Rashid Johnson

The History of Black Portraiture and Photographic Education in Chicago

In nineteenth-century America, images of Black bodies were used in the classifications of slavery and racial science. Frederick Douglass, by contrast, sat repeatedly for portraits and presented himself to the public as a thinking, acting citizen. The National Portrait Gallery notes that Douglass became the most photographed American of the nineteenth century and consciously used photography’s social power to shape his public image.^*3 Black portraiture has therefore carried both the image imposed by others and the public construction of dignity by Black subjects themselves.

For the 1900 Paris Exposition, W. E. B. Du Bois and Thomas J. Calloway assembled roughly five hundred photographs for the “American Negro Exhibit,” presenting African American life and progress through education, work, family, and organizations. The Library of Congress makes available portraits and scenes of daily life originating in that exhibition.^*1 Johnson’s early photographs were made within a history in which Black people had been classified by the camera and had also used photography for self-representation.

Johnson studied photography at Columbia College Chicago with Dawoud Bey, known for sustained work with communities. According to Shelley Rice, photographic education at the time treated the power relations involved in photographing people in poverty as a central issue and drew on critiques of social documentary by Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, John Tagg, and others.^*14 The danger that photographers might use other people’s lives to explain a social problem formed part of the environment in which the young Johnson worked.^*16

The subjects of Seeing in the Dark were unhoused Black men Johnson met near his studio on South Michigan Avenue. Johnson was himself a Black man and shared aspects of racial experience with them, while his photographic education, studio, and access to art institutions placed him differently in class terms. Because racial proximity and class difference coexisted, reducing each person to a representative of “Blackness” or “homelessness” would have erased the relation’s complexity. Rice identifies the varying degrees of trust, resistance, and self-disclosure from one sitter to another as central to the series.^*14

In 2001, the work was selected for Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The term “post-black,” used by Thelma Golden for the exhibition, described a situation in which Black artists addressed racial history while moving beyond the demand to represent a single, stable idea of Blackness.^*9 Johnson’s photographs likewise avoid defining one affirmative Black image, altering the relation among subject, photographer, process, class, and institution from picture to picture.

Seeing in the Dark: A Slow Encounter Shaped by a Historical Printing Process

Van Dyke brown printing is a nineteenth-century process in which sensitizer is brushed onto paper, a large negative is contact printed, and exposure is made with ultraviolet light or sunlight. Johnson used an 8 × 10 Deardorff camera to make close studio portraits.^*14 Because preparation and exposure take time, the sitter is not captured in a passing street instant. He has time to sit, face the camera, close his eyes, or raise a hand between himself and the lens.^*5

The years 1998–99 coincided with the rapid spread of digital photography and images made quickly and in volume. Johnson chose an older chemical process and made each brown-toned print individually.^*14 Coating the paper and making a contact print gave the portrait a temporality different from the immediate record of news photography or identification. By directing a format associated with historical museum portraiture toward named unhoused Black men, Seeing in the Dark brought the description of poverty into the same frame as the formal bearing of a portrait intended to endure.^*6

The dark tonal range has also been linked to Roy DeCarava.^*14 Details of face and clothing do not appear all at once, and the viewer must spend time reading the image. In Jonathan, a large hand interrupts the approach to the face; in Eugene, the hat and lowered eyes limit access. The men are not fully opened to view as evidence explaining poverty. Each retains a particular way of responding to the camera.

Staging Du Bois’s Double Consciousness as an Imaginary Social Club

The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (2008–) imagines a secret club of Black intellectuals and photographs formally dressed men in the format of membership portraits. In the National Gallery of Art’s Emmett, the figure appears twice; the chair, dark background, historically indeterminate clothing, and brown print create the look of an old archival photograph.^*7

Johnson connects the series to W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness,” the condition of seeing oneself through one’s own experience while also seeing oneself through the judgments of white society. The doubled figure, historical clothing, and formal pose translate these two viewpoints into the photograph’s structure.^*4 The club offers temporary distance from external racism while also establishing its own standards of education, class, and masculinity.

Contemporary friends and models perform as imaginary members, and the photographs are made as records of an organization that never existed. Title, costume, printing process, and exhibition give Black history an invented social space. At the same time, the old brown print, formal pose, and museum collection status reveal the conditions through which a photograph comes to resemble a credible historical document.

