Arrival of Departure. 2019. From the series Exodus Home. © Jay Simple
“This Juneteenth I am resolved to ponder, what is it to celebrate freedom when freedom never came. There is a ledger, as long as time that tells the stories of all the atrocities and false promises within this country. To move forward, the world says some must forget and forgive that ledger, and to others, it says just lay down your power. We all know deep inside some things are not done freely. So to arms they go to collect what they are owed.” - Jay Simple
Virginia based photographer, activist, and educator Jay Simple’s work addresses the legacy and impact of colonialism and white supremacy in the United States. Across multiple bodies of work, from cinematic, staged self-portraits to historically charged landscapes, sculptural installations, and archival imagery, Simple questions and confronts viewers with the continuing path of racism, nationalism, colonialism, and notions of belonging.
I came across Simple’s work when I learned about his curatorial project The Photographer’s Greenbook. Simple launched this Instagram account and platform in May to highlight photography organizations that he sees – because of their commitment to inclusivity – as a safe haven for BIPOC photographers. A nod to Victor Hugo Green’s Negro Motorist Green-Book, published between 1936 and 1966 – an annual list of safe spaces for Black people to travel in the segregated United States – The Photographer’s Greenbook is a response to the often unspoken problem of racism and exclusion in contemporary photography. Many organizations, publishers, and the photographers they highlight (until a few weeks ago), despite how progressive they claim to be, are overwhelmingly white.
Moved by Simple’s personal work and photographic activism, I contacted him in early May to begin a dialog about his practice and path forward. After a few discussions, we felt it was appropriate to publish this in remembrance of the ingenious promises of Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day, Jubilee Day, and Cel-Liberation Day, the annual holiday commemorating June 19, 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger read federal orders in Galveston, Texas, that all previously enslaved people in Texas were free.
Jon Feinstein in conversation with Jay Simple
Ascension, 2019. From the Series Exodus Home. ˙© Jay Simple
Jon Feinstein: Tell me about yourself: What was your childhood like, and how did it inspire you as an artist?
Jay Simple: I grew up in Philadelphia for the majority of my childhood. I was homeschooled as a child along with my brother and sister, and so we were a very close-knit family. My parents both being educators strongly pushed us in our academics, and both having a strong understanding of the challenges that would be faced in a society that ostracized those of me and my siblings’ complexion, at the root of our studies was a curriculum that focused on decolonizing narratives of identity within the United States.
Shadow House. From the series Exodus Home. © Jay Simple
Juneteenth. 2017. From the series Whites Only. © Jay Simple
Feinstein: Your work responds to white supremacy in American history and the present as a continuum and legacy.
Simple: I use the photographic medium to analyze systems of oppression by exploring their history and contemporary manifestations. In a contemporary moment through miseducation ingrained into our social fabric, it is plausible for one to misunderstand the constructed social, political, and economic systems in front of them.
Feinstein: It seems like this is only now coming into the outward consciousness of many (white) Americans, even those who have considered ourselves “progressive.”
Simple: I’m not sure that this is just coming into the consciousness of many Americans. I think they know what has and is happening to BIPOC within the United States and abroad. However, I think they have been taught to disregard the humanity of non-white people, and for them, discrimination and death of the “other” have become normalized. In moments like now, that normalization is being disrupted and apathy is not accepted. Since enslaved people first arrived on the shores of this country they have been protesting for their rights and humanity, so I think we have to understand that while there is miseducation there is also active and conscious disregard.
Installation view of Jay Simple’s series Whites Only
Burning Shack. 2019. From the series Exodus Home. © Jay Simple
Simple: So through a project like “The Ti(d)es That Bind Us” I’m looking at the colonial period and the important historical figures and moments that created the groundwork for a national narrative. Through these images, however, I’m constantly trying to undermine the narrative, to show the contradictions and brutality that have to be fundamentally ignored for the narrative to appear logical.
Then, through going to sites of historical reenactment, I’m asking the viewer to think then, while noticing the hypocrisy, how do we reembody, perpetuate, or dismantle these legacies today. While sometimes I’m able to do this through observation of public interactions, at times I force these thoughts through staging scenes with myself and actors.
Lynching Station. 2017. From the series The Ti(d)es That Bind Us. © Jay Simple
Archival image from the Library of Congress - Group of Florida migrants on their way to Cranberry, New Jersey to pick potatoes. Near Shawboro, North Carolina, 1940 July.
Feinstein: Why and how is photography such an important tool for you to address this?
