Confronting Taboo

Among the most celebrated African American artists of the twentieth century, Jacob Lawrence is known for depicting black life in post-Depression Harlem and exploring social and political realities through abstraction. Scholars have noted regular overlaps in the subject matter of Lawrence’s paintings and that of contemporary documentary photographs, especially the images produced by white photographers under the Farm Security Administration. And yet little has been said of the recurring references to vernacular photography across his oeuvre or of their relation to the documentary tradition. Through a reinterpretation of Taboo (1963), this essay asks how and why Lawrence turned to “everyday” photographic practices as a formal element in his painting and as a carrier of political meaning. My aims are twofold: to shed new light on an understudied aspect of Lawrence’s painting, and to expand our understanding of African American modern art as reaching across the history of photography

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Literature · Painting · Photography · Politics · Reinterpretation · Sociology · Subject matter · Taboo · Vernacular · Visual arts · Anthropology · History · Law · Philosophy · Swearing, Euphemism, Multilingualism