Amir Saadiq with HereIn
Untitled, from the series Without Transgression, 2021, photograph with BWXX film
[Image description: A black and white image of a man sitting in a landscape. He has melanated skin, short locs, and a beard. He looks out from behind long grasses that grow between the viewer and him. A beach is visible in the background.]
Amir Saadiq began his practice making documentary photographs of his black community in California’s Bay Area, capturing socio-political dynamics around race, class, and religion in compelling photojournalistic images. Currently a graduate student at UC San Diego, his work has recently moved away from documentary strategies. His new projects bear a poetic urgency, taking a leap into formally innovative and conceptually nuanced works that contemplate living in the black body in the context of a system fundamentally committed to anti-blackness. While his approach to artmaking is steeped in critical theory, Saadiq remains committed to communicating with, as he says, “people who look like me”— people of color outside the rarefied art world. He spoke with HereIn’s Editor, Elizabeth Rooklidge, from Nashville, a stop on his summer travels across the Southern United States to make photographs for his current body of work.
HereIn: How did you get started making art?
Amir Saadiq: My background is a little different— before I started making images, I was working in tech in Oakland. When Trump got elected, I quit my job and decided I wanted to do something different. Photography was my medium of choice because it’s the most democratic means of entering the art world. For someone who didn’t come from an art background, it seemed like it had the lowest barrier to entry.
Untitled, from the series The Beacon of Light, 2018, digital photograph
[Image description: A black and white photograph of two figures looking out through a window screen. On the right, an adult with melanated skin bears a slightly surprised look on their face. On the left, a child with non-melanated skin and wearing a dark shirt beams at the camera with a huge smile.]
The first project I did was The Beacon of Light. I worked with single mothers in my community and used the camera to document what was going on in their lives. I then used the images almost as a proof of concept to go out and have different conversations, using the business development aspect of my background, to provide job training and housing for them. For example, I reached out to a news outlet and they came and did coverage of the story. That allowed us to reach out to different food banks and create a partnership where they would bring food to the mothers a few times a week.
Untitled, from the series The Beacon of Light, 2018, digital photograph
[Image description: A black and white photograph of two hands, both with melanated skin, reaching toward each other. The hand on the right offers the other hand an apple.]
I tried to use my camera and my business development skills to bring awareness to issues that matter to me. After doing that for a couple of years, I realized that the challenge for me with documentary and photojournalistic work is that I was always waiting for a story to happen. Around this time I was doing a lot of reading and came across Saidiya Hartman and the whole concept of critical fabulation. It blew my mind.
HereIn: Can you tell us a bit about critical fabulation from your perspective?
Saadiq: Critical fabulation is about combining historical and archival research with fictional narrative to fill in the blanks left in the historical record. What’s truth? What’s fact? If you read something in an encyclopedia, by all normal conventions that’s what a fact is. In Hartman’s essay “Venus in Two Acts,” she started looking at the transatlantic slave trade and how the enslaved were viewed as cargo, or objects. She turned blackness as cargo-object into a person by giving the slave a name. If I think about it even deeper, what she was really talking about was the libidinal economy of slavery, or the psychic coherence of humanness, which is made possible for non-black people through black exclusion.
Untitled, from the series Without Transgression, 2021, photograph with BWXX film
[Image description: A black and white photograph of a man seen from behind. He has melanated skin and short locs, and wears a black tank top. He looks out over a horizon with a grassy ground and cloudy sky.]
The way critical fabulation impacted how I thought about art moving forward was by making me take a distinct step back. I realized that if I’m doing something that’s documentary or photojournalistic, then I’m waiting for the story to come to me, whereas as artists, we already have ideas about what it is that we want to say. Critical fabulation was that “aha moment” for me. It gave me the freedom to be able to tell a story based on historical content but create or rewrite the ending. The thing that is important for me when I make work is not to have conversations about things like materials. It’s much more about having socially relevant conversations, creating questions about systemic issues for people who look like me. Reading Saidiya Hartman made me want to go to grad school. There’s so much more I want to learn.
