Dannielle Bowman : 2020 Aperture Portfolio Prize Winner - “What Had Happened”
Vision (Bump’N’Curl),2019 © Dannielle Bowman
By Lara Southern
“What had happened?”
As we inch ever so slightly past 2020, we’re left somewhat adrift in the remnant rip tides of disquiet whipped up by an utterly discombobulating ten months. While the year itself is not yet far enough in our rearview mirror to fully comprehend, and Covid-19 still too fresh, the pernicious presence of systemic racism that was met with long-overdue global outrage following George Floyd’s murder,, is by no means a new reality, remaining one we have willfully avoided honesty and clarity around for centuries.
In Dannielle Bowman’s photographic series exhibition in progress, “What Had Happened”, she seeks to investigate, if not answer, just that. Currently showing at the Baxter St Camera Club of New York, this collection is an evolving exploration of the African American Diaspora, investigated through the multiple landscapes of her local LA neighborhood.
October’s Shadows (I),2019 © Dannielle Bowman
As the recent recipient of the 2020 Aperture Portfolio Prize and the 2020 PHP Women Photographer’s Grant, Bowman’s capacity to capture the narrative of the African American diaspora is generating the requisite attention and adulation. She has remarked that shooting for the New York Times 1619 project in 2019 had a lasting impact on her style and artistic ethos, as well as her emotional connection to each piece.
Embracing her youth as an artist (she graduated with an MFA from Yale University in 2018, after receiving her BFA from The Cooper Union), she permits her photographic style to evolve organically as she grows. “What Had Happened” - a series in progress - is unique and telling of Bowman’s desire to record the organic shifts and meanderings of her stylistic fingerprint. Ambiguity and interpretation are important facets of her work, as she aims not to express the full panoply of personal beliefs and opinions within every piece.
Vision (Garage),2019 © Dannielle Bowman
In recent years, she has explored black and white medium exclusively, incorporating light as a physical character within her frames, rather than a mere asset to her art. Bowman utilizes an often saturated California sun to great effect, throwing her multi-tonal greys into stark relief with the deep finely-etched shadows thrown in her carefully curated compositions.
By highlighting the residential neighborhoods around which she grew up, namely Inglewood, Crenshaw, and Baldwin Hills, Bowman’s works beg the question as to what we characterize as “home” and as the journeys we embark upon when leaving one home for another. The scenes feel familiar, a nostalgic thread connecting each image that is instantly recognizable, and yet the quiet subtleties of tone and scenic structure beg further inspection.
LEFT: Inglewood I,2019 © Dannielle Bowman4. RIGHT: Inglewood II,2019 © Dannielle Bowman
The images are marked not merely by what is highlighted in the frame, but – most notably, perhaps – by what is omitted. The voids and negative spaces highlighted by Bowman’s artful use of shadows, serve as invitations to the viewer to explore the tales of those left out of the grand archives of American history, specifically members of the African American community displaced from the rural South to the urban North in the mid 20th century (as the artist’s own grandparents were).
Eschewing the more traditionally explosive depictions of the migratory narrative, her analysis of the subject matter lies in the details – the family portraits on a mantle, sap glittering inconspicuously at the corner of a frame – all hinting at the racial nuances embedded into our everyday.
It is the fact that Bowman's work paints a portrait of the history and its reverberations in this particularly painful present, with such quiet delicacy – that makes it all the more powerful.
For more of Dannielle’s work, visit the artist’s website here and her pieces currently on view at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York.