Simple: Photography generally fails at objectively capturing anything because it frames out more than it shows. Historically the narrative of how this medium has been used is as propaganda to reinforce and normalize whiteness and to continue to “other” anyone else.
Whiteness at the center of the box and everything else crammed into the margins. This narrative however is historically also partial. If we look at books like Deborah Willis’ Reflections In Black, we understand that the usage of photography to dismantle white supremacy is almost as old as the medium.
So, if it’s the way I make images, or how I position my understanding of photography, I’m constantly having a conversation with narratives of history and trying to expand them to show what perhaps is consistently left uncaptured.
Archival image from the Library of Congress: Cutting Burley Tobacco and putting it on sticks to wilt before taking it into the curing and drying barn on the Russell Spears farm, vicinity of Lexington, Kentucky, 1939.
Needle or the Stack. 2019. From the series Exodus Home. © Jay Simple
Feinstein: In your series Exodus Home, the body and its place in the landscape seem to play a crucial role. I see a number of references to art history and religious iconography as well.
Simple: Most of my images deal with a particular location that has a historical significance. If you think about the history of the United States this is a true statement about anywhere that can be pictured, because every inch of this country is a physical reminder of the colonization and brutal persecution of native people. For me, the landscapes are a constant reminder of the history and construction of a nation and all of the issues that arise from that building.
The use of bodies within these landscapes are a way for me to navigate and explore how contemporary actors live within these spaces, perpetuate ideology, and investigate their positionality to history. The staging of bodies within the images often make reference to historical, cultural, or religious iconography. Which on one hand is to ask how we perpetuate, reembody, or perhaps subvert the notions that arise from these iconographies, and on the other to challenge the normalization of whiteness within these canons by using predominantly BIPOC people to enact these roles.
From the series Exodus Home © Jay Simple
Feinstein: Why are performance and staging important to you in communicating your ideas?
Simple: Staging scenes allows me to be more forceful with the narratives I want to tell. The stories and narratives are histories that are ingrained in the very fabric of our society, in the dirt we walk on, in the words we use, in the beliefs we hold true. These things are felt but not seen. I can feel it in the rustling of the Virginia wind in the trees as I stand outside a shack that would have been home for sharecroppers in the early 1900s. I can smell their struggle. I can hear their desires for more.
By staging scenes, I can bring those feelings and the emotional/mental wrestling that occurs for them into a visual language. Furthermore, I stage these scenes so that the actor’s eyes never engage with the viewer. They are engrossed in the task or experience that we see. While I think the images I make are confrontational, I don’t want the figures within the frame to be the confrontation. I want the confrontation to occur through the meditation that arises by having the freedom to see without being seen. To have that space for contemplation.
Stare into the Son. 2019. From the series Exodus Home. © Jay Simple
Feinstein: Self-portraiture also plays a crucial role throughout your work and practice. How does it help you process and address these histories?
Simple: Self-portraiture is important in Exodus Home and throughout my artist practice. I like to make it clear that the issues of nationalism, political and social disenfranchisement, and race found throughout my work are also paradigms which are as personal as they are general. Often I depict scenes of violence and trauma which I wouldn’t ask another person to represent, and so I often will pick those “roles” within my images. Lastly, I sometimes have problems with the politics of representation of others and the power of the photographer to manipulate or dictate how others are seen. I try to avoid any subconscious or conscious idealization of others, and so more recently I’ve tried to do the work I do without the usage of other bodies.
Rupture/Repair. 2020. From the series Exodus Home. © Jay Simple.
Malcolm. Archival Pigment Print, 2019 © Jay Simple
Feinstein: I can’t stop thinking about your recreation of Malcolm X By The Window.
Simple: Throughout Malcolm X’s political life he was constantly under the threat of violence against him and his family. The backstory for my image is that I live between a man who waves a confederate flag from the back of his truck when he drives past my home and another whose uncle is the Grand Wizards of the KKK in Virginia. Earlier that year I had also learned of a series of hate messages posted about me around the campus of a University I attended. Though not the same, I felt like Malcolm X during that moment, looking out my window wondering what would emerge from the darkness. Friend or Foe?
Feinstein: From time to time, I like to ask this question to artists making narrative-driven work: is there any music you’ve been listening to recently that might relate to your work?
