Naima Green Is In Pursuit
Of The Close Portrait
An Artistic Practice Turns Into A House Of Cards
- Interview: Madeleine Seidel
- Images/Photos Courtesy Of: Naima Green
Naima Green is a new world historian. Through her work as a photographer and artist, Green captures the mundane and the sublime of queer communities from Riis Beach to Ciudad de México in loving and detailed portraiture. Her work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, Mass MoCA, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and each series cultivates a practice that revels in the everyday, documenting human interactions and small intimacies too easily missed. Her photographic practice has recently extended past the art world and into media with her New York Times series Jewels From the Hinterland (2013-present) and this October’s stunning Harper’s Bazaar cover featuring musician Solange Knowles, each one imbued with the same care and consideration that makes her portraiture stand out from the crowd.
In 2018, Green began her project Pur·suit, which consisted of a deck of playing cards with each card featuring a portrait of an LGBTQIA+ person in Brooklyn. Inspired by Catherine Opie’s Dyke Deck (1995), Green wanted to create a document of queer Brooklyn as she knew it––a supportive, vibrant community that valued fluidity. The resulting deck of portraits featured both Green’s friends (like New York Times writer Jenna Wortham and artist Sable Elyse Smith) and complete strangers alongside the groups Yellow Jacket Collective, bklyn boihood, and BUFU. The intimacies captured by her lens take on a new meaning during the twin upheavals of the pandemic and this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests: at a time where community and touch feel so distant, Green celebrates joy and comfort.
This fall, Pur·suit and Green’s new projects will be featured at Fotografiska New York in her solo exhibition Brief & Drenching, which opened this August following Fotografiska’s prolonged closure during New York’s initial coronavirus lockdown. Organized by Green and curators Toby Kaufmann and Grace Noh, the resulting show is an antidote for our moment: a beautiful meditation on intimacy, home, and family, chosen or otherwise.
From our respective homes in Brooklyn, Green and I chatted about Brief & Drenching, her experiments in self-portraiture, and the power of the archive.
Naima Green, The intimacy of before, 2020. Top Image: Naima Green, Pur·suit (detail), 2019. Image by Megan Madden.
Madeleine Seidel
Naima Green
When you began the photo-series Pur·suit in 2018, it was initially envisioned as a deck of playing cards—very different from the large-scale portraits hanging in the exhibition. Why did you decide to display these portraits outside of their original playing card format?
It felt really important to see those portraits on a different scale. I had only seen them in the card deck and on screen, so I wanted to think about the presence each portrait could have on the wall of the exhibition and how that might change its context. Yunique, in particular––I love their portrait because of the gesture, and they’re just so elegant, and there’s an ease with the sneakers… their Chucks are just so lived in. Thinking about the portraits with those elements might not be present when you’re looking at the deck and seeing them at two-and-a-half, three-and-a-half inches, but when you see them at thirty-nine inches tall, you’re able to take in more of those details and spend more time with each sitter. I’m interested in these portraits and these people taking up space, because they deserve all of that.
It’s interesting to me that Pur·suit first existed as this object d’art—the idea of “the object” is so present throughout the exhibition in pieces such as i like you and its corresponding self portrait. As some of your practice expands into the three-dimensional, how do you make connections between the object and the photograph in your work?
I had been interested in making objects for a long time, but this show is one of the first times I’m really able to share more of those things. There wouldn’t be a photograph without the object, so in some ways, it’s about thinking through the process of what the final picture becomes, and knowing what is needed to make the picture in the first place. Using my mirror in i like you was a way to invite the audience into the moment of making that portrait. I was excited to bring the piece in because when I showed it at my thesis show, people engaged with the mirror by taking selfies. It felt like it was living in a different way, and I loved seeing how people engaged with something that was with me every single day in my apartment.The portraits also serve as a record of who was there with me and who was in that space––either physically with me, or with my ideas. I look at some of the portraits in this series, and there are a couple where my desk is really messy and represents a certain time I was in. I’m inviting people to look at what’s in my home and think about how that can be its own portrait.
Naima Green, Self-Portrait (I like you), 2017.
In addition to the way it plays with objects and space, i like you is a really fascinating exploration of self-portraiture. When did you begin photographing yourself for this series?
The i like you portraits were a big shift for me because I didn’t include my body in my own work for a long time. I had thought about [self-portraiture] as vanity, and I wasn’t interested in being known for the way that I looked. I wanted the photograph to be my voice and the thing that you remember. In 2017, I was feeling pretty disconnected and numb in a lot of ways; it was post-election, post-breakup… I wasn’t feeling embodied. I started a series called Attraction Experiments where I asked people to meet me at a location––which ended up being a photo-booth––to do a portrait together. I asked everyone to come prepared with five instructions that they wanted me to perform during our shoot, and in essentially becoming a performer for someone else within my own work, I felt alive in a way I hadn’t felt in quite some time.
Later that year, I had dental surgery and had to stay at home. Most of my work up to that point had been done outdoors, so I thought, “What can I do that’s just me and not needing to ask people to come over?” That’s when I started the i like you portraits. Over the course of a weekend, I just took a portrait of myself everytime I changed clothes. It was an exercise in vanity or when I felt good in the beginning, but then, it became a way to really play around, with the ways I was documenting myself, the objects on my desk, and a few of the people who shared that space intimately with me.
Related to the self-portrait, another new medium that you are working with is film, including this exhibition’s The intimacy of before. How was it transitioning from photography to video? Did that feel like a leap creatively?
In terms of film and video, it’s difficult for me because I often feel like I don’t have all of the skills for this––but it’s also a beautiful way to collaborate with people. I have made many moving image works on shoots and things like that, but this was an opportunity to think more about how video can show the way that someone might move around, like a breathing portrait. I had the idea for The intimacy of before at a time of immense grief and made a video sketch [of it] then. I knew I wanted to return to this idea now since this is also a time of tremendous grief but at a global level. The video has some elements of that first sketch, but it’s also about the moment of 2020––thinking about touch, intimacy, loss, but not necessarily in a form of sadness but of surrender and transition. We shot it in my apartment [this] July, but we were supposed to work on it in March as things started to shut down in New York. We had to put it on hold, and I’m really glad we did, because there was just a different tone through COVID in New York.
Your work is a document of such intimate and comfortable everyday moments, which is quite radical considering how you give priority to Black and queer experiences. What does it mean to you to be documenting these scenes of the everyday, and do you see yourself as an archivist?
For some reason, the term “archivist” is not something I ever really described myself as until [writer] Jessica Lynne––it was either Jess or [curator and scholar] Oluremi Onabanjo––named my process a process of archiving. Earlier this year, I sat down and had a really beautiful conversation with [photographer] Marilyn Nance, who has an incredible archive of FESTAC 77. I said, “I want to build this archive,” and she said, “You already have an archive.”
It changed the way I thought about what I needed to make and what I forgot I already had, because yes, my work is one of archiving. I think in creating contemporary documents or images that are constantly evolving, it does become this process of feeling like the work is never done. I feel invigorated by that because it gives me more space for the work to live and be an actual organism that evolves when people evolve, and as the world grows and things deepen. So, yes––a long yes.
Madeleine Seidel is a curator and writer based in Brooklyn. She has previously worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Atlanta Contemporary. Her writing on film, performance, and the art of the American South has been published in Art Papers, frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, and others.
- Interview: Madeleine Seidel
- Images/Photos Courtesy Of: Naima Green
- Date: November 2nd, 2020
