From Our Archives: Nona Faustine
Nona Faustine, 72 Canal, Sojourner Truth’s Home, 2016
This interview was first featured in Issue 21: Risk
SARAH SUNDAY: How did you first come to experiment with self-portraits and did you know right away that this was something you wanted to pursue further?
NONA FAUSTINE: Generally, my exploration into self-portraiture occurred during my first year of graduate school at the International Center of Photography at Bard College and yes, it was something I knew I wanted to continue to explore.
SARAH: Throughout your work, there’s a common theme of representation of black people and black women, as well as the representation of yourself as a person. How has your relationship with these images changed and developed over the years?
NONA: I don’t think that things have changed. I’ve definitely grown as an artist and as a photographer, and so have the kinds of stories that I want to tell, specifically through White Shoes. The theme of my relationship to the history of this country as a New Yorker and as an African American remains the same. The goals that I’ve set for myself within White Shoes have been to try to articulate all of my ideas about representation and art history. However, my relationship to that is still the same. The greatest difference in the series and telling the story now is all about time and how it unfolds.
SARAH: You’ve talked about your travels and said that through European art you came to realize, “the way art speaks to the soul.“ Do you think because of your interactions with artwork that experi- ence changed the way you create your own art?
NONA: Of course. Any artists who look at art is impacted. Any person who looks at powerful art is impacted. It changes your whole perspective. That’s what great art does.
SARAH: What are some pieces of artwork, or particular artists, that have specifically inspired you to create the work you do now?
NONA: There's not any one artist. The work that I make now came from explorations of my life and the evolution of me as an artist and a woman. It is my journey through motherhood and the looking and seeing from everyday life. Mostly I gained the tools in graduate school from a series of assignments by my professors at the International Center of Photography that led me to create the way I do. The portraits, also a process of evolution, were a documentary style mixed with portraiture that came about from the beginning of me taking pictures. They were inspirations ranging from my father's early im- ages of my family to Roy Decarava to James Van Der Zee.
Nona Faustine, She Gave Them All She Could And Still They Ask For More, 2016.
SARAH: A lot of your work deals with freedoms or freedoms denied; for example, a frequent motif in White Shoes is handcuffs. What is your own personal experience with freedom when creating your work?
NONA: I am an African American and a descendant of the enslaved people who built this country. Some peo- ple would say we’ve only really been free since the 1970s. As a person with that relationship to freedom and slavery, it is, of course, something that is very personal to me and something that, as an African American, I don’t take for granted. I could never take my freedom for granted because of the way it was obtained. My ancestors resisted and fought over hundreds of years. Centuries. Because of them, that is something I honor.
SARAH: Do you think your artwork speaks to race relations today?
NONA: Of course it does. That’s the whole point of the series. Particularly, White Shoes is talking about the relationship between the past and the present and what our role is in that right now.
SARAH: Do you consider yourself an activist, and do you think that your artwork has the potential to enact some changes in society?
NONA: Am I an activist? That's a good question. I'm wary of labels. I certainly have the spirit! I'm just an artist making work from the heart analyzing the world around me and measuring its impact on my life and the lives of others.
SARAH: Let’s get into White Shoes. How do you actually plan the shoots, especially the ones that are in public places in New York City?
NONA: You just have to leave it up to God, really. You have to pray that everything goes right. As any photographer or visual artist will tell you, you just prepare as much as you can, but you can never know what is going to actually happen until you get to the site. Because I’m working without a permit and I’m working in a big city that is constantly changing, it all occurs kind of spontaneously. I bring my camera, I have a goal, and I have an idea of where I want to stand or shoot. I try to go for that. Most times it works. Sometimes I may have to come back, but really it’s very simple.
SARAH: Have you ever experienced any conflict or anything bad happening while you were trying to shoot in public?
NONA: No, actually. I’m surprised at that, but so far no conflict and no issues. I’ve been very lucky.
Nona Faustine, Lobbying The Gods For A Miracle, Brooklyn, 2016.
SARAH: This series confronts an issue of remembering or forgetting history. You said you wanted to explore the questions of, “Why should we remember?” and “Who benefits from forgetting?" Can you explain how these questions interact with your series?
