MARKIESHA THORNTON

The Future Past of Now questions what the African diaspora would look like today if a natural synthesis had occurred instead of the forced enslavement and forced assimilation of people of color through the Atlantic slave trade. What traditions would we have kept and how would we have blended those traditions with other cultures?  What would our fashions, our hairstyles, our spiritual practices be? What would we be like if we did not have to contend with the sense of loss that we feel from having been disconnected from our ancestral home and traditions? 

 

    To imagine the answers to these questions, I am using portraiture and a method of hand coloring black and white silver gelatin prints of analog photos taken with a large format 4x5 monorail camera. This method allows me to layer the mixing of present and past to play with a sense of time that blends an alternate past with a reimagined present. My project also serves as an allegory of revisionism reworking denigrating ideas of people of color into images both common and resplendent. I reiterate this by using ethnographic style photos, showcasing heritage and connectedness rather than otherness and being less superior. Taking cues from Pan Africanism and Afrofuturism, I am blending pre-colonial and post-colonial cultural traditions of native people across continents; utilizing migration patterns, sociology, religion, mythology, and lore to insert an idea of natural synthesis sans post-colonial repercussions. 

 

    For decades, images of black people have been used in many ways; from the disparaging images of ethnography to the pigeonholes of black caricatures, to the explanatory and often prescription-esque images of black plight.  Recently, during the Black Lives Matter Movement, images of black people have served to both reiterate a racial divide and as a call-to-action. Harkening back to the 1960’s era civil rights movement and the stagnant and stifled conversation about race and equality, The Future Past of Now is an effort to push forward conversations surrounding blackness, the trauma of oppression, racial inequality and disparities that have affected black people across the diaspora. The work aims to not only transform images of black people but also the functionality of those images in the healing of a people trying to move on without the apology that may never be given but is undoubtedly deserved.