that had to be put into them in order to get veterans' benefits helped me construct the story of the community. And then that led me to other archival material. This was also-- by the time I was really working on this, this was also the beginning of my interest in web-based work.

[00:29:51.71] And so one of the things that led me to was thinking about, how can I share this material with people that's not part of my exhibition, that's not part of the work that I make? And so that led to at first a website called "The Cemetery" that then evolved into "Small Towns, Black Lives," which I have sort of frozen in time at 2004, I think it is-- yeah, about 2003, 2004, somewhere in that range.

[00:30:24.71] And we've sort of done some modern tricks underneath to keep it so that people can still look at the site. So the technology that we were using then was causing it to break all the time. So we fixed that.

[00:30:37.69] But I've preserved it there because I wanted to hold on to this idea that what I was looking at were these historical documents, and these documents were telling me the story. So I wanted to say, OK, these are the stories I'm writing and adding to my photographs. And these stories are coming from these archival documents that I was looking at in the National Archive and in the local surrogate's office and a range of different ways in which I started to put together the stories.

[00:31:06.35] And they were-- and some of that probably was-- thinking of influences, some of that was probably partially influenced by things like Wisconsin Death Trip. And we talked about Wright Morris earlier and the influence that the work of Wright Morris-- Wright Morris's work of images and text side by side.

[00:31:26.67] Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes' images of images and texts side by side were things that were deeply influential. All of that "Small Towns, Black Lives" project was a pairing of image and text throughout. And the archival work eventually winds up influencing and sending me back into public archives to look at a range of other things besides documents.

[00:31:52.08] And so I began looking at other kinds of material. I actually started this project-- I intended to do a landscape project. I was a visiting faculty member at Rochester Institute of Technology for one quarter, one semester. And I thought I was going to work on a project about the founding of the Niagara Movement in Buffalo and the meetings that took place on the Canadian side and start looking at that landscape.

[00:32:24.57] I came across information, and I photographed the gravesite of Frederick Douglass in Rochester and was looking at a lot of Frederick Douglass material, went to the University of Rochester, and discovered that they had a lock of his hair and the first book that he ever bought after becoming free of slavery. And it's inscribed with that narrative to his son.

[00:32:46.16] So the power of those objects caused me to totally abandon the other idea and decide that I was going to continue searching out those kinds of objects. And I spent the rest of that time frame in upstate New York looking at different collections-- at the slavery collection at Cornell, small historical collections like Jamestown, and everything sort of in between-- a range of different upstate New York collections in the burnt-over--

[00:33:19.82] District.

[00:33:20.07] --district.

[00:33:21.33] Yes. Can I go interrupt you here for a second?

[00:33:25.50] Of course.

[00:33:26.40] You use a very interesting word. You said, when I went-- I had to go to the National Archives and reconstruct who these people were that had USCT on their gravestones.

[00:33:38.12] Right, their stories, yeah.

[00:33:39.90] And USCT stands for United States Colored Troops. In the Civil War, it was very contentious to Have black soldiers fight for the Union. It only became a possibility when there were so many white people had died that Lincoln said-- and there's a great statue of him out here where he's underneath a soldier. That's very symbolic to me because that is where Black soldiers, Black citizens, showed that they were willing to defend the union.

[00:34:25.57] The only problem with that-- that wasn't the first time that Black people defended the union. It goes all the way back precolonial time that Black people did this. And what's interesting is Wendel says, I constructed.

[00:34:40.47] In some sense, he reconstructed because the fabric of memory had been broken as to where these people had settled once having gotten their freedom and once having earned that USCT because those are government-issued gravestones. At one point, the government also issued gravestones to people who were in the Confederate forces. So--

[00:35:04.38] Right.

[00:35:05.38] --that's--

[00:35:05.98] Right.

[00:35:07.54] So this is part of, I think, the paradox of being an American. There are things that are necessary for all of us to exist as a republic. At the same time, there are forces pulling us apart. And his work and my work identify some of the missing pieces.

[00:35:34.74] But it's more than that it's missing. What we're also saying is that it needs to be there. So constructing the past is reconnecting. It's restructuring. It's a redemptive process.

[00:35:52.68] I think if it was all about just going out and finding out, gosh, somebody didn't do this or they didn't do that, you couldn't do the work. It couldn't be sustaining over decades. And one of the reasons that it takes decades to do this is simply because there's such a void.

[00:36:14.70] And this work-- one of the things besides us having the same initials, WW, is that we're also in the same Guggenheim class. And so we received Guggenheims in 2003.

[00:36:30.86] And I didn't receive a Guggenheim because I was doing party pictures. I received it because I had started looking at and trying to recover the places where Black soldiers had fought. And this is the official parts of the rebellion.

