Abstract
In 1968, after several disappointing years in Europe, where he wanted to trace his white aristocratic family tree, Frank Walter returns to his native Antigua and opens a photo studio. He didn't anticipate being seen in Europe as only Black, rather than mixed‐race, and contemplates how to materialize this complex history. The studio was key for the one thousand two hundred fifty‐plus miniature paintings he made before his death: he painted many of them on the back of studio photographs. To behold the relationship between the two sides of these images, one first has to suspend the knowledge claims and self‐evident gestures that have relegated the photographic versos to static objects. One has to take hold of them — tilt, turn, and flip them. This article explores the overlooked role of contingency within the history of photography to reposition Walter's studio photographs/paintings as flip‐objects. They do not just materially hold together aesthetic forms that are often epistemologically opposed to one another, inscribing studio photography, ephemera, blackness, and the Caribbean into Romantic painting, extant materials, whiteness, and Europe, for example. Rather, these works initiate a demand for reorientation, postulating that these different modes and media of visual representation can only be seen through one another, like a thaumatropic image.
Frank Walter spends a lot of time thinking about what one can find on the backside of images of kings and queens. Not about what figuratively lies behind their cropped faces and staged poses. He isn't interested in psychological interiority. Rather, he's thinking about what supports and upholds projections of privileged belonging. In other words: what is on the flip side of these bodies, these face cards of kings and queens, and what is enacted by the desire to turn them around.
In 1977, while Walter is inside running a photo studio in his native Antigua in the Caribbean and Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee imperial tour is taking place outside, he fills a page with royals, portraits, and passports, as if it could be folded in quarto and put in his pocket (fig. 3). One is unsure where to begin with these exploratory identity papers. Not papers, actually, but a singular sheet of paper the size of a poster board. It creates the conditions for the page to be folded. The four areas are not perfectly aligned with the axes of the sheet, which calls attention to the fact that they must be cropped and adjusted. With this, the principle of the fold, which is usually hidden from view, becomes visible. The sheet enables a front and a back, an inside and an outside, initiating a logic of recto/verso, a “thinking with twofold attention.”1 The various identities, all on the same sheet, can be reordered and discovered differently depending on how it is folded and refolded, suspending the self-evident gestures and truth claims of “official” information on a two-dimensional page and turning it into something tactile.2 With the royals folded head over heels on top of each other, Walter has made a crypt for them, a structure that yearns to protect, possess, and incorporate a foreign body. It is an act of refused or failed mourning that commemorates exclusion, and as such, in its partitions, “one could be tempted to see a simple polarity, a polarized system . . . rather than the intractable, untreatable rigor of their distinction. . . . [It's] not a simple opposition but the excluding inclusion of one safe within the other.”3
These improvised identity papers intervene in the authorization process and insist that a range of medial forms are complicit in sanctioned knowledge. From top left to right: painting, television, photography, and cover design, all represented in the medium of drawing, traditionally considered to be less reliable for documenting, as it openly exposes its constructedness (fig. 3). But if anybody knows what is required to officially encrypt and formally document identity in Antigua, it's Walter. In 1973, he starts working for the Press Photo Services of Reuters, making thousands of photographs: studio portraits of his Black Antiguan community and administrative photographs for passports, driver's licenses, and student IDs.4 The process of drafting an identity entrenched in colonial violence and history is “deeply atemporal.”5 Walter needs this 1977 document in 1953, 1964, and 1974 to get into Europe, a place with which he identifies as much as Antigua. One can treat the four folds in his identity document as the two royals up top, the rectos, and the two areas below, the versos.
