Anthony Francis: All We Be
Anthony Francis is an artist living in San Antonio, Texas. He graduated from the Academy of Art University with an MFA specializing in photography in 2015. His work continues to deal with politics within portraiture. Common themes include autonomy, the mechanics of the frame, the process of photographic portraiture, and the expressions of love within personal experience.
RR: Hello Anthony, how are things going?
AF: Hi, Raul: Thanks for having me. Things are as good as they can possibly be amid a pandemic and protesting --still-- for equity and liberation. But, too, it is interesting because art and the process of conceptualization is a part of life. I am continually thinking about ways to make life and love the work itself, more than what a friend of mine calls the objectness of art. This idea includes all of the material confinements of the art process, the glorification of the grand fallacy of individuation (as Fred Moten might say). So, I am trying to make the work ‘the gathering’ itself. Photographic portraiture has a great opportunity to be that, to be more than confinement of a body in a frame. I think photographic portraiture can be collaborative and collective in its process and product. I think the focus of materiality might be a great impediment in art in some ways, because the experience, the phenomenological has always been what we have tried to get back to. Trying to remember or stay in the moment might be the futile efforts of all art. So, I am good and thinking but feeling heightened trauma. Because my work is a part of that, I find myself just trying to be in space with lovers and make new lovers. More than friends, I need accomplices. No new friends!!!
RR: Your portrait work is undeniable. Could you talk about your process in creating work around portraiture?
AF: Portraiture usually sets the limits of my work. I start with the body as material, and care, community, and gathering to start ideation. Considering the politics of portraiture, because it is a way of setting, the boundaries of the work is always at the forefront and setting the form and manner of expression. However, it is important to not only think about the concept but speak to how we all will participate in the making of the work. All the considerations that go into the work comprise the works’ form but increasingly, focus is on what stirs the soul before the conscious intent to make work. This is not too unique an idea (the investigation affects in some way, the incident of feeling), but the gathering aspect within portraiture is what is shifting the work for me.
Daiquonne, San Antonio, 2019, Is keeping his spirit lifted and or placing us on the pedestal
This is especially an interesting question at this very moment, because the driving investigation is whether one can love through the process and production of photographic portraiture. There is a politics in portraiture and I am wondering how to distribute the power vested in the artist and work toward the aforementioned gathering. I’m finding this premise may not be sufficient at times, because love has a different intention outside of art. Art and love can, and do, overlap and intersect. For instance, love seeks to be itself and must be communicated. It seeks to transmit as love and be received as love. Distilling the act of love is care’s continuing pursuit. I can say confidently that this work is from a want to love and is about collectivity and communicating care to my people, to fam, to friends. We all we got.
Dimitri, San Antonio, 2019, holds our babies and or the world
Edward, San Antonio, 2018, Cool or cold etc.
As this process becomes a commonsafeplace, especially as this current project is ongoing and evolving, things are starting to flow differently. In this current place the process starts with ambiguous prompts. The sitter and I are continually talking about the idea and working our way through the pose the way an informal read-through of a script might unfold. But we are talking about life, our lives, music and shit that has nothing to do with making a photograph. The environment is dynamic and bears ebbs and flows. The prompts come from life that also have nothing to do with making a photograph. The process consists of sitting/gathering and collectively remembering what it is like to be alive and work to live. It is a conscious performance of life, a collective understanding and personal interpretation of these ideas. This work is rendering me more sensitive and making a better lover. It, too, is making art more complicated.
Art has always been a reflection of our personal concerns. However, it is more simple than that; Art work at the very least reveals a priority, a concern of ours. I think the implications of that might be what makes some artists so resistant about making work with people and making work that is personal. The implications are threatening. The work doesn’t have to reflect who a person is, but I think it does, the way John Szarkowski talks about the content within the frame. That which we leave out of the frame is as important as what remains inside of it. In that respect, I think the frame is a world in the way that philosophy is a study of the nature of worlds. The frame is a world. In face of the confines of art, my concerns are shifting toward making sure care is happening, that care is the work. Love is then a type of subversion; it doesn’t need art to be itself. Do I need art to love myself and others? Again, can art do/be love? I don’t know if I answered your question, but I think my answer is relatively proximal. LOL
RR: That was appropriately complex actually. We’re talking of course about your recent work, All We Be, which was just at The Brick in San Antonio. You describe it as a performance of shared experiences. What are some of the ideas behind the work?
AF: There were a few ideas:
Portraiture is a description of a person. This definition comes from scholar Shearer West. It's pretty simple. However, a photograph can describe through its memetic power, but I have most recently thought about the way a pose can obfuscate the viewer’s interpretation. I started to develop this idea of at least two competing prompts for each portrait. The sitter would work to portray a pose that occupies space between both ideas, compelling the viewer to access the work with their own experience or imagination. I like the idea of imagination as an alternative to empathy. These prompts are thoughts and expressions of general human and specific personal experiences that include issues within my racialized black life, allowing the artist and sitter to occupy a privileged space. However, the viewing experience may be a point of gathering and remembering. They might be privy to the communality of the work. There is an inside and outside to the work, a backstage and an audience. Hopefully, they have a frequency that sometimes has to be felt rather than read.
Lastly, the captions are also reflections of the portraits. They allude to short literary portraits and meant to mirror the image, bearing fidelity to the referent and at the same time allowing possibility without definition.
Jarvis, San Antonio, 2018, our hands are stretching in sky and/or his space is a dancehall
Jessica, San Antonio, 2019, is love and or is loving us when we are hard to love
Kaldric, San Antonio, 2019, is fighting for it all, and or holding onto black has made
RR: I love the idea that within your process your goal is the redistribution of the artist’s power. As we know photographers have a lot of power when it comes to how the story is told. What are the steps you take for this redistribution and delivery of autonomy to your subjects and subject matter?
