By Elin Spring
In Part Two of A Way With Words, we examine three photo books that feature allusive lyricism or cunning journalistic text. Sandi Haber Fifield’s The Certainty of Nothing, Rebecca Norris Webb’s Night Calls and Amani Willett’s A Parallel Road take an oblique written approach to guide our interpretations of their photographs.
From The Certainty of Nothing by Sandi Haber Fifield, courtesy of the artist, Yancey Richardson Gallery, NY and Robert Klein Gallery, Boston.
As in her prior work, abstraction, alteration, and augmentation of photographic imagery exemplifies Sandi Haber Fifield’s The Certainty of Nothing. But rather than originating with subjects personally close in place and time, she has studied and photographed the ancient Cambodian cities of Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat. Rediscovered after centuries concealed in overgrown jungles, these civilizations had once thrived and Haber Fifield ponders the tense equilibrium between uncertainty and perseverance that has forever defined the human experience.
From The Certainty of Nothing by Sandi Haber Fifield, courtesy of the artist, Yancey Richardson Gallery, NY and Robert Klein Gallery, Boston.
In the first of two series in the book, Haber Fifield contrasts the past with the present, and the decayed with the fertile. Flora from the ancient jungle are juxtaposed in modern geometric patterns, poised with her signature invocations of selective focus, feathery textures and delicately drawn tendrils dancing between leaves and branches.
From The Certainty of Nothing by Sandi Haber Fifield, courtesy of the artist, Yancey Richardson Gallery, NY and Robert Klein Gallery, Boston.
Dark palettes evince the weight of time, dashed with beams of gently filtered sun. Some images possess stark white rents where the artist tore and refitted the print, emitting inklings while secreting primal mysteries. Pastels appear as if bleached by faded memories; Gods and Demons are veiled in hues that echo history’s degradations.
From The Certainty of Nothing by Sandi Haber Fifield, courtesy of the artist, Yancey Richardson Gallery, NY and Robert Klein Gallery, Boston.
In the second series of images, Haber Fifield focuses on black stone monoliths of ancient hieroglyphs, constructing elegant vertical abstracts. She joins their original markings with her own white etchings or with tiny punctures that breathe air and light. These accentuate the work of ancient scribes while recording fresh lines of history, layering the present on the past and connecting human civilizations across time.
From The Certainty of Nothing by Sandi Haber Fifield, courtesy of the artist, Yancey Richardson Gallery, NY and Robert Klein Gallery, Boston.
Susan Minot’s poem “Perseverance” penetrates in short strings, uniting Haber Fifield’s two sets of images. Beginning with “My thin slivers keep collapsing,” Minot personalizes Haber Fifield’s visual insinuations, giving voice to the way empires rise and fall as if they were as intimate as the rise and fall of our own breath. As in the lush prints, the eternal “certainty of nothing” is steeled by Minot’s enduring resolution. She presages another fall – as assured as Eve’s – and faced with restoring her shattered world, declares “I know somehow I will.”
From The Certainty of Nothing by Sandi Haber Fifield, courtesy of the artist, Yancey Richardson Gallery, NY and Robert Klein Gallery, Boston.
The book is exquisitely produced; its construction mimics Haber Fifield’s original photo-based collaged images with laser cutting and selective silkscreen. Bleak yet hopeful, The Certainty of Nothing is an elegant expression of the human predicament.
“House Call, 2014” from Night Calls (Radius, 2020) by Rebecca Norris Webb, courtesy of the artist and Robert Klein Gallery, Boston.
Rebecca Norris Webb’s Night Calls was conceived as an homage to her now 100 year-old father, who was a doctor in rural Rush County, Indiana, where she was born and her family lived for generations. Norris Webb’s sensual, often stormy landscapes are bathed in surreal light. They hover in that mystery-cloaked period between dusk and dawn, “when many of us come into the world and when many of us leave it” – and significantly, when her father was often called to duty. Portraits of her father’s patients and their descendants are deferential and enigmatic, often with optical reflections suggesting the reminiscences of her contemplative subjects.
“Eleanor, 2019” from Night Calls (Radius, 2020) by Rebecca Norris Webb, courtesy of the artist and Robert Klein Gallery, Boston.
