Kwabena Slaughter
My name is Kwabena Slaughter. I’m an artist. I have my MFA in studio arts. And I’ve worked for almost two decades in the Fine and Performing Arts. And I’m currently in a Ph. D. program in American Studies. It’s always been important to me to bring together, you know, the manual labor and the intellectual labor. I just could never deal with the separation of the two. I recall when I was in my MFA program, and the faculty were always telling me to stop reading, stop talking about books, right? That’s not why we’re here, we’re here to just, you know, look and talk about what we see, and talk about how we make the things we see. But I just never felt there was a separation between those two things. So my academic research is about Booker T. Washington and his relationship with artists. It all started many years ago, when I read a book of his, it’s called “The Man Farthest Down”. It’s about a trip he took through Europe and he was visiting, you know, many different countries and cities, and looking at what life was like for the poor people there and he was trying to compare that with what life was like for African Americans living in the South. One of the things that really stuck with me is during a chapter where he’s talking about his travels in Italy, the way he really is specific about describing the things he sees just seemed like he almost has like, the eye, the way of looking similar to artists. This one part where he’s talking about, he’s riding down a road in the rural part of Italy, and he sees some cactus fruit growing along the side of the road, and I think he saw some people collecting them to eat them. In nonfiction literature in African American history from, you know, the early 1900s, there is no other book where someone’s going into that kind of detail about cactus fruit. That just really stuck with me as evidence that there’s more to this guy’s story than, you know, … what I learned in elementary school. His whole career just gets bottled into that Atlanta speech in 1895, but there’s just so much more there. So I’ve just been following that road for a long time now. So that’s what my dissertation schoolwork is going to be about. And as far as my artistic research, that has to do with the social knowledge about how photography works, and specifically about how the camera works, because I think there’s a similar issue of the separation of the materiality from the visual. Or you could say, like, from the technical, you know, from the theoretical analysis, you know, that separation of, you know, art and the intellectual, I feel like that’s still present in photography, but in this case it’s between the camera and the photograph, but there’s things about the camera that haven’t been taught, but those things really do have an effect on every image that we see. I’ve been working on that many ways, making my own experimental photography, dismantling cameras, and making my own kind, doing all kinds of things like that. Some of the work I’ve made, in museum collections in the US, some stuff has shown in the US and abroad, I have a right brain and left brain, I use them both. I was recently researching some images from Tuskegee, and I saw a photograph of a geometry class and the teacher was guiding the students through an equation to figure out the circumference of a circle, and this photograph was from like around 1906. So on the chalkboard, you can see it in the photograph, it says the diameter of the circle is 42 inches, and then you see next to it, the teacher has written out the steps in the mathematical equation to get to the circumference, but … they’re not using pi, you know, they’re not using that graphic Greek symbol for pi, instead, they’re using the fraction 22 divided by 7. And when I was looking at this photo, I could tell that they were trying to find the circumference of a circle. So I’m looking on the chalkboard there. I’m like, well, where’s pi? I don’t see pi here. So how is this thing they’re doing going to answer the equation? It just struck me like, wait, 7 goes into 22 three times plus a little bit more. I was like, wait, is that 3.14? So I bust out my calculator and did the math there, and I was like, whoa, wait a minute. Here in 1906, in rural Alabama, they’re using 22 divided by 7 to serve the place of pi. That, to me, just opened up a whole realm of mathematical awareness and knowledge and pedagogy that I never got when I was in school. I had never seen that 22 divided by 7 format before, and I just thought that was really interesting. And it’s things like that, that I feel like are part of the importance of studying history, you know, like, up close. It’s not just about reading the history books, it’s about actually looking at what was going on there and seeing, you know, kind of what life was like on the ground. I just found that example to be really sort of reshaping expectations and notions about, you know, what life was like going on during that time, what people knew at that time and what they didn’t. I just find it really fascinating. And I just think that’s a solid example of the value of digging into the crates. Carter G. Woodson is the person who initiated Black History Month. And originally it was called Negro History Week, but it eventually evolves into a full month. And I wonder, like, why did he put the word history in there? Did he think, just call it, you know, Black Month? I tie that in with his book, “The Miseducation of the Negro”, I think that book was published before Black History Month was first launched. But I think his choice of, you know, putting the word “history” in there is intended to address that miseducation issue. You know, he wants these lesser-known things to gain a presence, you know, in school, in the curriculum, in our daily conversation, so that we can correct that miseducation. You know, history is one of those tricky things where there could be a whole bunch of history books already published, and then you yourself come into the mix as a historian, and you read those history books. Do you know if you’re getting a complete picture at that point? You know, if you’re getting, you know, all the information that was there? I feel like history and historiography are like in this tug of war battle between how what’s been written shapes what gets written later. So I just think, the more that lesser-known stuff we pull up out of the crates, the more beneficial effect that can have toward the future.