Recto 1: In the top left there is a portrait of King Charles II, incorporating key historical details: his royal cypher, “CIIR,” the dates he lived and reigned, and his long wig of curls and pencil mustache. But something is off. His lips seem fuller, more prominent, and in his caption, details proliferate. A mix of names one might know from history (Charles, Duke of Lorraine), and those one doesn't (“Francis Walter REX ANTIGUAE” [King of Antigua]).6 Verso 1: In the bottom left is a face that one might find when the passport to its right is opened at the border. Frank Walter, born Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter in 1926, is abbreviated here as “FRANCIS A. W.” Almost inseparable from his name is his profession, “ARTIST,” and above this is a sampling of his other titles: “INVENTOR,” “INDUSTRIALIST,” “PLANTER.” Two columns of text framing his face detail a family tree and royal names: thirteen generations beginning with Charles II and Lucy Walter, his mistress, and ending with Walter himself, whose birthplace is listed as “Pan Europe.” Walter grew up hearing about his European lineage, how he stems from white slave owners from Germany and Black and mixed-race enslaved women, and how his German name might have origins in the highest royal houses.7 A passport photo of a Black Caribbean colonial subject becomes a royal portrait. Rather than establishing their iconic glory and authority by inscribing a clear historical narrative, the details surrounding these portraits of kings and queens seem to undermine them.8
Recto 2: In the upper right is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II that has lost its way, no longer hanging in a palace but framed by a television screen and a caption: “EIIR . . . / Welcome to Antigua / Royal Visit 1977.” It makes sense, given that this event clears the way for more royal “essays in television ritual.”9 The caption is part royal title and part imperial tourism and marketing at a time when the colonial rule in the country was being internally resisted, its future highly uncertain.10 Verso 2: In the bottom right is a passport that defies its own logic. It has two identities, British on the top and Dominican on the bottom, and two stamps that are unsure of themselves: “Dominica (?) 1961–1970” and “May 5th-6th, 1965 (?) Southampton.”11 Walter gets this first stamp when he settles in neighboring Dominica after returning from his long-term stay in Europe. He is initially excited about his ten-year European trip that began in 1953, planning to learn about Western innovations in the agricultural industry. But despite an advanced education and managerial training, he is only able to find precarious work in British and German factories and coal mines. He lives in temporary shared lodgings, is often hungry, suffers hallucinations, is institutionalized, and experiences a wide range of racist violence. He cuts his trip short and returns to the Caribbean in 1961.12 He gets his second stamp in 1965 when he travels back to Europe. But lacking the proper identity papers, he can't enter and is incarcerated onboard in Southampton while the other passengers go ashore.13 In 1974, after four years of battling with the authorities, his claim of aristocratic descension is rejected and, with it, his application for a British passport.14 The passport, emerging in the nineteenth century as a technology to restrict the movement of colonial subjects, has now “effectively naturalized the ‘rule of colonial difference,’” authorizing its own fiction and governing the mobility of racialized subjects under the guise of national difference.15 So, in 1977, to be able to come and go, and to have come and gone as he pleases, Walter drafts his identity papers with fabulated family trees and sketches of the mixed-race ancestors he never knew.16 Throughout his immense archive, which includes over ten thousand paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, and toys in all sorts of materials, as well as hundreds of hours of audiotapes and over fifty thousand pages of writing and notes, including an eight-thousand-page autobiography, one continually finds works that address belonging and birthrights to power, privilege, and visibility, the processes through which these are made known and absolute, and what can be suspended, simultaneously revealed and hidden, in the folds and flip sides of images of kings and queens.17
Years after Walter's death in 2009, his work is receiving its first large-scale exhibitions. First in Italy in 2017, when he was selected to represent Antigua and Barbuda in its inaugural participation at the Venice Biennale, and then in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2020. In the catalogs for these major exhibitions and in the images that advertised them, Walter's paintings have remained in the foreground. Critics have commented on the astounding number of them, over five thousand in total, many featuring landscapes he saw during his time in Europe (fig. 1).18 “Walter's landscapes are unpeopled, or the people are seen at a distance, and are usually obscured by a layer of paint. The sense of isolation, of being alone in the natural world, is pervasive.”19 These paintings might, on one side, seem secluded, disconnected from the noise of society. But upon tilting these images, the noise one hears and the perspective one finds are quite different (fig. 2).
