Gary Burnley: In the Language of My Captor
Lloyd and his sister, 2021. Unique inkjet photo and mixed media physical collage 21.5” x 25”.
Written by Michelle O’Malley
Photo Edited by Christiana Nelson
Acclaimed photographer Gary Burnley recently received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Garnering approximately 3,000 applicants each year, the highly sought-after Fellowship is awarded only to the most promising scholars. Burnley was awarded the photography fellowship alongside 12 other selected recipients. Currently residing in Ridgefield, Connecticut, Burnley is an accomplished artist known for his mastery of photographic collage. He has a bachelor of fine arts degree from Washington University in St. Louis and a master of fine arts degree from Yale University.
His most recent exhibition, In the Language of My Captor, showcases photographic collage’s power to transform portraiture. Burnley is a Black artist himself and expresses the inequities and hardships of Black Americans by replacing historical portraiture subjects’ faces with pieces from photographs of present-day Black men and women’s. Consisting of 20 pieces of photographic collage, each of the portrait subjects’ faces contained elements—ingrained in us to be “opposing from one another,” according to Burnley—purposefully jumbled. The deliberate alteration opens groundbreaking dialogue in the old narrative of America’s history. We marvel at how narrow-minded a society could ever come to be. Yet viewing the exhibition’s images, seeing historical subjects overlaid with the faces of present-day Black people, sparks hope that change may eventually follow. The exhibition ran in February 2021 at New York’s Elizabeth Houston Gallery.
Untitled (Mabel), 2021. Unique inkjet photo and mixed media physical collage 14”x 12”.
Ideal Landscape, 2021. Unique inkjet photo and mixed media physical collage 28.5” x 14”.
Burnley’s exhibition took its title from a poem of the same name, Shane McCrae’s “In the Language of my Captor,” which reads:
I cannot talk about the place I came from
I do not want it to exist
The way I knew it
In the language of my captor.
In consideration of his own experience as a Black man, Burnley daringly overlays snippets of self-portrait photos onto the photograph of Emmett Till. Till was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 and his photograph appeared in newspapers nationwide. By placing photos of his own eyes and mouth over Till’s, Burnley, who is from St. Louis, as an artist blatantly reminds us that in a different time and place this tragic fate could have been his solely because of his skin color. Viewers get a sense of how fear-inducing it is to live as a Black man.
Self-Portrait, 2021. Unique inkjet photo and mixed media physical collage 22” x 17”.
Study (Iris), 2021. Unique inkjet photo and mixed media physical collage 32.5” x 14.5”.
Devin, 2021. Unique inkjet photo and mixed media physical collage 22” x 14.5”.
Burnley’s exhibition overturns the power of the captor, putting the narrative of American history into Black Americans’ hands. In describing his approach to creating these powerful images, Burnley reflects that “Black Americans live in a different world, or maybe ‘we live in the same world differently’ is a more accurate description. I think of being an artist and the work I do as a way of inserting myself into places where I do not belong, where historically I’ve been told I have no place.”
Maybe these images will hasten the creation of a more equal world.
Most recently, Burnley spoke at the Association of International Photography Art Dealer’s (AIPAD’s) Photography Show on May 21, in conversation with Stephen Frailey, the founder and editor of Dear Dave, a photography magazine. To learn more about Burnley’s career, visit garyburnley.com.