Damarius Johnson
What inspired you to join Picturing Black History as an author and to contribute to this partnership between Ohio State and Getty Images?

Kwabena Slaughter
Well, I’m an artist. So, you know, I’m familiar with Getty. I’ve worked in museums and things, you just hear that name of that organization a lot. So, the opportunity to dive into a collection of photographs that I, you know, potentially had never seen, that was just like, you know, ah, alert, get into this, you know, don’t don’t miss this opportunity. That’s what drew me in. It’s funny though, at first, I didn’t realize that this whole thing was going to be connected to Black History Month, I was just thinking it’s black history in general. It just really gave me a chance to kind of combine my two areas, you know, of the visual and the intellectually critical. And I even put that in my email to the person who was my contact in the program. I was like, hey, I’m an artist, and I’m in this Ph. D. program, this is a great merger of the things I’m interested in, so please let me in. One thing that I, maybe it’s just my personality, but you know, when I look at a photograph, I am not just looking at the people in the image, I’m also looking at the background, at the angle of the lighting coming in, at the clothes they’re wearing, and trying to draw meaning or search for the relationship of all those things together in that image to help me understand what’s going on there. The image that first drew my attention was just one that had so many technical questions folded into it, that my background in theatrical production I was like, oh, wait, where are the cables coming in from and how are they powering this and how did they hang it? I think I know what it takes to assemble that thing that’s in the middle of this photograph. So that just sort of expanded my understanding of what it is that’s being documented in this photo. One little thing that I think often is unknown to the general public, is that light comes into the lens and it passes along to the film or the photo receptor. That light that’s passing along, has an image that is round, not a rectangle. The reason why your photographs, every photograph you take is a rectangle is because there’s a device at the back end of the camera that just crops out the other stuff that’s in that circle. What this is saying is that there’s content that enters inside your camera, that doesn’t actually get captured in the photo, and that’s one of the things that I’ve been exploring in my artwork, because I feel like it’s important for the user of this tool to know what the tool can do. And I just feel like that fact, has gotten obscured because, you know, the very first camera that Kodak released something like, late 1800s, I forget the exact year right now, the photographs came circular, because they had not put that thing at the back of the camera to turn it into a rectangle. I even saw some correspondence with George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, where someone was like, hey, these pictures are round, can you stop that? Make it a rectangle. He was like, no, we like the circles. That’s the way our equipment is doing it, we’re gonna stick with that. But you know, less than a year later, they added that thing that makes them into rectangles, and it’s been that way for the last 150 years. Did anybody teach us that? No. This is how in my head, I pair these issues of, you know, history in terms of content, and then the history that’s present in visual content. My article is tied in with the events at Tuskegee that was a celebration of their 25th anniversary. A lot of photographs were taken of the campus, you know, for that event, both as promotional stuff in advance of the event, and then during the event, and then, you know, distributing to journalists and stuff afterward. And when you look at them, you can see all of these things that the photographers were doing to facilitate making the good photo. So in a lot of the spaces on campus, like the indoor spaces on campus, you can tell that the photographer hung drapes or closed curtains in different places to block the natural light coming in, so that the light wouldn’t be shining directly into the camera and messing up the photo exposure. There’s even one photo I saw where it’s like a portrait of some people sitting in a chair with a black backdrop behind them, but it seems like maybe the backdrop hadn’t been fully opened out or the camera got knocked off, so you can kind of see through the side of the drape, and you can see the rest of the room in the campus building on that side of the photo. So that stuff tells you that, like, this wasn’t just a case of somebody coming in with the device and pointing and shooting. This was orchestrated. They had to plan and map out and strategize this act of documenting this moment in time. And it’s those things that I think to start to flesh out, for me, my interpretation of what was going on there. Recently, I was communicating with the archivist at Tuskegee Library. They just shared some documents with me that showed that the school, I think, understands itself. That it was very technologically advanced during that period, in the early 1900s. There was more electricity distributed to the buildings in Tuskegee than there was in the city of Auburn. The scholarly analysis of that speech that Washington gave in 1895, that became like a roadblock for more investigation, you know, more analysis, more engagement with, I think maybe some people just kind of wanted to stay away from the subject because it got such a negative response. But there’s just still so much more there. And I feel like on campus, at Tuskegee, the students knew it, the teachers knew it, and, you know, I think Washington did a lot of efforts to try to get people to come there and see what was going on there. You know, instead of just reading articles and reviews in the newspaper, actually, you know, come over here and see what we got. This was a unique place at that time.