Walter's cousin, the former minister of tourism and economic development in Antigua, picks up on this noise that he first encountered in Venice: “While reviewing his art, it was a surprise to find on the back of one of Frank Walter's oil self-portraits a photograph of myself” (fig. 1, right side).20 Although many of Walter's works remain undated, we know that these paintings were not created while he was in Europe. We know this because over 1,250 of these paintings were made in miniature, on the backs of studio photographs and Polaroid boxes sometime after 1968, when he returned to Antigua and opened a roadside photo studio.21 While much criticism has been devoted to the painterly side of these images, they are supported via versos that offer a divergent media history (fig. 4).22
Understanding these photographic versos as mere physical material for the more aesthetically complex painted rectos would overlook a major component of Walter's practice, namely, its demand for reorientation. These are not fragmentary mini-paintings proliferated by an “outsider” artist who was frustrated with his lack of means and recognition and on the verge of ruin, someone who didn't “make it” as an artist during his lifetime and now needs to be heroically rediscovered by the West, as if he had been playing the gallery game on tilt.23 The reference here is to a poker game: when a player is losing, sometimes they tilt; they get upset about the direction in which things are heading and make emotionally based, impractical decisions, often risking it all to try to avoid the fate of failure. Instead, this collection is neither evidence of a media archive on tilt nor of Walter's creative-genius resourcefulness, which would romanticize his use of whatever leftover materials were at his disposal to compose and subsidize his valuable painting practice. Such an approach would render his work with photography as merely expedient, whereby the photographs are no more than rubbish to be reused, lucky not to have been thrown away. These assumptions are based on problematic underlying beliefs about the “failed” artist, refuse as a stable entity rather than a historically and contextually variable category, and a value hierarchy between the medium of photography vis-à-vis painting.24 They place an undue expectation on these photographs to straightforwardly convey something about the community they “represent,” whereas their fronts, that is, the paintings, do not have to pay this didactic price, as they are supposedly concerned with formalist aesthetics, reinforcing the racist binary between Western art as the modern art of form and experimentation and non-Western art that should inform through a focus on easily digestible and legible content.25 Instead, tilting these images means suspending such knowledge claims to take seriously “a possible intimate relation between both sides of Walter's work.”26
Flip Sides
The backside of a painting is where its origins, mobility, and secrets are inscribed. Here one often finds inscriptions that are meant to authenticate the work, such as its title, date of completion, artist's name, and the location, scene, or description of the person it depicts.27 There can be labels from galleries that owned, sold, and loaned it out, functioning like stamps in the painting's passport (fig. 5).28
The provenance, accounts of attribution, institutional trajectory, and migration of the work are told on the flip side. While the front of a painting might try to hide how it was made, one can find traces of its materiality by turning it around: evidence of the choice of materials, whether it was painted on high-quality paper that would be able to hold the weight of the paint over time, as well as stamps of the canvas-maker, which can help narrow down the geographical location in which the work was made.29 One might find business cards of conservators who worked on it and labels for the brand of varnish that was used to protect it once it was determined that this was an image of value. The verso reveals how it was handled while gesturing to the future, how this work was anticipated as accruing value for posterity, and how this fluctuated. While the front of the painting might be accompanied by a caption card when it's displayed, a summary of the work made for viewers by a team of experts, the back isn't tethered to translation. It is designed to be read by a small community of people who understand the codes that are embedded there and speak the same disciplinary language.
While the backside of a painting is itself not usually conserved, showing duration, material decay, and the environmental conditions that one wanted to shield the front of it from, this doesn't mean it doesn't have anything to show. Quite the contrary, it's an archive with a different set of riches requiring one to ask a different set of questions. Historically, one can find hints about the lineage of certain people on the backside. For instance, when the Städel Museum in Frankfurt turned around the face cards in its Old Masters gallery in 2015, the backsides of the portraits were shown to feature coats of arms, crests, and information about previous ownership and attribution (fig. 5). Thus, there's a history behind the tilt that is tied to speculative value, nested in the way the flip side of the work acts as a carrier of the image, just as the front is, and insists that it is something to be looked at. And not just looked at—not just turned around and then made static—but titled, looked at in combination with the recto, so that both sides can be perceived simultaneously, if incompletely. Embracing this tilt for Walter's work requires that one reframe his use of foundational materials, in his case, the studio photographs of his Black and mixed-race Antiguan community (figs. 6–7). It also means challenging narrow understandings of the photographic medium as deeply intertwined with inscription and evidentiary recording, the paradigm of the trace, notions of pastness and absence, and teleological myths of invention.