Untitled, from the series Without Transgression, 2021, photograph with Ilford HP5 film
[Image description: A black and white photograph of a small graveyard. Five blank headstones stand crookedly in front of Spanish moss trees.]
HereIn: You’ve cited Afropessimism as a particularly important influence on your practice. What has that critical lens offered you?
Saadiq: It gave me a framework for what I’ve always felt and helped me think about where my work is situated and how I can talk about it. In a nutshell, Afropessimism argues that society is predicated on the social death of the black body. When we look at things in the media— the constant death we’re seeing, either literal death or things like mass incarceration— it’s hard to argue against that.
But one of the things I’ve been working on since my first year in grad school, which is something my grad advisor would always challenge me on, is that I would lean on a lot on critical black theory and couldn’t stand on art history. My undergrad degree is in African American history and international relations, so I wasn’t as comfortable having conversations about art, nor did I want the conversations that my art inspires to be reduced to art theory. One of the things I’ve worked on, and hopefully the work shows it, is not putting the theory out in the front while alluding to it still. If you know, you know. But if you don’t, you don’t, and that’s ok. I don’t want to necessarily put my theoretical framework front and center. That’s not to say that I always trust the viewer, but rather, that I want to invite them in.
P.G. (Peter Gordon), 2021, digital photograph
[Image description: An abstract photograph of what looks like the silhouetted back of a human head and shoulders in front of a circular light source.]
HereIn: How did that manifest in the work itself?
My first year show in grad school was called P.G. (Peter Gordon). Peter Gordon was an enslaved person [in the mid-19th century]— we always see the iconic image of him with a scarred back. The main photograph in the show was an abstraction, my rendition of this image that I was never able to get out of my mind. All the photographs around that were of inanimate objects positioned to look like they were a black body. When in moved down to San Diego, I started collecting found objects, mostly bibles and dolls. I had no idea what I would do with them. So what I was thinking about when I was making these images was trying to trick the viewer into seeing a human form. Another thing with Afropessimism is that as a black person, I struggle with what it means to have agency. I feel like agency is contingent on the state. A lot of times when we see this violence toward the black body, there’s no retribution, nothing that corrects this. So all of these images are made with inanimate objects as a way of questioning agency.
Untitled, from the series P.G. (Peter Gordon), 2021, digital photograph
[Image description: A black and white photograph of a hand with melanated skin reaching out toward light that pours in from a source at the top of the image.]
For this project, I was also thinking about the duality of blackness. We’re invisible but hypervisible at the same time. I was thinking about just the color black, because most of my images are in black and white. So I started thinking about how that’s a metaphor for blackness itself. I started studying Norman Lewis and thinking about painting, how black is the embodiment of every color, but it is seen as this absence.
HereIn: I’m interested in hearing about how you conceive of focus in these works. The images are largely out of focus, which turns your subject into an abstraction.
Saadiq: Here I’m using a shallow depth of field and I think what that really comes down to is, to a degree, just not trusting my viewer. It’s me taking control over what it is that I want to see; I don’t really trust people to see what’s being seen. We can look at society now and realize that we’ll see black bodies being murdered in the streets and there’s no recourse for that. There’s no justice. It’s like me not trusting the viewer to see what I feel is important.
Untitled, from the series P.G. (Peter Gordon), 2021, digital photograph
[Image description: An abstract photograph of what looks like the silhouetted back of a human head and shoulders in front of a circular light source.]
If I extrapolate the metaphor of questioning agency, what it is we can and can’t control, the focus is very specific so that I’m determining what the viewer focuses on, what’s important. I’m a very private person, and I think a lot of times there’s the expectation, especially for artists of color, to give a justification for being somewhere, justifying our existence. So I went with the abstractions because I felt like it told me more about the viewers than it told them about me. It’s almost like a Rorschach test.