AF: The methods of power redistribution are ever demanding. It is both natural and necessary that I love better, and the work accordingly changes/is changing. The underlying concept of my work is love, and I am working to make the work a form of care for myself and people who come in contact with me and my expressive actions and performance. If a portrait is the description of a person, representation is important as well as the acknowledgement of autonomy and agency. Their need to represent themselves is as important as how they might express the prompt. If they are placed in a position that is not natural to them, we change it. They also wear their own clothes and pose in ways that are comfortable to them even when we're working to express these collective memories. I might change my set to interact with what they wear, but I’d rather do that than dress them.
I usually direct a sitter’s gaze past the viewer and outside of either side of the frame, a convention suggesting the presence of a subject’s own mental space or preoccupation. In studying portraiture, some artists, like Deanna Dawson, choose to use a direct gaze that confronts the viewer. While those that use a gaze directed away or past the viewer allow the viewers’ gaze to prey upon them, I prioritize an allusion to a space outside of the frame that is unconcerned with the viewer. The painter Barkley L. Hendricks would work in a similar manner. Lorna Simpson chose more inaccessibility by completely turning the subjects’ back on the viewer in her earlier work Waterbearer, 1988 and the other work into the early 1990s. Besides the visual syntax, I am working to broaden my personal approach to the nature of photographic portraiture. Going back to the last question, If the caption doesn’t describe or clearly name and the pose is open to interpretation, is it a portrait? Maybe the definition of portraiture doesn't matter. In a way, this work most deeply alludes to a life being lived together and having been lived together. The appearance of one particular body within the frame might just speak to destiny, the collective destiny of many housed inside each of us. So the viewers demand to participate closes the loop to call individuation a lie. To interpret what might be taking place in an image or trying to decode what is being communicated demands the viewer give themselves access to the work if they so choose. This might just be an allusion to the autonomy of the performance, the possible communion of which the photograph is a document. If you want to fully see this work, you have got to be willing to be together.
Krystal, San Antonio, 2018, is challenging and or asking what's good
Ma, San Antonio, 2019, This and or That
RR: You mentioned Lorna Simpson as well bell hook’s concept of love playing a role within your work. Does Black Feminist Theory play any other role in your practice?
AF: Black feminist theory, like the struggle for racial and financial equity, sets the political --in its simplest form-- parameters for love. This means, the people most targeted by the myriad systems of oppression have experiential knowledge that is valuable to all humanity. So, bell hooks, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Tina Campt, Patrica Hill Collins and so many more have ideas that matter to all of us. So, because I am interested in love and caring, black feminism is a requisite intellectual gathering place to listen and to inform the conceptual foundation of my work. This field of praxis needs to be guiding us now. I’ve read Aristotle and even Schopenhauer: Schopenhauer was involved with the Nazi party, and so much has been built atop and outside of Aristotle’s work that it has no direct connection to my work. Anyone reading history, art, even mathematics would be affected and edified by black feminist theory. So, feminist theory is integral to the way I take care to represent the subject, to even consider my work as the gathering, to conceive of the work, and the communal nature of the sharing of prompts and the performance of making more that the resulting framed photograph, is the work. People, through the lens of western art, might say my work then is about love, but that would miss the mark. The work is meant TO love, and that is meant to happen before, during, and after the work. That means that the gathering, that we are together, is more important than taking pictures.The reason for the work is because we are consciously alive together but kicking it because we have time. What the viewer does is approach the work as they will. Increasingly, my focus is on the gathering and the language of love there and, again, whether love is in the place at all. This also burdens me to keep love in me and to even show the work where it can best be received and do the most care. It is a matter of alignment between love praxis and the love work of care. Anything outside of love is a failure of mine to carry out the forms of such a high standard, a rigorous and continuous action that edifies all us.
Xavier, San Antonio, 2019, is doubled over because of knowing, and or momentarily pained. (outtake)
RR: Would it be too much to ask for words of encouragement or thoughts on what we are seeing today, now.
AF: Words of encouragement might be too much to ask, because I don’t want anyone to feel better as long as “better” means moving past the urgent need for us to disassemble the structural system of white-supremacy. The single most important thing to understand about white supremacy is that it is an idea that affects all people but helps racialized white people the most. The conversation makes many uncomfortable, but if you look at many of those close to us and the things we enjoy, like art, music, cinema, they are all tools to reinforce these ideas. Those art forms are so often used by artists of color to try to grapple with or break through structural systems of white supremacy. When we think about the historical foundation of financial inequity, these systems were built upon the determination of who did and didn’t deserve resources or the flippant, inhuman declaration that things were more important than people. It has been the most devastating and prolonged human-made disaster in recorded time, the body scorching heat wave of racism and capitalism. Love, in the middle of this reality is the only nonpartisan concept that can allow us to realize how we might go forward. Love, a willful continuous action that edifies (holistically) both (or more) parties involved. As in love, we have to give to receive and lose so that we all win. I don't know if that is encouraging, because it means we all have to work harder than ever before and learn more than ever before and be willing to give time and material like never seen before. We have yet to see racial equity on a global or national scale. We have to reevaluate how good we are willing to be for each other and redefine, failure, success and all of America. These needed changes, needed love are in doubt. Many people, that read more and are better at loving than I am, know we should follow black feminists into love. Many are trying to maintain hope, but white-supremacy is in everybody and everything. We need to continuously and radically commit care. That may not seem like encouragement, but it's all I got. LOL
Thanks for having me. I hope to give all I have to meet the high standard of a love praxis and hope we join the rebellion. Love is subversion, an uprising. Peace and love.
Zaneta, San Antonio, 2019, She loves dearly and or care and defense is on deck
RR: Thank you Anthony.