The players involved in these photographs do not fit into the binary model of an active photographer behind the lens and a passive photographed sitter in front of it, which canonical theories reinforce by privileging the apparatus, the camera lens and shutter, therein situating photography as a violent act of inscription.30 Rather, what matters here is the (re)orientation that this photographic process necessitates, insisting on inscription as an embodied practice. This is particularly the case with commercial studio photographs, which can reveal both image and imagination, citation and aspiration, whereby the private-public realm of the studio is a place of transformation (figs. 8–9).31
These images ask that one pay closer attention to the durational process of creation that went into them: the poses, props, costumes, fantasies, and identities that were tested out as modes of citation and reenactment, and the multidirectional relationship between people behind, in front of, and completely outside the range of the camera lens (figs. 10–11).32
Photographic histories hinging on the paradigm of the indexical trace can imply a universal immediacy to the persons and objects the photograph depicts and overlook the historical role of contingency to produce visual effects that could not—and should not—be planned in advance.33 What if, instead of relegating contingency to specific photographic genres, one understood it as essential to the history of the medium?34 The unforeseen in photographs would not be regarded as a glitch or an error in chemical processing but as “the[ir] yield, the[ir] visual surplus value.”35 While Walter's photographs cite traditional portrait styles, they also call attention to artifice, emphasizing the staging of the body and infusing it with the marks of contingency, the passing of time, and the interactions the photograph has or hasn't received: who asked for it and didn't pick it up, who handled and processed it, who turned it over and taped it to the wall, where was it laid face down and for how long, when did paint and other materials start to seep in, who interpreted these as marks of intention or chance and who tried to touch them up, and what about those small brown blots and yellow blurs that don't seem to come from either the painted front or the photographic back, but from somewhere else altogether, sending these images on an imaginative trajectory beyond the indexical (figs. 12–15)?
Wonder-Tilting
Tilting these images not only results in a confrontation with contingency but also activates the complexity of authorship embedded in these hybrid objects. The conventional Western art-historical interpretative framework of achieving unity and neutralizing contradictions by charting the development of a particular artist's “oeuvre” according to influence, periods, and styles becomes frustrated by the encounter with the two sides that constitute each of these “works” by Walter.36 This is especially the case when the rectos and versos do not thematically or aesthetically align with one another and instead challenge the subject, style, and tone on their flip side. How can one trace the romantic notions of the authorial hand and uniform artistic spirit required to cultivate the author-name “Frank Walter” in his painting of “European” trees, for example, when it is supported by a photographic verso that looks like an advertising image, usually an authorless genre, and in which painting itself is already embedded: clean, neat hotel beds up front, supported by “African” colonial art in the back (figs. 16–17)?37 One can't fully grasp this object via an either/or framework; it isn't as simple as privileging photography over painting or vice versa.38 Rather, one finds here that the rehearsal of essentialist notions of roots, homes, and dwelling is called into question in the context of a shifting colonial island infrastructure and a rise in tourism and transit, complicating the performance of modernity and self-fashioning. This recalls experimentation with performances of the self in colonial photographic portraiture, specifically the crucial “aspect[s] of identity creation and embellishment.”39 In such cases, the real and the imagined are anything but mutually exclusive: “In portraiture . . . clients experiment with the visual communication of particular aspects of their real and idealized identities, values, trends, and relationships.”40 Such experiments can take place in the photographic studio through the use of props, costumes, and backgrounds, but also within the photographic image itself. There is a history in non-Western photographic practices that relies on visual negativity, creating in the photograph “a secondary image of defacement, thereby challenging the simple binary opposition of . . . revealing and concealing.”41 The tilt resists either/or interpretive methods and scopic knowledge by endorsing the urge to repeatedly negotiate difference: noticing, verifying, doubting, discovering, pausing, suspending, imagining, deviating, rerouting. Recto/verso, back and forth.