[00:36:52.12] It's the history of the rebellion. Like Star Wars, like George Lucas says all those things about the rebellion, that all comes from the Civil War. Just lift those titles right out of the history of the Civil War. It's called The History of the Rebellion. And so that's been a big quest is to fill in those silences.

[00:37:19.74] And I think, after 20 years, that is starting to happen that we're all here. And it's a marvelous show that's happening here at the Peabody. It's part of this thing that's happening.

[00:37:34.77] At the same time, we also know what's happening in our general politic right now. And that's overlaid by this other thing. So I would like to stay on the positive side and say that we're trying to make room for a larger conversation.

[00:37:53.08] And this is where what artists do is important, that actually, we deal in reality, but we also deal in reconstruction and fabrication of necessary facts. And I think that's important. That's an important role that we play.

[00:38:14.40] And in a way of talking about the Peabody and talking about the Guggenheim Foundation and some of the other foundations that have supported this work over the years, that's where it gets to be-- these places, these entities, and that you're all here today, this is very important to our civic discourse. This is what makes us who we are.

[00:38:40.29] So I think, again, it's just necessary work. What is it that John Lewis said about-- it's a good--

[00:38:54.75] Necessary trouble?

[00:38:55.89] Good trouble?

[00:38:56.27] Good trouble. Good trouble. We're good trouble agents. It's good trouble.

[00:39:03.39] And it's so interesting that John Lewis-- he came out of those schools for the colored, the Rosenwald schools. I mean, most of the people that were involved in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s were products of segregated school systems. But someone made them aware of the Negro in our history.

[00:39:24.80] This particular volume that I have, I really treasure this because this is deaccessioned from a library in Wyoming.

[00:39:32.53] [LAUGHTER]

[00:39:34.62] I mean, that's the difference between Wendel and myself is that he wants to go to an archive and photograph these things. I want to collect them.

[00:39:45.63] Right, right, right.

[00:39:46.84] So my collecting has become very esoteric and that I like collecting-- this is not actually a collectible book, because it's an ex-library book. But it's collectible to me because somebody out in Wyoming read this thing.

[00:40:04.85] But I also have another copy. This is the fourth edition. I have a copy of the first edition, 1922, and it also came out of a library. It came out of the library in Bridgeport and was deaccessioned.

[00:40:19.70] But in that book, it's got all sorts of pencil marks about all kinds of salient facts. So I know that in Bridgeport, the people that were looking at this book, they were getting essential facts about African American history. I don't know if there were African Americans or not, but somebody really marked that book up.

[00:40:41.73] But they did it in a good way. They just did it in pencil. And it's very legible. And so I can look at these two books.

[00:40:49.89] And the other difference is that this one actually is all in one piece. That one from Bridgetown, it's falling apart. And so that's one of the things that I'll do is I'll get the book conserved so it'll be good for another 100 years, and maybe someone else will use it so much that it breaks down.

[00:41:13.15] So I like that kind of thing with a book or with some of these objects where they actually have the wear and you actually can see where it was used. That's a very important thing-- and then eventually was tossed. And then, of course, I like to be there to find it.

[00:41:36.73] I think, in some sense, that's part of your practice, too, is the patina of disuse, like finding those graves, that overgrown graveyard with one or two of those graves poking out. It's like an iris, which is a perennial. And there are those stones. They poked out. They were just waiting for you.

[00:42:06.30] They're waiting for Wendel White to go to the Archives.

[00:42:09.58] Right.

[00:42:11.05] And I would just I would add that the other-- earlier, you referenced the importance of the time that it takes to work on these projects. And I would agree with that and also add to it that in my particular case, I work at things kind of slowly. So it's not always-- I think some of it works well with exactly what my approach towards the material is, the time that it takes me to think about it, the way in which I have to process it and draw it out, the experience of being in these different collections-- so all these different collections.

[00:42:52.42] And just to clarify this as well, although it's probably a little evident from the title, but one of the things that became part of the Peabody proposal was that I had started already working on work like this that had a general title of "Manifest."

[00:43:15.25] And I had been working in Nebraska. I had started originally upstate New York, as I said. But then I worked in Nebraska, Iowa, worked in Florida on a Zora Neale Hurston project.

[00:43:27.38] And when this opportunity came, I was really already thinking about the fact that we were coming up on the 250th anniversary of Declaration of Independence. And I thought that this was a particular inflection point in which I wanted to-- and I knew how significant the conversation was around citizenship and race at the time of thinking about those founding documents.

[00:43:57.81] One of the things I've referred to is that some of these documents, even the literal manifests that I have photographed from slave ships, are in a sense also founding documents for African American life in the United States. And it represented for me the a moment in which I thought, well, I would want to bring together a way of looking at how these collections, how these objects have been brought into some public collections throughout this geographic territory, these 13 colonies plus Washington, DC.