Damarius Johnson
Historians would say, okay, well we can understand the time period from what is represented in the image. But it also seems like what you’re saying is that there’s, you can understand something about the technology of the period also from the way that the image is captured.

Kwabena Slaughter
If you’re a scholarly writer, even if you’re not focused on linguistics, you still have to learn about syntax and punctuation, and, you know, sentence structure and all these things. But do these historians who are using these photos as anchor and objective content as part of their analysis, if they haven’t received some kind of education about how to read those photos, then that’s going to have a effect on their writing. And then, you know, what people learn from that writing. I guess kind of what I’m saying, is like, photography has just become so much a part of the everyday life, that we need to be taught more about what’s really going on,

Damarius Johnson
If you could just talk about what was your first introduction to black history?

Kwabena Slaughter
The first thing that I really remember, I think wasn’t, like, until high school, when it had to be talked about, in class. You know, like when, you know, schools felt responsible for being proactive in including it in the discussion in class and in the curriculum. I think that was the first kind of, like, concrete moment. But a lot of that time was on the celebratory side, like, you know, seeing performances, or dance performances, or singing or music in celebration of Black History Month. Because I’m in graduate school, I have a whole lot of books in my house. And in some cases, I may have had multiple copies of certain books. In my neighborhood, there’s a lot of those free share library boxes just along the street side or in people’s front yards. So I’ve been taking some black history books and putting them in those boxes, hoping that some other kids will grab them, or a parent might see one and be interested and maybe read that side by side with their child. And also putting posts on social media about things I see just trying to share information, you know, if this weren’t a pandemic, I would be out engaging with public events moreso. But, based on what I can do, you know, it’s just about trying to share information. I’m originally from Chicago, I grew up on the northwest side, I was in public school through seventh grade, and then eighth grade, transferred to private school. The private school didn’t really teach a whole lot about black history. You know, I think one of the issues that’s sensitive about black history in general is there’s so much information that has been withheld from the black community, that black children also need to be educated about black history. I did not receive a whole lot of that in my early years. As I got older, and started to see and compare things, that just was kind of the early stage of like, wait, there’s more to this story, let me look further, let me look further. I guess what I’m trying to do now is intervene in that hushedness, that I think a lot of young people experience, just make that information more common, more know and more a part of everyday life. I think the United States is a unique creation. I don’t think there’s any other place on earth where an indigenous group from one continent, moved to another continent, erased most of the people who were indigenous there, and when they came, they brought people who are indigenous to a whole other third continent and brought them, forced migrated them with them. You know, as a lot of people say African Americans have contributed a lot to America, as it is. We haven’t necessarily been considered a component of the kind of Americanness that has been claimed by white America. We don’t have a white history month. And that’s not a discriminatory issue. That’s just because white culture is considered the default thing here. There is not Ethiopia History Month in Ethiopia. Every day is Ethiopia day, that’s their world. But in the United States, African American body and African American mind, African American culture has just continued to be quieted, but it has a presence, a role, and an effect on America in general. Maybe, like in 1000 years we won’t need Black History Month, but we need it. It’s got to be acknowledged. We still got to be educated about how much of an influence it’s had on this country.

Damarius Johnson
So what figures, events and movements in black history should everyone know more about?

Kwabena Slaughter
Two things that come to mind, of course, Tuskegee’s 25th anniversary celebration. I think that was really a unique and special intersection of a whole lot of different things going on around the country. Speaking from my artistic side, one of my areas of interest has been the history of tap dance. I think there is a lot that can be unpacked in that story. About a year ago, actually, I gave a presentation at a conference where I was talking about the history of tap dance. One of the things that people have investigated is this incident called the Stono Rebellion that happened in the late 1700s, I think, where a lot of the enslaved Africans using drumming to communicate to Africans on other plantations, because that was a practice back on the continent using drum rhythm to communicate between villages, because bass sound can travel really far. The slaveholders at the time got nervous because they could tell that this was a rebellious activity, because they didn’t want Africans to talk to other Africans. But there’s even stories about how, like, if two Africans from the same village were enslaved, they were intentionally stowed away separate from one another so that they were always with people who did not speak their same language, trying to make them all foreign to one another. One of the results of that Stono Rebellion was that drumming became banned, outlawed. The goal there was to cut off this communication strategy that enslaved people had been using. One of the things that historians have been looking at is: was tap dance born out of that issue of, I can’t make the rhythm with my hands, but maybe I can do it with my feet with my stamp? I just think that’s an important chain of thought for people to follow and dig deeper into. The mind is part of the body. And I just think it’s important to keep that in mind during the course of research and analysis and theory. When you’re in elementary school, you have a gym class. When you get into your PhD program, you don’t have gym class. It’s not considered related to your learning process, but the body is still there. You know, I think it should still be included.