Yet, the tilt alone does not safeguard against reproducing colonial approaches to Walter's work, especially if insisting on presenting him as a “failed” and later rediscovered artist. Media history itself, as Erhard Schüttpelz argues, has been straightjacketed within narratives of successful and failed technologies, whereby the former find a scientific application and the latter more idiosyncratic uses.42 Approaching the photographic versos with this awareness illustrates how highly reductive it would be to understand them as the poor, unpreserved backsides of beautiful paintings that resuscitate Walter, a “failed” Black artist whose work is now deemed worthy of institutionalization, within a Western artistic trajectory. What happens if non-Black scholars stop thinking of these photographs populated with Black bodies as a discovery to be revealed, but instead acknowledge that desire—an impetus for scholarship and a site of knowledge production that is often suppressed—is built into these objects themselves, in the urge to repeatedly and playfully confront oneself and the Other in the tilt?43 This ultimately leads to acknowledging an unruly but generative contingency in the photographic image, and intermediality is key for this: “To read media through each other is not the same as claiming the death of media or insisting that the 20th century is a post-medium age. Rather, to read media through each other might be to situate the site of any medial or mixed-medial expression as tangled in an inter(in)animate encounter, a tangle that includes cross-temporality.”44 This would mean that “what you do with your hands becomes the photograph.”45
With your hands indeed. These objects do not just materially hold together media histories that are often epistemologically opposed to one another, inscribing studio photography, ephemera, blackness, and the Caribbean into Romantic painting, extant materials, whiteness, and Europe, for example. Rather, these works postulate that these different modes and histories of visual representation can only be seen through one another, like a thaumatropic image. The thaumatrope, an optical device popularized in the nineteenth century, visually produces miracles or wonders (thauma) by turning, rotating, or changing direction (trope): a wonder-turner. It pairs two different images on different sides of a disc suspended on a piece of string, and when the disc is spun, the images seem to infiltrate one another. Flowers on one side of the disc fall into the vase on the other, for example. It is often aligned with the history of film because it is presumed to demonstrate synthesis and the illusion of movement. But in its earlier medical and scientific contexts, the thaumatrope was actually meant to break down how vision works: “Its ‘realism’ presupposes perceptual experience to be essentially an apprehension of differences. The relation of the observer to the object is not one of identity but an experience of disjunct or divergent images.”46 The thaumatrope is less about smooth, invisible transitions and more about the medial configurations that allow differences to be recognized and processed as such. As with the tilt or the fold, differences are not meant to be, and are not, synthesized here.47 They are instead suspended to be seen as such, and loosely, without consensus, held together.48 In this way, the European backdrop common in earlier African diasporic vernacular photography and, “particularly in postcolonial contexts, function[ing] as a means of imagined mobility” becomes visible but troubled.49 The holding together of these spaces without synthesis allows for the tilt and, successively, gives rise to that which comes after it: the afterimage, which plays a key role both in these early epistemological discourses on optics and in Frank Walter's own works and writings.
The fact that Walter painted these landscapes from memory in Antigua, long after he left Europe, is often referenced as one of many examples of his genius.50 Walter excelled in European history, science, and philosophy; he was a Latin scholar and a poet, and he spoke multiple languages. He was skilled in botany, became Antigua's first Black manager of a sugar plantation, wrote about politics and economics, and ran for prime minister, losing to his cousin. Having heard bedtime stories as a child of his European aristocratic lineage, he was drilled in etiquette by his relatives.51 Walter did not remember these images. (We know the story from Frantz Fanon: “I am a black man—but naturally I don't know it, because I am one. At home my mother sings me, in French, French love songs where there is never a mention of black people. . . . A little later on we read white books and we gradually assimilate the prejudices, the myths, and the folklore that come from Europe.”)52 Walter knew these images before, not after, he went to Europe. What he knew afterward is that the European images he saw with his own eyes couldn't accommodate the mix of recollection and imagination.53 Throughout his writings, Walter repeatedly references delayed apparitions from the future and optical metaphors that complicate vision: afterimages, TV images, X-ray vision, and negative and never-before-seen patterns containing “tremendous data.”54 It's a way of describing the production of historical knowledge as embodied, nonlinear, and multitemporal. It interrogates what can be seen with the naked eye and how to suspend formal, sanctioned histories to generate different principles through which history could be written, so as to try to account for marginalities and exclusionary epistemological values in the very first place. It relies on duration and repetition with difference, successive rehearsals featuring images of objects seen somewhere else before, with temporality always running the risk of getting mixed up. It's a maddening history, as Jacques Derrida writes: “What I prefer, about post cards, is that one does not know what is in front or what is in back, here or there, near or far . . . recto or verso. Nor what is the most important, the picture or the text, and in the text, the message or the caption, or the address. . . . Reversibility unleashes itself, goes mad” (figs. 18–19).55
The tilt plays a key role in the genre of photographic portraits and glamour shots, which often focus on special occasions (birthdays, weddings), rituals (christenings, carnivals), and rites of passage (graduation, baby's first steps). One notices here how the pose that was perhaps initially sought after was not quite achieved in these images, how it might have been perceived as somewhat off, the images depicting an awkward half smile, an infant staring blankly into the camera, or closed eyes (fig. 18).56 One might, at first, see this as a glamour shot that has accidentally missed the mark, capturing the sitter in a moment of blinking instead of direct, frontal gaze into the lens, resulting in an imperfect or undesirable image left behind in the studio. But the tilt reworks the promise that failed in the first instantiation, releasing the gesture into an open, mixed Caribbean-European landscape, suspending and extending the viewing process through a moment of gestural articulation (fig. 19).57 In this collection, it's a gesture that is often doubled: two photographs of the same face, one upside down and the other right side up, with the designation repeatedly changing depending on which side is being viewed and how the object is held. This maddening reversibility is a form of work, forcing one to confront one's own economies of vision with a doubled gesture of closed eyes, refusing a means of access via visual identification or inspection.