Dispersing Self-Image from the Face Across Soap, Books, Music, and Plants

As Johnson moved into sculpture and installation, he spread Black self-image beyond the face across black soap, shea butter, wax, mirrors, tiles, houseplants, books, and records. These materials connect to barbering, self-care, the home, study, music, and life across the African diaspora. MCA Chicago describes this incorporation of domestic materials into art structures as “hijacking the domestic.”^*2

Writing about Wifredo Lam, Johnson considers the way African diasporic religion, Cubism, and modern art meet within a single painting. His interest in allowing different cultural references and art histories to coexist without reducing a figure to one racial sign continues in later works that gather books, records, plants, and household objects.^*11

The materials carry symbolic associations and physical effects. Shea butter changes shape with temperature, black soap leaves gloss and residue on the wall, and mirrors reflect the viewer. Books and records show how knowledge and taste are selected, owned, and presented to others. Gridded shelving organizes a personal cultural history like furniture and also recalls museum systems of classification and display.^{*18 *10}

Portrait photography encourages viewers to read race, class, education, and psychology together from a single body. Johnson’s shelves and spatial works treat books read, music heard, substances applied to the body, plants tended, room arrangements, and the viewer’s movement as elements of self-image alongside the face. Blackness appears through multiple acts of selecting, possessing, and presenting culture, rather than as a single appearance.

Jonathan’s Hands, Calvin, and Emmett: Changes in Naming and Historical Appearance

Jonathan’s Hands (1998) places the hands prominently before the face, stopping an approaching gaze. In Calvin (1999), face and clothing emerge gradually from the dark print. Personal names bring each sitter into the work as an individual before the social category of “homeless person.”^{*8 *15}

The name Emmett (2008) evokes Emmett Till, although the model is a different contemporary person. The present-day sitter, the appearance of an old membership photograph, and the doubled image bring several periods together. In the early work, names resist anonymity; in the later series, a name connects one model to another figure or narrative in Black history.

Seen together, the three works trace a shift from making dignified portraits to examining the forms through which dignity becomes visible. Formal dress, historical printing, and learned titles present Black men as historical subjects. The same elements can also confine dignity within codes of education, class, and masculinity.^*16

Shelving and Architectural Space: Extending Self-Image into Possessions and the Viewer’s Experience

MCA Chicago’s 2012 exhibition Message to Our Folks brought together fourteen years of work, from early photographs to sculpture, film, and installation.^*2 Gridded shelves support books, plants, records, ceramics, incense, and monitors, recalling domestic storage, modernist architecture, and the order of museum display at once.

Choosing what to place on a shelf resembles choosing clothing and background in a portrait. After viewing an image from the front, visitors walk around the structure, see themselves in mirrors, and encounter sound and smell. In the Whitney’s New Poetry, the structure extended from the museum interior into outdoor space, connecting the act of looking with movement through a public setting.^*12

At an architectural scale, viewers can follow the books, music, domestic materials, plants, furniture, and institutions through which a person shapes a self. Selection and arrangement once contained within the photographic frame become an experience of walking, reflection, scent, and sound.

Black Portraiture After Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems

Since the 1980s, Lorna Simpson has combined Black women turned away from the camera, bodies without visible faces, and text to question the habit of reading race, gender, and psychology directly from a portrait.^*19 Carrie Mae Weems reused historical materials that photographed Black people as scientific types, exposing photography’s and the museum’s participation in racial classification.^*20

Working after these interventions, Johnson used historical processes to make new photographs. Simpson limits information about the figure; Weems rereads an existing archive; Johnson produces fictional portraits that look like historical materials. New Negro Escapist imagines a social club absent from Black history while showing how costume, title, printing process, and museum collection create the appearance of historical truth.

The method also contains an affirmative image. Formally dressed Black men, personal names, and learned titles clearly express aspirations toward dignity and self-formation. Class selection, male-centered membership, and awareness of white social judgment accompany that image, revealing the rules that structure an ideal self.

From the Appearance of Historical Portraiture to the Objects and Institutions That Support Self-Image

In Seeing in the Dark, the slow Van Dyke brown process and its brown surface extend the encounter between photographer and sitter and present unhoused Black men as historical portraits with personal names. In New Negro Escapist, the same appearance gives documentary credibility to imaginary members and an invented institution. The historical process gives real people the temporal weight of portraits made to be preserved; it can also make a history that never existed look like a trustworthy record.

In the installations, the elements that form self-image expand from expression, clothing, and background to books, music, bodily materials, plants, furniture, and museum display structures. The portrait’s task of describing a person continues as the problem of exhibiting how an individual selects culture, arranges a life, and becomes visible within institutions.

In the early photographs, the sitter’s gesture, distance from the photographer, and the surface of the historical print build an image of one person. In the spatial work, possessions, architecture, sound, scent, and the viewer’s reflection divide that work among themselves. Johnson’s movement from photography into multiple media forms a continuous expansion: Black self-image is no longer assigned to a single face but extended to the objects and institutions through which a life is made.

Museum collections including SFMOMA hold the early photographs and later mixed-media works as parts of the same artistic development. The Guggenheim’s 2025 retrospective likewise traced Black self-image, domestic materials, anxiety, and escape across photography, sculpture, film, and painting.^*17

This retrospective reception allows Johnson’s move from photography into three-dimensional work to be read as a widening of the elements that make a portrait—from the face to objects, architecture, and the viewer’s experience—rather than as a break between media.^*13