Vince Aletti
Dawoud Bey, Vince Aletti, April 14, 1990.
In honor of the opening of Vince Aletti’s show The Drawer at White Columns this week, we’re sharing his guest curation from Musée Issue No. 24 — Identity.
Vince Aletti – The Drawer
March 22–May 4, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, March 22 from 6-8pm
White Columns, 91 Horatio, Street New York, NY 10014
GUEST CURATOR
by Vince Aletti
Photographs are a way to identify ourselves and others. Even if they don’t tell the whole story, they get us past security; through customs; onto a dating site; into the paper, the yearbook, the scrapbook, and your mom’s virtual wallet. They can describe or obscure, flatter or insult. They can be fact and fiction, sometimes simultaneously. The pictures I’ve collected here, all from my own collection, can only hint at this range of possibilities. They include a mug shot, a film still, a magazine cover, a publicity glossy, a group of class photos, and portraits made in a studio and in a photobooth. Dawoud Bey’s Polaroid of me (opposite) was made in 1990, at the now long-defunct Ledel Gallery in Soho. Bey, who had a show on the walls, improvised a studio in the back of the gallery where he made impromptu black-and-white portraits. I took advantage of a rare opportunity and kept the result tucked away in the original paper sleeve. The bearded, bare-chested young man in Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s portrait was the subject of one of his early self-published Shoot zines. Jesse DeMartino, a photographer I met in his skateboarding days, made self-portraits every day in 2005. The one included here, from September 13, was mailed to me as a postcard, along with a number of others in his Waxing & Waning series, with a note that the project “pushed [him] to the brink of sanity on a number of occasions.” Deborah Luster’s gold-toned tintype of a cotton-field worker is also from a larger series on inmates in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison. Detailed information about the subject, including his name, date of birth, and the date he entered the prison system, has been scratched into the back of the plate. But Luster’s portrait of Donald Garringer is the opposite of the mechanical mug shot. She sees her subject fully, with clear but understated sympathy and concern. Much the same can be said for Judith Joy Ross, probably best known for the devastating portraits she made at Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1984. I’m especially fond of her pictures of children, and the one that follows was made in a rose garden in Allentown, Pennsylvania, not far from where Ross lives. Vance Allen, little-known outside of New York’s Black photography circles, shot a splendidly turned-out Sly Stone off the screen in the course of a TV interview sometime in the mid-1970's. Bill Jacobson often prefers to keep identity deliberately vague: an impression, a blur, a souvenir. He titles his image “I Am Not This Body #478,” leaving the mystery intact.
James J. Kriegsman, The Supremes, 1965.
Bob Mizer for Athletic Model Guild. Model portrait ca. 1955.
Judith Joy Ross, Rose Garden, Allentown, Pa., 1996.
Deborah Luster, Donald Garringer, L.S.P. Angola, Louisiana, 9.17.1999.
Anonymous class photos from a group of 26, undated, early 1950s.
Anonymous class photos from a group of 26, undated, early 1950s.
Paul Sepuya. Alex, 2005.
(Film still) Jeanne Moreau in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte, 1960.
Bill Jacobson, I Am Not This Body #478, 1999. Photograph Courtesy the artist.
Jesse Demartino, September 13, 2005 from the series Waxing & Waning: 365 Self-Portraits.
Vance Allen, Sly Stone on TV, undated, ca. 1970.
Anonymous studio portrait. ca. 1975.
i-D, February 1996, Kate Moss by David Sims.
Anonymous Photomatic portrait, ca. 1940s.
