Embrace The Spirit Of Black Bodies Through Marcia Michael’s Lens

Marcia Michael presents the Black body through her own vision, by simply allowing it take form. Studying her MA in Photography at the University of Derby in 1996 allowed her to not only see but also connect the dots of her existence, opening a conversation about her Jamaican maternal history. She celebrates her closest muse, her mother, who before passing was the source of inspiration for re-imagined family archival photos, which tell a tender story of the lives often erased from Black British history. She has been actively exhibiting her work since 2010 in the UK, America and Africa. She has also collected notable awards such as the Heroinic One Hundred as well as various honourable mentions.

Marcia’s transposition from film to digital imagery draws from her fundamental training at Derby, allowing her to tell refreshing visual stories. By avoiding tired notions of ‘groupthink’, Instead, she allows her audiences to find a piece of themselves in her work or whatever they need to see. Although personal to her: the voices of her mother, children and extended family members serve as a comforting reminder of how we communicate upon reflection of ‘The Family Album’ in our homes—Marcia just happens to obliterate the physical binders so we can feel deeper connections to our own histories. Although nostalgia might be a luxury we can’t afford, her work reminds us that by strengthening those memories, we create a history for future generations to claim ownership from

How did your creative journey into photography begin?

I jumped right in and did a degree in photography at Derby University UK. After my A-levels. I wanted to try something new and after taking a handful of pictures beforehand, it was clear that there was something to develop. One of my teacher's at Derby, John Blakemore, (who I still converse with) helped me to develop my learning in pre-visualization, photography conversation, the differences between looking and seeing form, as well as mastering ones aims through black and white printing. This process became extremely important for me, for with it, I structured my personal vision in learning how to reclaim beauty, from its simplest and untouched form, from what I can see

When was your proudest career moment or when your vision was seen as you intended?

My mother accepting my photographs of me representing her body, is my proudest moment of seeing a vision realized. In telling me how her day went over the years, I can recall many stories of her telling me that she would show strangers these images of herself, which she walked with in her handbag. Also, our conversations about the images that I took sparked in her a new energy that I had not seen for a long time; In essence, I can remember starting the project The Object of My Gaze for various reasons: because she wanted to see her aging self-documented and allow these images to be seen by her future descendants. Secondly, in those moments that she was being photographed, she forgot about the pain felt in her body and she was not alone. What I have accumulated of her, is more than I could have ever imagined. I have a strong feeling that there will be future descents who will use the documents I have collated, to reaffirm and add new chapters to their own variations of family history.

Tell us, what does Jamaican history mean to you in relation to your work?

Everything, it is that which I search for.

Spending so much time in Jamaica as a child and as an adult, I am aware that my search for the past came too late. Opportunities with people who had key information are remembered as lost. My mother's body was certainly a way in, yet now that she has past, and that she was my connection with Jamaica, I have the need to still search for my own. My visits to Jamaica as a child introduced me to a version of black history that I most certainly was not given in the UK. Upon my return I was reading about Marcus Garvey, Paul Bogle, Mary Seacole and other black figures. I was very involved in the reading of these narratives. Growing up and being born in the UK, unlike some of my older siblings has also meant that the culture that my mother and father created of the food and the sounds, were my Jamaican 'home from home'. My mother's voice is one of the clearest interpretations of Jamaica that I could use as a form of participation. Hearing its dialect, was a version of a history that I could enter. In trying to imitate its rendition, I could never succeed. However, I now realise that the voice has its imprinted experience of history locked in every sound that it decides to voice.

““Journeying through history using my mother’s Jamaican voice, is and has taken me to parts of my history, I can only imagine.””

Woman in Black Dress (2009), The Study of Kin

I needed to know what happened in Jamaica with my family. I call to reclaim their stories to know how each journey happened and shaped not only my presence but my experience today. The colonial rule of Jamaica by the British, through a personal narrative, needs to be told many times over. This is due to the UK amnesia of the past. I would like them very much to be held accountable for this past and to accept responsibility for this. It hurts too much to know that they are proud of this past; It reveals a lot about why internalised racism exists so heavily in the UK.

“I am not finished with Jamaica; it knows very well that “mi soon come”.”

How important is imagination during your process of telling new stories, Is it helpful or a hinderance?

