Spelman photo exhibit captures beauty, dignity of black life

Bottom line: Though at times thematically scrambled, this Spelman show about beauty is just as often filled with visual delights.

The Spelman College Museum of Fine Art show “Posing Beauty in African American Culture” suggests when you’ve been pushed to the margins for so long, the simple act of stepping in front of the camera is a reclaiming of beauty, or at least identity.

Like the current show of Jerry Pinkney’s children’s book illustrations at the High Museum, with their visions of a warm, cozy African-American home front, “Posing Beauty” offers many images filled with dignity, affection and the gentleness of family, something popular culture has been less apt to offer up when representing black life.

The more than 75 photographs curated by renowned New York University art historian Deborah Willis in the wide-ranging photography show “Posing Beauty” are exceedingly diverse. The show is filled with all manner of visual delights, but is also a bit of a scramble, often struggling for a through line.

There are intimate, 19th-century cabinet card portraits from the college’s collection showing Spelman students posed in crisp white dresses exemplifying youth and promise. Next to such historical images is “Venus (Self-Portrait)” a radical, inspiring 1994 image of artist Carla Williams that displays her far-from-svelte but lush, defiantly nude body. Judging by the comments left by viewers of the exhibit, it’s one of the favorite images for confronting a dictatorial beauty standard head-on.

The show also incorporates celebrity portraits of Michelle Obama, Michael Jackson and Denzel Washington and images of Black Panthers and ordinary people grinning next to their cars or friends. Often the images seem less about beauty and more about a litany of affirmations: self-respect, integrity and defiance, to counter an oppressive cultural standard of what constitutes the black experience.

There are some expected examinations of beauty in the show like Lauren Woods’ visceral video featuring the 2006 Miss Texas pageant winner Shilah Phillips, the first black woman to win the crown in that state. By slowing the action down, Woods transforms the smiling, expertly coiffed women on stage waiting to learn the winner into bundles of anxiety and resentment. The video questions the price of actually achieving the beauty standard.

But beauty in “Posing Beauty” is often not quite so literal. More often “Posing Beauty” seems to be about either the subject and/or the photographer taking ownership of one’s image. That position is exemplified by a man called Atlanta’s first African-American photographer Thomas E. Askew. Askew took formal, painterly portraits of prosperous African-Americans, from a well-dressed family grouped on a lawn like something out of an Edouard Manet painting, to a girl with perfect posture playing the piano in a richly appointed parlor. Rather than the beauty of movie stars and pageant queens, Askew’s fascinating historical images capture the quiet dignity in portraits of friendship and family life.

While women are often held to a high beauty standard, men are more often let off the hook. But in “Posing Beauty” men are just as often appreciated for their loveliness as women. One of this show’s delights is its reliance on historical and street photography that really captures the zeitgeist of the age when the image was taken. There are numerous photographs from the 1930s into the Fifties and the age of hip-hop of men behaving like peacocks, turned out in everything from suits to stretch pants to testify to the equal abilities of men to court beauty. Fashion is a big part of the pleasure-zone of “Posing Beauty.” The show revels in the expressive power of clothes: how beauty is defined individually as the way you style yourself for a day in the world.

Bayete Ross Smith’s joyous “Prom Night” portraits capture the wild expressiveness of teenagers, dolled up in white zoot suits or with hair the color of Easter eggs, thrilling at the inventiveness of their outfits. Street photographer Jamel Shabazz’s images are a special treat, offering similarly giddy, electrifyingly fun images of the wild style of ordinary people on the streets of New York City.