Simple: I’ve been listening to a lot of The Mcintosh County Shouters. One of my favorites at the moment is “Move, Daniel”, which I titled one of the images from my current project Exodus Home after. Most, if not all, of their music, comes out of spirituals and shout songs that enslaved people would sing. Within these songs often there were hidden messages of resilience and resistance. In the case of “Move, Daniel”, it was a song sung to warn someone stealing from their captors that they needed to escape before being caught.
Move, Daniel. 2019. From the series Exodus Home. © Jay Simple
Feinstein: Thanks for sharing that. It hits me hard and changes how I feel that image. I’m looking at the other titles in your series which feel equally heavy and charged with history and resistance.
Simple: My usage of language in titling is important for allowing me to give hints to my viewers about what is being depicted. Often they are references to music, literature, events, and locations which hold concepts that help understand the images. Essentially references to find more about the wider narrative within the picture frame.
My practice is heavily based on disruptions and conflations of history, this is an effort to dismantle the problematic notions which arise from looking at narratives of history and to show how these notions live subversively and obviously within social and cultural understandings today. Our understanding or revisiting of history is found through the music, literature, and places we engage with, so it is important to include this within my work. However, it is secondary to the initial visceral reactions of the viewer.
In other instances, titles and language are poetic ways for me to point to another level of irony, joy, pain, and contradictions within the overall muddy mess of identity, oppression, and belonging that run through my images.
Cover of the book The Negro Motorist Green-Book (1940 edition). Created by Victor Hugo Green, this guide book appeared yearly between 1936 and 1966. It also cataloged the "sundown towns" which black people had to leave at sundown. Sometimes it was called "Negro traveler's Green-Book. (via NY Public Library)
Feinstein: This is going to turn into a long interview, but - as you said when we were first chatting over Instagram, we’ve all got more time now! I want to talk a bit about The Photographer’s Green Book for our readers.
Building on its reference to the Negro Motorist Greenbook, what is it and how did it start?
Simple: The Photographer’s Green Book was born during a moment of public outcry when Aint-Bad planned to curate all-white photographers for a publication about the Southern United States. This was one of many aggressions which occur in our visual medium that excludes the voices of BIPOC, women, and LGBTQI+ communities. The Photographer’s Greenbook, via the Instagram page ( website forthcoming), has a list of organizations that fight for inclusivity, diversity, and equity through actively giving platforms to a wider scope of artists.
I also launched A List For Those Considering Diversity When Complacency Wasn’t Enough which is a list of publicly submitted questions that individuals and institutions should consider as they tackle issues of inclusion, diversity, and equity through action within their respective realms.
The Negro Motorist Green Book - 1949 Edition via blackpast.org
Feinstein: Do you have a favorite submitted question so far?
Simple: One of my favorite questions was posed by curator Anita N. Bateman. She asked, “Name important ways you’ve divested from perpetuating or asking for significant emotional labor from cultural workers, artists, or diverse voices to help diversity your institutions.” I think this is an important question and points to the broader understanding that the work of creating diversity isn’t just the job of non-white people. White identifying people need to start analyzing their privilege, ignorance, denial, and ability to be complacent by pressing the labor of fixing the issues they create onto those they have advertently or inadvertently oppress.
Cover of The Negro Travelers' Green Book (1956). Via Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library Digital Library
Feinstein: Building on that, what has been the response so far? Have there been any reactions or revelations about it that you did not expect?
Simple: It has been great just seeing people sharing and engaging with the platform. I’ve gotten messages from individuals and organizations who have never heard of many of the resources on PGB, and that is both sad as it is great that it can expand their, and my own, knowledge base.
When I came up with the idea of making this platform I didn’t expect the speed that people have come to engaging with it. It is wonderful to see and really drives me to want to engage with that community on what else can be done to expand the conversations and resources PGB is facilitating. I am very open to feedback and anyone who wants to help expand this platform.
Cover of the 1947 edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book. via New York Public Library Digital Library..
Feinstein: Where do you see it going from here?
Simple: All of the resources on PGB are compiled through submissions from the public. The goal is to create a communal platform where people can decide which organizations are safe and responsible in issues of diversity. This approach is done similarly through the compilation of the list of questions. The next step is to take the questions and begin engaging in conversation with the organizations listed to bring deeper insight to actionable ways equity is occurring.
I want to see PGB become a resource which works towards consolidating insight from communities that are dealing with similar issues of inclusion and equity within the arts. Through this I want to boost the voices of great organizations that are doing the work of engaging with diverse practitioners or subject matters. In addition, I want PGB to be a place that can compile resources for institutions and individuals who want to actively support and expand their notions of what has value within their fields.