In his pivotal photography series Seeing in the Dark, Rashid Johnson renders painterly portraits of the homeless people he came to know in downtown Chicago as a young artist working out of his South Michigan Avenue studio.  In these intimate portraits, Johnson’s subjects are not merely photographed but rather seen, treated, and depicted with dignity, with their names serving as titles for each individual work. Working in 1998-99, just as digital photography was replacing the chemistry of analog, Johnson purposefully employed antiquated nineteenth-century photographic techniques, including gelatin silver and Van Dyke Brown printing processes, and conceptually layered photograms with symbolic elements such as black-eyed peas and chicken bones. This series of unique photographic works is perhaps the earliest example of Johnson’s use of material as conceptual framework. In the decades since, Johnson’s distinct materials and methods—as well as his powerful voice—have drawn acclaim, particularly for his contribution to placing the African-American experience squarely and permanently into the public discourse of the twenty-first century.

Seeing in the Dark launched Johnson’s career, bringing him widespread international attention from curators and collectors. The series was included in Freestyle, Thelma Golden’s seminal 2001 exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and in Johnson’s 2002 solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others. Photographs from the Seeing in the Dark series are held by numerous public institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African-American Art. Works from Johnson’s photograms series also reside in the collection of the Art Institute, as well as in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Brooklyn Museum.

THE ART NEWSPAPER
A BRUSH WITH... RASHID JOHNSON

Hosted by Ben Luke
Produced by Julia Michalska, David Clack and Aimee Dawson

August 26th, 2020 | 12:29 BST

Produced by The Art Newspaper, A Brush With... Rashid Johnson is an in-depth podcast conversation spanning the artist's biggest influences, his beginnings as a photographer, and the importance of his early Seeing in the Dark series. Ben Luke talks to Johnson about the cultural experiences that have had an impact on his life and work and how the artist quickly occupied a "post-medium space," working in everything from film to sculpture, installation and, as with the other artists in the series, in painting. Through the conversation, Rashid reveals the influence of cultural figures as diverse as the hip-hop star Rakim, the jazz composer Sun Ra, writers including Toni Morrison and Paul Beatty, and artists as diverse as Roy DeCarava, Jean Dubuffet, Richard Tuttle and David Hammons.
 

A DIFFERENT SPACE OF ENCOUNTER
By Shelley Rice

It is precisely this tension—this internal battle—that animates Rashid Johnson’s Seeing in the Dark series and makes it so very special. His homeless sitters lived outside, in public; by definition, they were deprived of a domestic environment, a private space. But enacted within the theatrical space of Johnson’s prints, their relationship (or not) with him becomes an affirmation of interiority, of a complex subjectivity impervious to social degradation. Johnson uses the luxury and antiquity of his medium to work against the “bare life” experienced by his sitters, thus making his technique an active participant in the creation of meaning.[ii] This same duplicity is the basis of another early series of Van Dyke prints, in this case abstractions created at the same time as Seeing in the Dark.

Two of these works, Beans and Chicken Bones, forgo the human subject to focus on elements of modernist design—but in this case the pictures are constructed by arranging staples of the Black kitchen on printing-out paper, and then exposing them in the sun to create negative images. Referencing nineteenth-century contact prints by W. H. Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins as well as photograms by Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy made during the heyday of the European avant-garde, Johnson’s abstractions highlight, not the objects of industry, luxury, or botany chosen by these photographers, but the most basic ingredients of the African American lifestyle. Beans lines up its contents in a centralized (and leaky) circle; Chicken Bones allows the recognizable subject matter to cohere into an overall and lively composition. Beautiful and amusing, these prints make a statement once again about the hybrid nature of both Rashid Johnson’s art and his life.

ABOUT SHELLEY RICE

Shelley Rice is an Arts Professor at New York University, with a joint appointment between the Photography and Imaging Department, the Art History Department and the Institute of Fine Arts. She is the author of Parisian Views, the editor of Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman and the co-author of numerous books and catalogs. Her essays have appeared in many publications, for instance Art in America, Artforum, The Art Newspaper, Bookforum, Aperture, Tate Papers, French Studies and Etudes Photographiques. Rice is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Fulbright Grants (to France and Turkey), National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts Awards, a Hasselblad Research Fellowship and the PEN/Jerard Award for Non-Fiction Essay. In 2010 she was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters in France, and in 2015 she was awarded the David Payne Carter Award for Teaching Excellence from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.