While I am not familiar with the tunes of Frank Sinatra and other white-American superstar artists, I still consider them, for some reason, to be the crème-de-la-crème of music in the mid-1900s. For some context, I was bored this weekend and decided to take a look at my family’s somewhat sizeable collection of old CD albums. In the end, I was able to find a favorite Christmas classic—which I had often listened to before as a child—of Mahalia Jackson, an incredible African-American vocalist who made extraordinary contributions to music that matched or even surpassed those of Sinatra and his famous contemporaries. However, as I listened to her album, I wondered how come I had to be reminded that Jackson was as talented as the white-American vocalists whom I labeled as “the best” for no apparent reason.
Thinking about this issue eventually led me to the article "Black Performers, Fading from Frame, and Memory" on Lens, the photojournalism blog of the New York Times. The writer, Maurice Berger, described a recent exhibit entitled "Slow Fade to Black," by the famous American artist Carrie Mae Weems, that showcased photographs of legendary African-American vocalists from the mid-20th Century such as Jackson and Ella Fitzgerald. Here's an image of Fitzgerald that Weems used in her exhibit:
Ella Fitzgerald
In case you're
wondering about the blur, I was also initially puzzled, but I found from the
article that Weems intentionally distorted the photograph by employing a
technique called "cinematic fade," which creates the illusion of
making the image's subjects either materialize or vanish. The blur was an
ingenious metaphor for addressing the problem that I realized that I had, but
on a much larger scale: the memory of Fitzgerald, Marian Anderson, and other
African-American legends more than fifty years ago is slowly disappearing from
our current generation's "collective imagination." But if this is the
case, how come Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin are still remembered so well
today? Berger attributes this to gender and racial prejudice. Even though the
previously mentioned African-American women were extremely talented, their race and gender, rather than their extraordinary work, are unjustifiably spearheading the dissolution of their legacies. So, it's clear that this exhibit is a message suggesting the impossibility of separating the societal generalizations imposed on women and African Americans and their contributions.
However, both Berger and Weems clearly noted that the exhibit is fundamentally about the connections between memory and photography. But as our generation slowly becomes ignorant of the musical innovations made by Jackson, Fitzgerald, other African-American singers, I wonder whether that memory-photography connection will become lost. As the meaning of the exhibit is fluid in itself, what I take from looking at the photos--which were all taken in a way that creates the illusion that the image's subjects are actually animated--is that the singers' legacies cannot disappear and must be preserved, even in a blurry way that strikes viewers as unpleasant or unexpected. Had Weems used images with much clarity, I would not have experienced the realization that I am not truly recognizing Jackson, Fitzgerald, and others for who they are and what they have done.