Norris Webb’s lyrical prose is the current carrying her “river of stories,” recounting sweet and sorrowful memories of home. Her photographs offer visual innuendoes that her writing shapes into a dialog with her father in the form of letters she addresses to him. In a poetic blend of sensations and tales from her youth, Norris Webb’s recollections render an aura of shared experiences.
“Blue Scarf, 2017” from Night Calls (Radius, 2020) by Rebecca Norris Webb, courtesy of the artist and Robert Klein Gallery, Boston.
“Waxing Gibbous Moon, 2019” from Night Calls (Radius, 2020) by Rebecca Norris Webb, courtesy of the artist and Robert Klein Gallery, Boston.
A simple transposition becomes an incisive reflection, “I look like you. Like you, I look.” Episodic flooding of the Big Blue River becomes a metaphor for survival or death. We share intimate musings as she retraces her father’s footsteps (“driving half asleep, I search for.. sycamores, whose freckled bodies remind me of you”). Sometimes, these blossom into questions, both existential (“Is our legacy usefulness?”) and profound (“For what is this one life of ours, after all, but the unbroken flow of its love?”).
“Two Sycamores, 2017” from Night Calls (Radius, 2020) by Rebecca Norris Webb, courtesy of the artist and Robert Klein Gallery, Boston.
In the illusory light of Norris Webb’s photographs, we recognize our tentative but tenacious hold on life. In the splendidly hand-penned narrative, her empathy expands into “the unmarked crossroads where family, history, memory and one’s first landscape meet.” The book’s design embellishes Norris Webb’s luminous prints with visual references to her father’s patient logs and quotations from poet and doctor William Carlos Williams. Night Calls is not only a deeply personal love letter but a resonant quest for the meaning of home.
“Blossoming, 2019” from Night Calls (Radius, 2020) by Rebecca Norris Webb, courtesy of the artist and Robert Klein Gallery, Boston.
A Parallel Road © Amani Willett (Overlapse, 2020), courtesy of the artist.
In A Parallel Road, Amani Willett constructs a menacing and affecting narrative from collages of new and archival photographs. These overlay lightened pages from the indispensable The Negro Motorist Green-Book, first published in 1936 to offer advice on avoiding the treacherous dangers of “driving while Black.” The tone of the faded Green-Book is filled with promise: regional listings touting welcoming places to patronize, sprightly ads, and breezy “points of interest” travelogs. In using the Green-Book’s size and format for A Parallel Road, Willett appoints a stark contrast and his searing selection of photographs escalate into a heartbreaking reckoning.
A Parallel Road © Amani Willett (Overlapse, 2020), courtesy of the artist.
Vernacular snapshots of Black families reveling in and on their cars are visited by just a few Dick-and-Jane style illustrations of white families on road trips and the storm clouds begin to gather. Newsreel and journalistic photo clips of roadside violence toward Blacks are joined by shrewdly placed inserts of unnerving current reportage (“You shot four bullets sir. He was just getting his license and registration”).
A Parallel Road © Amani Willett (Overlapse, 2020), courtesy of the artist.
A Parallel Road © Amani Willett (Overlapse, 2020), courtesy of the artist.
Guileless B&W photographs of Black guest cottages and businesses segue into an overturned auto, a picture of marching Klu Klux Klan, and into Willett’s own increasingly indicting images, such as nighttime roads, a shattered windshield, swerving tire marks. A series of Willett’s contemplative portraits of Black drivers and even a verdant, curving country road in broad daylight transmute into apprehensive scenarios.
A Parallel Road © Amani Willett (Overlapse, 2020), courtesy of the artist.
Willett’s narrative crescendos with a black two-page spread crowded out by the white-printed names of Blacks killed while driving and a brief, pointed poem by E. Ethelbert Miller likening them to modern-day lynchings. A Parallel Road conjures the sentimental style of a personal scrapbook whose underlying text transforms the photographs into a stinging account that is at once an homage to resiliency, a plea for human compassion and an indictment of wrongs that sadly persist today.
A Parallel Road © Amani Willett (Overlapse, 2020), courtesy of the artist.
FOR INFORMATION AND/OR PURCHASING:
The Certainty of Nothing by Sandi Haber Fifield
https://www.sandihaberfifield.com/books
Night Calls by Rebecca Norris Webb
https://www.radiusbooks.org/all-books/p/rebecca-norris-webb-night-calls
A Parallel Road by Amani Willett
https://www.amaniwillett.com/a-parallel-road-book
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