In a different site of work, at the scene of writing, a photographic portrait's closed eyes appear again, tilted once more and singled out on the wall in the background, behind another face (fig. 20). Photographs like this one, of Walter in his Antiguan studio where he painted, made toys, wrote books, and took photos, are rare.58 While we know his work primarily as paintings and as scenes of writing—and photography as something else altogether—the tilt enacts a processual change in orientation. The ingrained classificatory tendencies that sustain difference in artworld values, such as notions of “the work” and refuse, aesthetic form and representative content, success and failure, and canonization and marginalization, can become visible at the moment when they are suspended, broken down, and seen as such, thaumatropically, through one another.59 Instead of a positivist approach to these objects that insists on the acknowledged or neglected value of one side of these images over the other, their inherent reversibility offers a challenge to reimagine the dynamic mix of front and backside, background and foreground. This ultimately demands a reassessment of the value relation between transparency and opacity, “relinquishing the imperative to know, to take, to capture, to master, to lay bare all the world with its countless terrors and wonders” (fig. 18 in/and fig. 20).60
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to colleagues from the Goethe University Frankfurt, UC Davis, and UCLA for offering helpful feedback on the first draft of this article, presented at the UC Humanities Collaborative Junior Faculty Exchange event, sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute. Thank you to Barbara Paca for generously helping me access these materials and to Kyle Tata and Alaina Dexter for sharing their thoughtful insights with me on photographic production processes.
Notes
Lisa Lowe, quoted in Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 11. See Lowe, “Intimacies of Four Continents,” 208. On understanding the official/the withheld in colonial archives through the logic of the recto/verso, see Brand, Blue Clerk: “I have left this unsaid. I have withheld. What is withheld is the left-hand page. . . . I have withheld more than I have written. . . . What is withheld is on the back” (3–4).
Derrida, “Foreword,” xviii.
See Walter and Walter, “Frank Walter Legacy Project”; Paca, “Last Universal Man,” 314; Thompson, “History on the Underside,” 372–73.
This refers to the speculation in Walter's family that their name can be traced back to Lucy Walter, mistress of King Charles II. Walter lists them in this image as “married in Catholic rite 1646” before the birth of their son, James, whom Walter believed was brought to Antigua to live in hiding for his own safety under the alias of Francis Wentworth Walter. See Paca, “How I Became European,” 402.
Paca, “Last Universal Man,” 293. On the 1948 British Nationality Act, see Carter, Harris, and Joshi, “1951–1955 Conservative Government,” 57. On the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, see Cantres, Blackening Britain, 139, 142–45; Perry, London Is the Place for Me, 153–77.
Paca, “Chronology,” 346. On the 1971 Immigration Act, see Cantres, Blackening Britain, 209–10.
Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility,” 211. On the urgency of producing “in excess of the fictions of the archive” and the official, see Sharpe, In the Wake, 13; Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 9–14.
See Paca, “Last Universal Man,” 303–4. On the subjunctive mode as a historiographical approach, see Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 11.
See Walter and Walter, “Frank Walter Legacy Project.” On Walter's autobiography, see Paca, “Last Universal Man,” 303. For a sample of these works, see Paca, Frank Walter, 100–1, 106–7, 150–51; Paca, “Last Universal Man,” 244, 277.
