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Will H. Jacks

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Portraits that Honor the Men Who Participated in the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike

August 6, 2020

https://hyperallergic.com/580505/portraits-that-honor-the-men-who-participated-in-the-1968-memphis-sanitation-workers-strike/

Since the early 20th century, photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston have adapted the Old Master painting technique of chiaroscuro, using extreme contrasts of light and dark to create powerful portraits of the natural world. Weston’s 1930 gelatin silver print “Pepper” spotlights a vegetable’s swelling forms to suggest a human figure. Adams’ 1940 gelatin silver prints “Surf Sequence” portray the rippling texture of ocean surf, melding realism and abstraction. These black and white photographs owe their formal elegance to chiaroscuro.

At MOCA, Juste’s use of chiaroscuro conveys a different kind of expressive power. Elegantly framing his subjects against solid black, he reveals closely observed details, like the sheen of their ties and crisp white shirts. His figures are fixed in a featureless space, bold sentinels to history. Viewed at a time when historic monuments elevating Confederate and colonial powers are attacked, the father and son in Juste’s photograph could be warriors carved in granite monuments as insistent responses to racist histories.

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