Lorna Simpson

Once you get past Enwezor’s lengthy and elaborate discussions of race in his essay “Lorna Simpson”, some key elements regarding Simpson’s work and techniques begin to surface that, in my opinion, significantly contribute to the understanding of photography in today’s world culture and society.

First of all, one striking element was how in all of Simpson’s photographs “the subject is never fully visible” (119). Enwezor’s point that this “underline[s] the hypocrisy of the camera as it presumes to invent truth” got me thinking about what can the camera claim to say if it cannot see (119)? In other words, when we see a portrait of a person, we instinctually look to the subject’s eyes first in order to understand the emotion of the image. But when their eyes cannot be seen, what can the photograph tell us? We understand no emotion from seeing someone’s back, although the way they’re standing—their body language, that is—can tell us quite a bit. Essentially this goes back to the question of the photograph’s ability to portray reality. How can we understand reality when we cannot see it?

Another interesting point that Enwezor brings up is Simpson’s use of text. Her erasure of “the caption that was so necessary for the denotative aspect of documentary practice” and use, instead, of poetic, abstract phrases, definitively displays her transition from street photography to essentially story-telling (109). From what I understand, in Gestures/Reenactments, Simpson alternates between text and image, creating something like a silent still film, where we are visually stimulated and are allowed to create our own stories, but then are re-guided in the subjectively “right” direction by her text. I consider this to be a form of multi-media art, but one that is far more graceful and poetic than, say, a collage.