When I was 16, my dad and I were parked outside the Express Dairy in Wembley, chatting in the front of our car. We’d been there for about 10 minutes when there was a knock on the window. It was a police officer. Someone had reported the presence of two suspicious men in a vehicle.
As we drove off, my dad chuckled at the idea that anyone could think of us, a middle-aged man and his son in a Volvo estate, as a threat. I laughed too, but I wouldn’t have if I’d realised that incidents like this were soon to become commonplace. Here, in 1984, was an end to boyhood and the start of my journey into adulthood – into becoming a black man.
What this meant in practice was that my body was no longer my own. Being a black man means being subject to the white gaze. It means becoming an object of prejudice and fascination, simultaneously hypervisible and invisible to white society, your emotions and inner life ignored.
The tropes are familiar and still potent: black men as supernaturally gifted at sports and entertainment, in possession of hulking bodies and ungovernable sexuality, liable to lapse into violence and lawlessness. When I walk down the street, the sense of being scrutinised and judged and typecast still is never far from my mind.
It’s an uncomfortable feeling to live with. But, given the option, I’m not sure I’d ever choose to surrender it. Through that awareness of how different, contradictory, perspectives can flourish simultaneously, great art can emerge; art that puts black men at the centre of an image as nuanced subjects rather than stereotypes.
I’ve attempted to explore these themes of identity, maleness, race and power in a new exhibition, Made You Look, at the Photographer’s Gallery in London. The show examines how black men shape their self-image in front of the camera. It gathers work by artists including Malick Sidibe, celebrated for capturing the vibrant life of a newly independent Mali in the 1960s and 70s; Samuel Fosso, who pictures himself in a variety of slyly amusing guises and assumed identities; and Hassan Hajjaj, who photographed men meticulously dressed in vivid African prints against bright backgrounds of clashing colours.
This is a time of marked gain and loss for black people. For while this is a period of unprecedented black prominence – from Barack Obama in the White House to artists such as Beyoncé, Steve McQueen, Marlon James, Kanye West – black people are still victim to the consequences of entrenched racism.
More than 500 black and minority-ethnic people in Britain have died in suspicious circumstances while in state detention over the past 25 years, without a single official being successfully prosecuted. In America, one in three black men can expect to go to jail at some point in their lives. And the list of African-American men killed in recent years solely because of their skin colour – Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray among them – continues to grow.
Against this fragile backdrop, Made You Look focuses on the figure of the black dandy. Dandyism, defined as a man “unduly concerned with looking stylish and fashionable”, might seem like trivial concerns in the era of the Black Lives Matter campaign. But as the case of Trayvon Martin, shot by George Zimmerman for looking “suspicious” in a hoodie, attests to the fact that how you dress can sometimes be the difference between life and death.
Dandyism is also about using dress to flout conventional notions of class, taste, gender and sexuality – certainly the case with the majestically louche Soweto youth majestically decked out in flared sleeveless suits and pearls, shot by South African Kristin-Lee Moolman, and the strikingly beautiful young man photographed in New York by Jeffrey Henson Scales.
Such images point to the subversive power of dandyism to reveal masculinity itself as a performance, as something provisional, open to reinterpretation, rather than a set of inherited characteristics fixed in the skin. And they also highlight how, for black men, style is a form of radical personal politics.
As a teenager, having to grapple for the first time with the force of the white gaze, I’d ask myself this question: how do you live without fear or debilitating anger in a world where you’re constantly reminded that your body doesn’t belong to you? The answer, as proposed by the works in this show, is to demand to be seen on your own terms, via the style and attitude that announces your ambitions and desires, your sense of pride and inner belief.
For the most part, the men featured in the exhibition aren’t wearing the finest of clothes. They seem less concerned with what they wear than how they wear it. Their style is by turns flamboyant, provocative, arresting, camp, playful and assertive. It is about confounding expectations about how black men should look or carry themselves in order to establish a place of personal freedom: a place beyond the white gaze, where the black body is a site of liberation rather than oppression.
Made You Look is on display at the Photographer’s Gallery in London from 15 July-25 September 2016.
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