Lorna Simpson

In this essay about the photography of Lorna Simpson, Enwezor describes how Simpson grapples with the ideas of racism, poverty, civil rights, and politics. Her images are unique because they aim to restore historical truth. I thought it was interesting that Simpson denotes the cliche " a picture is worth a thousand words" by incorporating the sense of "language" into her photography and attempting to "erase captions that was so necessary for the denotative aspect of documentary practice." Her photography became similar to that of Cindy Sherman because of the feeling of a behind the scenes narrative, like the picture was a piece of a larger film, and not just a singular work.

Race and gender were a large part of the ideas Simpson hoped to evoke in her photography. Simpson "fell in love with photography so to speak with photorapgy as a shaper of subjectivity," meaning that she lost the need for photographic realism, much like her contemporary artists. The subjectivity was also known as the "crisis of representation" or the essentialist views of race and gender of the time.

"Simpson reworks the ethical paradigm of the documentary, ctritically questionning the maudlin sentimentality introduced in the early photography of the face as a window to the soul of the subject." Simpson instead makes the subject not the main focus of the image, but one has to extract their personality and "soul" from not their eyes, but their surroundigns, or race, or gender.