Photo-Essays as Vernacular Transcription
This project explores photographs as forms of vernacular transcription that act as visual archives and contextualization of social movement. This essay is an attempt to explore connections between African American literary and rhetorical elements of visual expression that illuminate how the Black experience is catalogued and archived in moments of protest and liberation.
This interest evolves from an understanding that photographs are a way to capture emotions, catalog and archive moments, and transcribe ideas that real-time reactions can miss and sometimes can’t be read on the typified page. Photographers such as Gordon Parks and Devin Allen are vernacular intellectuals who use their cameras and editing processes to inform readers about Black urban life, race relations, and political movements to provide a new perspective on American culture. Their vernacular transcription can be seen through the emotions conveyed, memories rendered, and narratives inscribed by their photo compositions.
Thus, photography as vernacular transcription, is an artistic practice of response in times of triumph and crisis. The photographer, as artist and intellectual, also captures responses in ways that show joy, love, and resilience in the face of nihilism and danger. These vernacular transcriptions are helpful to inform on and dissect issues that influence society and culture.
Vernacular transcription curates Toni Morrison’s practice of “rememory[1]” through collective imagery that helps contextualize memories and experiences to furnish a shared and informed history. More recently, Natasha Tretheway extends this conversation in her 2013 text, Beyond Katrina: Meditations on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, where she notes her grandmother “layering” memories of August 1969’s Hurricane Camille and August 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. She describes her grandmother’s recollection this way:
The narratives and metanarratives, Tretheway notes, are lost in translation because of the underlying effects of traumatic experiences. Photographs do the incredibly laborious work of capturing vernacular transcriptions by relaying (sometimes coded) information through emotional appeals from the image while still staying open to interpretation depending on the viewer’s dynamic range of seen, heard, and lived experiences. This process of interpolation allows for viewers to engage in a dialogic practice of rememory.She knows this is about something I am writing, and as she answers, I begin to get the feeling that her answers are shaped by her need to govern the narrative of the storm and its aftermath, to control the meaning of the present and the past in the face of an uncertain future. … A preferred narrative is of the common bond between people in a time of crisis. This is often the way collective, cultural memory works, full of omissions, partial remembering, and purposeful forgetting.
[1]Morrison’s character Sethe in 1987’s Beloved says “If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there in the world” (Morrison 43).