Imagination is such a confusing term for me, one that I have struggled with, so instead, I capture. I see what is and collect it. Yet, one would not always think so by what I create. I have a reality called Aphantasia where I am unable to construct images using my minds vision. This has meant that until I see things, I simply cannot imagine how they would look. I therefore rely on seeing what is (and therefore seeing what develops) and not what is possible. I believe it is the viewer who uses imagination to gaze into the world I see.

Why was it important to photograph members of your family for Study of Kin?

My family, at that time, were the link(s) to the past. They were the closest connection available from which to retell a visual story. I have a picture of my mother's sister. Upon seeing a picture of her Daughter, it would be very difficult to tell the two apart. Seeing these likenesses in other public albums, it was possible for me, that we were not only likenesses for our ancestors before but are a representation for them as well

Your photography draws inspiration from the 'flesh' so, what favourite techniques have you learned overtime in representing black bodies in photography?

This is an interesting question as there was nothing to learn, I just opened my eyes and focused on my family who have Black bodies. Perhaps the primary technique utilised was love, self-love and reality. There was never a shame in my parents’ household with the display of bodies, I got to see a lot of my mother's flesh. Post baby, however, the father of my children began to use words against mine and the children's bodies to mark his as superior. Upon leaving this abusive relationship, where I was manipulated not to take photographs of the children in an arty way due to his lack of belief in my photographic skills, this made me want to see and show Black bodies and document our family's 'flesh'. This is when I bought my own camera and began The Study of Kin which includes The Family Album, so that my children who are of mixed heritage, would see and know the normality and beauty in Black bodies.

Partus sequitur ventrem (2015-2017) The Object of My Gaze

How important is the ownership of your art in telling the true stories of black bodies, and has this 'truth' changed over time?

I experienced a compelling misuse of ownership of body through the belief and behaviour that my children's father exerted over me. Even down to the photographs of myself and of the children, he proclaimed ownership of them because I had used his camera and his money had paid for them. When I started The Study of Kin, I made sure that I received legal advice on whom ownership of the images (especially the children) belonged to. My experience, caused me to reflect on the mistreatment of the Black body and Black families in Great Britain, searching for an understanding of what this behaviour was steeped in. My search through the use and construction of the family album was to ascertain absence of ownership of Black bodies and how through my role, ownership could be reclaimed because of the photographic image.

I also wonder if it is not a hindrance, this ownership that I yearn to maintain, holds me back from speaking 'it' loud. There is most definitely a fear that in the future that the images will be read wrong and no longer seen as part of a family reclamation archive. Yet the images of the past, being the images, that historians will use to excavate narrative from, are also sublimating a true story waiting to be discovered and deciphered. I have always found this interesting and for example when I see a picture of a crowd of Jamaicans, is a colonial travel album, I am searching intently for a face that resembles mine. I do this to reclaim their presence, to define location and activate an ownership, and thus I do the same in the making of work that uses family members and myself.

““The black feminist discourse on matrilineage seeks to unwrite a brutal history of rupture and dislocation and to write an alternative story of familial and cultural connection… The black feminist appropriation of the metaphor of literary matrilineage acquires its special resonance from the peculiar history of black motherhood” (Dubey, 1995, pp. 245-246).””

In The Object of My Gaze you explored matrilineage and the connection between your mother and yourself. What responsibility did you feel to discuss the memories of your families and are those memories inherently biased towards nostalgia or reimagined again and again through your lens?

The memories of my ancestral family can now only be found in their narratives which reverberate through their decedents, as embodied dreams, re-lived experiences adapted stories, and channelled expressions. What I aim to do through Black matrilineage is instil an act which is borne out of the black literary tradition of black women, who through their search to uncover narratives of the past, through the writing of their new stories, reconnect and create a sisterhood of black women's writing that preserve language, memories, and myths. This act not only searches and reclaims the past but also in the creation of new works (as narratives), recover stories that are to be passed on. Dubey in her essay Black Matrilineage, explains what this black feminist discourse is and what its purpose is.

