Beauty and the face of change

Theodore  Fonville Winans’s Dixie Belles, Central Louisiana, 1938. Featured in the  exhibit, the picture captures the emerging confidence of upwardly  mobile African-American youth.

A Hamilton photography exhibit explores how African-Americans learned to express self-worth

To see oneself as beautiful is to be empowered – a state of mind that was hard to come by for African-Americans in the aftermath of slavery and discrimination. The current exhibition Posing Beauty in African-American Culture at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, tells the tale of how black Americans, from celebrities to unnamed citizens, came to express their own sense of self-worth, preparing themselves for the camera's gaze. Notably, the show gathers the work of the many black photographers too long overlooked, as well as the work of white photographers who took on black subjects across the divide of race. Organized by Deborah Willis, a professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, the show opens up a new field in the history of photography.
The argument over beauty can be heard in the earliest moments of the struggle for black equality. Writing in 1926, the Harlem Renaissance poet and playwright Langston Hughes declared: "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. ... "
But how would that beauty be defined? One of the most historically significant works in the show is Edward S. Curtis's portrait A Desert Queen, taken in Seattle in 1898. Curtis, a white American photographer, is known to Canadian audiences principally for his staged portraits of the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast, and he has been much criticized for imposing cultural stereotypes on his photographic subjects. In this show, we observe Curtis up to his usual tricks. The woman's bosom is half unveiled to the camera and she's costumed in a traditional African headdress and heavy ornamental jewellery. You can't help but wonder who she was, and how she came to sit in front of Curtis's lens.
The new century brought a proliferation of images of black men and women out test driving the new-found trappings of upward mobility. In 1932, James Van Der Zee, a black New York photographer, created a striking image of a fashionable black couple clad in their matching raccoon coats, posing with their luxury car. African-American photographer Eve Arnold brings us a view of the black debutante ball at New York's Waldorf Astoria, shot in the 1960s, the gauzily clad girls arranged in prim rows alongside their suitors. As Willis's catalogue explains, an industry sprang up around black coiffeur and fashion, with magazines and newspapers arranging beauty contests for the "modern Negro woman," implicitly rewarding black women who complied with white beauty norms.