Anthony C. Francis
I, Anthony Francis, am an artist living in San Antonio, Texas with my partner and children. A lecturer of photography at Texas State University, my work deals with problems, politics, love as subversive remedy, autonomy and representation within the making of portraits. Because portraits are a description presenting a reference to a person, they are generally and specific likenesses of people and a person.
Juneteenth, KCMO, 18th and Vine, 2018
A Body of work made while on a trip to create another series, these portraits took place over two or three hours as a night session in the historical district of 18th and Vine in Kansas City, Missouri. My mother, grandfather, grandmother, and cousin live here, but my most recent experiences are the more memorable. I only wanted to facilitate representation. This process is integral to the portrait making exchange. I made the portraits and sent the sitters digital copies. I did minimal, if any, posing and was their/our photographer for a moment during this celebration of delayed emancipation or just being alive.
Representation is always needed, never ceasing value. It is a person’s own ‘poetic license’ like in the forward of Lorenzo Thomas’s book of poetry Chances are Few, saying, ‘it simply amounts to what the old people in New Orleans say when babies cry: ‘Sure you right, darling, let them know you are here!’ In this project, I am just here to acknowledge the presence of the representation of human existence. We just be.