HereIn: To me these do indeed read as very private images. Viewers don’t typically expect to engage with a work and then find it closed off to them, so this is a really interesting way to navigate that space of disclosure and privacy.
Saadiq: It’s kind of like leaving these bread crumbs. During my first-year show, P.G. (Peter Gordon), people would ask me, “What does that mean?” I’m like, you can google it. What are the expectations? I’m realizing that I don’t want to make easy work, something that’s so didactic— this is step one, this is step two. I want people to take the time to learn what it is.
When I think about what’s going on with society, it’s this erasure. I think about books by Toni Morrison that are being banned, or the critical race theory that’s being banned in so many different states. So again going back to critical fabulation and what’s fact. What’s the truth if there’s this erasure of history? When I’m creating work, how do I weave in these clues about the history of blackness? Because that may be all that lives. I want it to be nuanced enough that it’s almost like a code. A good metaphor would be something like the Underground Railroad, and enslaved people in the fields singing Negro spirituals. People thought they were just singing, but these songs are the directions for how you escape. So for me, I try to think about something like what Fred Moten talks about, how we can use art to be subversive.
Untitled, from the series Without Transgression, 2021, photograph with Ilford HP5 film
[Image description: A grainy black and white photograph of a landscape. The foreground is a grassy dark ground, with a Spanish moss tree growing on the right side of the image. The camera looks further out over a body of water and a gray sky.]
HereIn: You’ve recently been making photographs while traveling. How has that shaped the work?
Saadiq: I started traveling through the South last summer. I did this series called Without Transgression, that’s the one where I quote Frantz Fanon: "I came into the world imbued with the will to find meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects." So it goes back to thinking about what agency means. I visited a bunch of plantations in South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. I was raised in Tennessee, so there was a tie to this land. Building off the relationship with America and the black body, I started thinking about the landscape. Where I am now in Nashville, within like twenty miles there’s probably ten plantations. You’ll see Confederate flags. I started thinking about how two things can be true; this land can be really beautiful, but it can also be really violent to certain people.
Untitled, from the series Without Transgression, 2021, photograph with Ilford HP5 film
[Image description: An overexposed, grainy photograph of a grassy clearing surrounded by Spanish moss and other trees. The center of the clearing glows a bright white.]
In Without Transgression, I’m using grain as an abstraction. This is at a plantation in South Carolina where thousands of enslaved fought for their freedom and died. The image is intentionally not in focus. With these images, how do you conflate time? I’m trying to have a conversation with time— it’s all unresolved. I’m thinking about double exposures. Landscapes where thousands of people lost their lives, and how do I abstract it so it doesn’t look like it’s just a pretty image?
Everything in my first-year show was digital, but I’m pretty much all analogue now. I’m thinking about isolation, something that could become the embodiment of the black body or representative of it without showing this violence, but also considering how I don’t want to romanticize certain places. I’m still making beautiful images but, again, questioning what the truth of it is. I actually inserted myself in these images because I wanted it to be in conversation with Fanon’s concept of double consciousness, but also thinking— as an artist— about understanding the history of photography and what it’s meant to the black body, and how it was used to index and catalogue blackness not as human but as object. Now I know this history, I’m still questioning what my role is with this tool.
Untitled, from the series Without Transgression, 2021, photograph with Ilford HP5 film
[Image description: An ethereal, double-exposed photograph of two landscapes. The strongest exposure pictures a small dock stretching out into a body of water. Fainter images of trees and clouds appear in the original image’s water and sky.]
HereIn: Do you ever think about this work in terms of the idea of ghosts? The double exposure had a distinctly ghostly feel.
Saadiq: It’s interesting because when I started doing the work on plantations, it was so surreal being there. I know my family was there. I do feel like ancestors are present. So yeah, I think about that all the time. Trying to create a visual language to talk about this violence and this absence, this thing which doesn’t really exist. I don’t know what that looks like. I feel like a lot of these images are really quiet, too. And I don’t know what that means yet. My practice is continuing to evolve.
This conversation has been edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.