Rashid Johnson

Rashid Johnson was born in Chicago in 1977. He studied photography at Columbia College Chicago and also attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Early photographic series such as Seeing in the Dark and The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club formed the basis of his practice. His participation in Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001 brought wider attention, and MCA Chicago’s Message to Our Folks in 2012 surveyed the first fourteen years of his work. His work is held by institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Smithsonian.^*2

Johnson’s themes include Black identity, cultural memory, double consciousness, Afrocentric objects, art history, class, masculinity, anxiety, and the construction of public and private selves. His early photographs used historical processes such as Van Dyke brown printing and staged portraiture. In Seeing in the Dark, he photographed Black men experiencing homelessness in Chicago through a nineteenth-century process, linking contemporary subjects to histories of photographic portraiture and racial representation.^*5 In The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club, he invented a fictional secret society of Black intellectuals, using period styling, doubled figures, formal poses, and titles that refer to Black history and theory. Through photographic historicism and staged fiction, Johnson critiques the burden of representation: rather than offering transparent documentary images, he shows identity as mediated by history, archive, class aspiration, performance, and coded material.^*4 His historical importance lies in complicating the politics of Black visibility at the beginning of the twenty-first century, especially in relation to the Studio Museum’s Freestyle exhibition.^*2

MCA Chicago’s Message to Our Folks described Johnson’s use of everyday materials as a process of hijacking the domestic. Bowdoin College’s text on Larry connects Seeing in the Dark to Shelley Rice’s reading of photography as a social site. The critical core is Johnson’s challenge to the idea that racial identity can be stabilized by documentary evidence. His portraits are deliberate performances showing that Black subjectivity is formed through history, fiction, and visual codes.^*5