See, for example, Lorch, “Retrospektive des Künstlers Frank Walter”; Gropp, “Frank Walter im MMK”; James, “Why Frank Walter Can't Be Categorised.”
Selvyn Walter excerpted in “Selected Texts” in Paca, Frank Walter, 338.
Thompson, “History on the Underside,” 372. On the relationship between the Polaroid and African diasporic communities in the 1970s, see Thompson, Shine, 71–89.
See Lazard and Damman, “Carolyn Lazard by Catherine Damman”: “I looked at the backs of the paintings [by Walter], and what I found were all of these incredible photographs of daily life in Antigua. There was something about his use of the photograph as both image and surface material that gave me all I really needed to know about how to address the framing of Walter's work. . . . And so . . . my work was to document the backs of his paintings, which then, themselves, turn into a kind of photo series.”
See, for example, “Artists: Frank Walter.” On Walter's requests to exhibit his work at European institutions, see Paca, “Last Universal Man,” 307. For a critique of ascribing Outsider Art to “a class of artists who are frequently Black and poor and disabled” and the “equally problematic attempts to mainstream the work into modernist art-historical narratives,” see Lazard and Damman, “Carolyn Lazard by Catherine Damman.” See also Bruce, How to Go Mad, 12–15.
See Roy, “Problem.”
See Dyangani Ose, “Hypothesis for an Institution,” 18–23; Roelstraete, “After, Behind, In, and Through,” 30–35; Wolf, “Hintersinnig”; Battcock, “Wall Paintings and the Wall,” 73–78.
This becomes even more crucial considering that these also could have been test images used to calibrate color. On this, see Roth, “Looking at Shirley,” 116–27; Hüser, “Finding Openings,” 318–30; Yue, Girl Head, 40–56.
The author's name “performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function. Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. . . . We could say that in a civilization like our own there are a certain number of discourses endowed with the ‘author function’ while others are deprived of it.” Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 210–11.
On the Black body potentially suspended within the difference and discrepancy between painting and photography, see Raengo, “Holding Blackness,” 27–28, 37n38–38n38.
Behrend, Contesting Visibility, 21. On the history of the title “Untitled,” which gained prominence in the 1970s in photographic and photo-text work, signaling a form of “titular restraint” that can indicate authorial evasion, deference, or withdrawal, see Welchman, Invisible Colors, 339–48.
On “the sensations, feelings, and desires of the white and non-black body that produce the black body as an object of inquiry” in the first place, see King, “Off Littorality,” 42.
Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 120. Crary is writing here about the stereoscope but aligns it with other optical devices relying on this principle of difference.
Thompson, Shine, 84. See also Appadurai, “Colonial Backdrop,” 4–7; Lippard, “Frames of Mind,” 8–11.
See, for example, Saltz, “Antiguan Master.” On Walter's photographic memory, see Paca, “Last Universal Man,” 245, 274; Paca, “How I Became European,” 383.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 168; see also 18–21. See also Kincaid, Small Place, 33; Riechelmann, “Frank Walter's Ghosts”; Walter, “How I Became European,” 380.
Walter refers to this mix in his writings. See, for example, Walter, autobiographical manuscript, 5697–98, in Paca, Frank Walter, 136–37.
Walter, autobiographical manuscript, 2617 and 4596–99, in Paca, “How I Became European,” 383, 398–99; Walter, autobiographical manuscript, 4266, in Paca, “Last Universal Man,” 292.
On the racialized history of the smile and notions of happiness in studio photography, see Sheehan, “Looking Pleasant,” 127–57.
On the suspended gesture that offers the possibility of response, see Campt, Black Gaze, 36–41, 87–88; Schneider, “That the Past May Yet Have Another Future,” 286–87.
On the often-overlooked work of classification and segmentation, see Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out.
Bruce, How to Go Mad, 11. On uncertainty and “critical ambivalence” as format and method, see Bruce, How to Go Mad, 235–37. “Sometimes it is useful, even crucial, to tarry in the openness of ambiguity; in the strategic vantage point available in the interstice (the better to look both ways and beyond); in the capacious bothness of ambivalence. . . . Lingering in ambivalence, we can access multiple, even dissonant, vantages at once, before pivoting, if we finally choose to pivot, toward decisive motion.” Bruce, “Shore, Unsure,” 357.