NONA: Those who benefit from forgetting are the larger power structure; the majority of white Ameri- cans that are in charge of running this country. I think a lot of the forgetting occurs within non-African people or non-people-of-color. If you’re a white person in America, you don’t have to be reminded of the history of African people in this country because you are largely the ones in charge and running it as the heads of institutions and businesses. As Americans, we all have this responsibility to honor and remember the past and to expand and correct on past sins of our fathers and our forefathers and moth- ers. That’s the reason we’re in the situation that we are in right now; this huge racial strife in America that is ever-present and seems to be ever-growing. It is because we have not learned from our past. We have not acknowledged the past hurts and sins of slavery, of Jim Crow, and even of the civil rights movement. We don’t acknowledge it, and when I say “we”, I feel collectively we are all in this together. Of course, it’s not African Americans who have to remember, because we do remember. The larger population of this country has deep responsibility. If you want to continue this strife and continue handing down this collective trauma that has been with us for hundreds of years, just keep forgetting our past then we will continue to go down this road. But if you want to have true healing, then I think that we must acknowledge and we must discuss. That’s one of the things that I hope my work does, specifically White Shoes, but also, my mitochondrial series and monument series. It’s all talking about how we look at one another. It’s about the monuments we persevere, who gets to persevere, and whose legacy gets to be put on the pedestal. There are a lot of relevant questions that I’m asking.
SARAH: With White Shoes, why the nudity? Do you think these photos could have been created with you wearing clothes?
NONA: I get asked that a lot. The nudity is in solidarity with the way enslaved people were put on display as they went on auction blocks, but also the dehumanizing way that enslaved women were taken advan- tage of and shown. There’s also another important part of celebrating and reclaiming the black body in art specifically. There’s a series of images of enslaved people taken on a plantation in 1850 South Carolina commissioned by Louis Agassiz and taken by J.T. Zealy and those images are the first images that we see of enslaved people in America. I really wanted to answer and challenge those images within my own way of reclaiming. I knew the power of the black body, and specifically of my fleshy, large body. I also celebrated and loved that, having become a mother shortly before I started this series. My daughter was about three and a half at the time and it was from that perspective. It was about acknowledging and talk- ing about the pain, but also the beauty of my body, of a black woman’s body and reclaiming that in the art.
Nona Faustine, Of My Body I make Monuments in Your Honor, Brooklyn, 2014.
SARAH: How does risk factor into your work?
NONA: In White Shoes the risk is everything. There’s a risk to my physical being. There’s the threat of arrest, being naked and vulnerable on the streets. The way society is today, women are often assaulted or killed, for little or nothing; just from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Putting myself out there in the middle of the intersection at Wall Street with ongoing traffic was a huge risk. It was a very important site and that was the only way that I could physically be there. There was the Tweed Courthouse, which has the precinct right across the street, down the block. There’s so much risk involved in doing many of the im- ages in White Shoes. Oftentimes I’m in cold weather of 18 degrees or 35 degrees with snow on the ground. There’s a lot of risks, but it’s about really connecting with the sites and showing the sites for what they are and hoping that people understand that.
SARAH: What is a risk that you're particularly proud of having taken, in your work or otherwise? What is a risk you regret having taken?
NONA: The risk of bearing one’s pain and trauma in the way that I have. The White Shoes series was so personal that I thought I would just keep them to me. I'm glad that I did not. It was a great risk with the nudity, but I will never regret it. It came from the truest part of my being. I think that's what being an artist is all about. Those kinds of actions push humanity forward and expand the conversation.
SARAH: In the future, do you think you’ll continue with themes such as this or will you be heading in a different direction?
NONA: I really don’t know what will come after this has finished. It’s part of who I am to talk about history and social issues and I love that. That is who I am. I love science, archeology, and history and I’ve really found myself within these two series. The issues that I’m talking about are ones that you almost can’t exhaust as an artist and as a writer because the history is still unfolding. We’re still discovering so many things. There are still so many ways to talk about it. We’re still so very much impacted by the history. Then there are times I think I would do something different. I probably may need a break from this and just talk about flowers or the beauty of dirt.
Self portrait © Nona Faustine
SARAH: If you could convey one message through your photographs to the viewers, what would you want to say, but also, who would you most want to say it to? What demographic would you want your message to get to?
NONA: The work is for everyone. The work is a love letter to black women. It is a love letter to New York. It’s about the trauma of America. There are so many different people who I’m speaking to. I’m speaking to so many of my white brothers and sisters who are struggling to understand their African American brothers and sisters as well and what we’ve gone through and what our mothers and grandmothers and forefathers have got through in this country. I’m speaking to my daughter. I’m hopefully speaking to my grandchildren to let them know what it was like to be here at this time; who we are and who I am. It’s a personal biography as well. This particular time in New York City where gentrification is eras- ing so many neighborhoods and places that we have built. It’s saying, “I was here.” It’s such a complex multilevel of things that are going on, but I’m talking to my people. I’m talking to American people, no matter what color. So many people have connected across the board with the work. What touches me very deeply is when white women come to me and tell me how much they love the work, how powerful it is, how much they connect with the work and then I realize that your personal story is the thing that reaches across the divide. It reaches across and pulls other people in. We are, on many levels, all the same.