““The Object of My Gaze returns the learning mothers would have passed on to their daughters in their becoming of gatekeepers of history””

To get to the point where I am at now, my mother and I became engaged in an embodiment that reclaimed the embodied experience as a maternal tradition for passing on history. In doing so, our Black female bodies, re-confirmed our positions as the makers and markers of history, this is in reference to Doyles's statement that the Black Slave mothers' body was 'a maker and marker of boundaries, a generator of liminality, both vertically and horizontally' and one that, I have come to understand as a way to recover our histories, 'generates both a repetition and [a]revision of that history’ (Barbeito, 1998, p. 365) in its descendants histories. I could not understand my mother's own embodied language that contained her maternal history, so I utilised photography as a means of interpretation that offers me the vocabulary, in which to converse with my mother's body and her history. In terms of responsibility, we have a duty to correct the past and make sure that it is visible that we are doing so. Stuart Hall’s, 1984 Essay ‘Reconstruction Work’, pinpoints to me the very exact nature of my enquiry. That is "The past cannot speak, except through its archive". (Hall, 1984, p. 252).

I affirm like so many others, including Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker through their writings, that we are these archives. When we accept this, the need to reclaim and relearn lost methods of lineage come to the fore, as it did for me. These photographic images that we made, therefore, are more than what I can imagine, Stuart Hall tells us that “When such histories do come to be written, the photographic evidence is likely to play an extremely important role in their construction. One hopes that by then the historians will have gained some experience in ‘how to read’ it” (Hall, 1984, p. 252).

““We need to produce the photographs, the paintings, the works, for the future to be able to use these, to make sense of what their past is.””

Have the relationship dynamics within your family changed since you started photographing them as your subjects?

No. My mother and I have always been very close, the works are just an extension of our relationship. My father did not like being photographed. It was my mother's influence that allowed me to photograph him on the odd occasion. I wish I had the number of images of him that I do of her, to delve into his family history: of his, I know nothing, though I do have a feeling that recently, due to this act of matrilineage with my mother, my paternal mothers are wanting to make themselves known to me and reveal to me their stories.

Many of the photographs of family members were taken very quickly. I may have had just 10-20 minutes with them and had to capture everything. Some family members did not give their time and are therefore not in the pictures. I do not believe that they understood what I was doing. These are of course stories to tell and add to the narrative of family life, whose is and whose out! I did get very annoyed by this but had to understand that it was their choice. This is the same with my children. My son is not photographed often in the earlier series as he did not like it, so, I respected that.

Portrait of a Young Girl in housecoat (2009), The Study of Kin

When do you think as an artist that you have been misunderstood?

Such an intimate question. The answer is most definitely yes. Even with the way that I produce series. I am a doer, I make and make, not knowing how things connect, but knowing, intuitively that they do. No one seems to understand this but me (or so I believe), but towards the end, they might get it, I know that I certainly do. For example, The Study of Kin and The Family Album are supposed to be presented together: the vocabulary which they speak from and to, were in my mind sliding doors between past and present. This seems to be completely lost.

What connections have you made from the way you document inanimate objects and architecture compared with people? (for example, The Object of My Gaze vs School: Themes of order and disorder)

It's the same, I look, observe and decide what I will document. I think about my photographic training at Derby, where maybe for a year or two, I photographed landscape images. Influenced by works of Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston and aesthetics of Group f/64, I was taught to look for the beauty in the form that is already present. I miss film photography and never thought that I would be able to transcribe my sight from film into digital. Personally, I had to relearn to look with the digital camera, however, my learning in taking time and waiting to see what comes to you, is how I approach both.

Portrait of the Photographer, (2009,) The Study of Kin

““I have learned that my path is in this magical field of collecting images, and this is what fuels and fills my need in this existence. It is important to be seen by the person who needs to see it.””

Are there any exhibitions you are inspired to show your work at and is being 'seen' important to you as an artist?

There are venues that I would love to show my work in, these are more to do with the spaces themselves. I've held back a lot of the work I have made, and this is also about ownership. Yet in the right places, these images do need to be explored. With the intimacy and respectfulness, they deserve. I think it is important and I would be very interested in having a conversation with my work in Caribbean countries, especially Jamaica, but I am aware that the nudity causes a big problem. I am fully aware that I am a spiritual being in a physical body and in the past when I have tried to not follow my path, it went horribly wrong. I have learned that my path is in this magical field of collecting images, and this is what fuels and fills my need in this existence. It is important to be seen by the person who needs to see it.

Five artists we should be following on Instagram?

@chidinma.nnoli / @joylabinjo / @cyborg_artist / @phoebe.boswell / @tamarmasonart

Follow Marcia Michael on Instagram @marciamichael_artis

Credits: Interview by Funmi Olagunju and Produced by Mariam Mugambwa .