[00:44:32.96] And the Washington, DC, piece was included certainly because it fits within the geography of the colonies, but also because I had worked on a project for the opening of the Smithsonian. And that collection encompasses such a broad spectrum of elements of life in the United States and Black life in the United States. It's so wide-ranging.

[00:44:58.14] So it's an important collection, and it was important that I got an opportunity to photograph that collection. So it seemed like a wonderful centerpiece to thinking about all of this in general. The pictures that I'm showing, though, here on the screen, and what you would see in the book, are not in a particular order.

[00:45:23.21] And we thought about this. And one of the things I thought about was that gradually, obviously, we could have imposed a framework on it-- these are all the photographs from South Carolina, these are the photographs from Delaware, these are the photographs from New Hampshire, Massachusetts-- or ordered them in time frames-- these are 17th-, 18th-, 19th-, 20th-century photographs, 21st-century photographs, objects.

[00:45:52.80] But one of the things I wanted to do was to replicate for you all what my experience was like, which was going from place to place at different times based on when collections would allow me to come in and visit, based on the ways in which these images had come into my body of work, and that they came in in these irregular ways, that they came in ways that were not ordered in the sense of this is happening, then this is happening, then that's happening.

[00:46:23.64] And so the way in which they all come together can feel somewhat random, I suppose. But at the same time, it was important to me that it also reflected the way in which I made the photographs. So they're not ordered in the way I made the photographs, but they reflect that sensibility. They reflect that travel.

[00:46:47.59] So, Wendel, I have a question. Do you have-- is The Columbian Orator in this collection? Did you-- is that in this--

[00:46:54.51] I did photograph it. It is not in this collection.

[00:46:57.32] OK, well, here's an interesting story for you. A young Abraham Lincoln, the first book that he bought was The Columbian Orator. And it eerily parallels Douglass's ascent to literacy because Abraham Lincoln was also self-taught.

[00:47:19.98] And it's so interesting to know that they were reading that book at the same time. And The Columbian Orator, it was a selection of speeches that dealt with the founding of America. And it all had to do with all of the good stuff, about what we should all be believing in. And so both Douglass and Lincoln read that.

[00:47:50.71] And it's not so ironic that later on, these two people, one Black, one white, but both poor, both coming from families where literacy was not part of the household-- and I was thinking today as we were walking around the green here, I was wondering if Lincoln's son went to Harvard. I didn't know, but the point of whether you went to Harvard or not-- he did go to college. And Lincoln never went to college.

[00:48:26.13] And the same thing with Douglass's sons, his descendants-- they all went to college. So that story of how you become from the backwoods to the White House and then beyond to become a plutocrat, well, Frederick Douglass traveled that same road with the same book. And they're both great Americans.

[00:48:50.80] And I was just thinking about that as you were saying that that lock of hair, rather than looking at Douglass's landscape, was instead to look at his hair and to look at that book. And that gets to an interesting story about archives.

[00:49:13.36] And we were talking a little bit about this earlier over lunch is what-- do archives really tell the full story, or are they a reflection of our own imperfection, what we collect, what we remember, that you went into that archive and you said, I'm going to photograph this book, I'm going to photograph that hair, and that's going to become a whole series? That in itself is a reclamation project in that you are creating a new narrative, literally, a new narrative.

[00:49:49.55] Absolutely. And it is that-- it is exactly that experience of going in and thinking about-- and in many of the conversations that I've had with people in the Archives, it is so fascinating to know that the material that comes in comes in in such haphazard ways.

[00:50:10.82] Some of it is the collection going out and seeking particular material. And it's not to say that every archive is just the random stuff that people put in there, but a lot of them are. Especially a lot of the smaller ones are dependent upon somebody in the community saying, well, we've had this material, and I'm going to give you this material.

[00:50:33.89] The Douglass sewing box at the Nebraska State Historical Society was given to them by the woman who had grown up in the Douglass household and then settled in Nebraska and had brought all these mementos from her life that overlapped into the Douglass family and then passed it into that particular archive, so far from where her life really started.

[00:51:05.62] And so that's not necessarily an object-- it's a very rich collection of objects, but it's not necessarily one that archive might have gone out to pursue. It's something that came to them. And I think that that is the kind of fascinating experience that I have as I go from one collection to another as things come in.

[00:51:30.81] I recently was talking about visiting the collection at Brown. And just before I came in, this piece of linoleum came in that had been part of a promotional piece used by the Black Panthers that had been stenciled on, and just this remarkable way in which these objects and this leapfrogging of moments throughout history, and the hope that I have that gathering all those things will make sense.

[00:52:06.82] And I think that it has started to. At this point, I feel a sense of cohesion in the book project. I feel a sense of cohesion in the exhibition and the body of work that we've created.