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Jason Fox
I’m talking with photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross. We’re looking at a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson. It’s called Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare (1932).

RaMell Ross
It sort of represents his idea of the decisive moment, which has been ubiquitous and extremely influential in photography and photographic theory.

JF
It’s an image of a man jumping over a puddle, and he appears sort of frozen in time with his heel hovering just millimeters over it.

RR
This guy is jumping from a ladder that seems to have fallen, or maybe even placed to help someone traverse this extremely expansive puddle. It’s about time being frozen so that you can see this intricate, perceptive moment. It looks quite perfect.

JF
For the photographer Cartier-Bresson, street photography was about capturing the ephemeral, spontaneous moments of modern life that can express a kind of poetic truth. It’s a poetry that can’t be captured in words, but it can be captured by a photographer who knows just where to look, and exactly which hundredth of a second to snap the picture.

The decisive moment celebrates the street photographer’s freedom to be spontaneous, to look at whatever he wants, to make meaning however he wants. Like the man frozen in the image hovering millimeters above a rain puddle. We don’t know what happened before or after he jumped. But we get the sense of limitless possibility. Maybe he lands in the puddle. Or maybe he never lands at all.

But RaMell argues that African Americans have had a very different relationship to photography. They haven’t been able to wander, or look freely. And historically, photography has been used to document, to classify, to decisively know and judge black people, not to set them free.

RR
To me there’s nothing more dangerous than images that make a claim to a type of knowledge. And so a counterpoint would be the indecisive moment, which to me has the potential to do the opposite, to put ambiguity in the mind of the viewer. And, I think, to make images and be able to situate black ambiguity in the context of truth is a powerful thing. Race, as a concept, is relatively debunked. But blackness, specifically in the US, is something that is fraught with much misunderstanding and emerges from an order and a logic of oppression and difference and reduction. And so to photograph, and to use imagery and photography indecisively, to me, is to put a little bit of relief in the image to change the power dynamic.

JF
For RaMell, photography isn’t about correcting the record. It’s about changing our whole relationship to it. When we look at an image and ask whether it’s real or not, we’re not seeing some kind of inherent truth. We’re actually bringing our life experiences and our judgments to it. And we’re asking ourselves, Do I trust this? What’s it want from me? And if I decide to trust it, what’s the worst that could happen?

More than getting us to ask, “Is this true?” RaMell wants to think about why we’re interested in one image, but not another. Why an image can frustrate or excite us. To move away from this notion that we need to know, or that we even can know, exactly what we’re looking at, as though it’s evidence in a puzzle.

I’m Jason Fox. And this is a five-episode series I’m calling Trust Issues. You’ll hear from artists, writers, activists, and even a broker for ISIS videos that were smuggled across the Syrian border, about how we relate to each other through images.

Think of it like a relationship advice column, except instead of learning to be a better lover or a family member or friend, it’s about how to become a better viewer by understanding how images shape the way we see people, whether we trust them, and why. This is episode 1, “The Freedom of Fiction.” We look at the difference between so-called fiction and nonfiction, and how that difference has a lot to do with who’s in front of the lens, and who’s behind it.

Here’s RaMell again.

RR
I moved to Hale County in 2009, and it was to teach in a youth program. And I also ended up coaching basketball there as well and really got integrated in the community. And I started making photos there as well with a large-format camera.

It’s interesting. The images that I show are images that start in 2012, because it took three years for me to sort of get beyond the tropes of the South . . . the landscape as this sort of expanse of beauty, the moss as a standalone item, people in earnest poses, houses and trees and chairs on porches. People in their places doing their things without reflexivity.

JF
RaMell was tired of seeing photographers depict the American South as some simple, uncomplicated space that seems to stand outside of time. Yellow (2012) is one of the first photographs he made that he felt did something different.

RR
Yellow is an image I made while I was photographing my friend Curtis and his family. While I was setting up my camera, and they’re talking and enjoying each other’s company, I just glanced to my left, and his granddaughter was over by this flower bush, playing in the grass and doing some digging, and she was doing it so diligently. The color relationship between the yellow and the landscape and her barrettes and the flowers was just incredibly striking.

JF
In the image, a young black girl in a yellow dress crouches behind a flower bush about fifteen feet in front of the camera. Her back is turned, so we can’t really see what she’s doing. She’s surrounded by this wide, freshly cut lawn, and about a hundred feet behind her, dark woods fill the horizon.

RR
She had her own personal meaning and personal secret that no one had access to, aside from her. And I wondered what that was, and I thought that was a great settling point for ambiguity, that she’s playing in the soil of this historic region. You know, God knows what happened here.

I came to the strategy of obscuring people’s faces and recumbency, and often direct gazes or not, as a means to, I think, enhance the intersubjectivity of the image, to sort of provide not only an imaginative space, but I think, also let each image be a tiny act of refusal on the part of myself, and on the part of those in front of the camera to kind of give themselves over to the viewer for consumption. I know that photo history is replete with images of people of color that don’t question the concept of race and what race means to the people viewing. It’s more about sort of representing race proudly and humanizing people or giving folks insight into the lives and into the geography and into the homes of people. But what I’m interested in is questioning the whole project of representation as a possibility. It’s more interesting for the images to refuse consumption by the viewer. In that way, they become sort of inexhaustible.

It sort of reflects, one, the way that media and images and these types of production have produced ideas of blackness, but it also, I think, unconsciously, shows that it’s still in flux. Like, it’s not something that’s to be settled.

I love this line by Godfrey Reggio, in which he’s like, “I want the viewer to complete the film.” Complete the film. Complete the film. The film is incomplete until the viewer participates in it imaginatively, and I think, given the sort of fiction of blackness, I think that there’s a need for images with people of color to be completed . . . the narrative to be completed by the viewer.

My artist statement for the series South County, AL (2012–14), I like to share it because I think it’s the best language formation I have for my approach. And it’s that blackness is a lie. But it’s a true lie. To be black is the greatest fiction of my life. Yet I’m still bound to its myth. I can’t help but think about the myth’s childhood and its backyard of the South. How the myth of blackness aged into fact and grew into laws. How it evolved from there to become tacit, and join the secret order of things. How it became the dark matter of the American imagination.

JF
One of the reasons I couldn’t stop thinking about how we talk about nonfiction is that a few years ago, the Flaherty invited me to listen through their extensive audio archive. In case you were wondering, the Flaherty is basically like a summer camp for a who’s who of independent filmmakers. And it’s been running since 1955. It’s a week filled with screenings, and then post-screening discussions, which can turn into pretty intense arguments. And they record almost all of them. Like, you want to hear Susan Sontag get yelled at by a random dude in 1974? This is your archive.

A lot of the recordings aren’t pristine. There’s creaky floors, and when they’re outdoors it almost sounds like the seminar is just a background for an immersive concert of crickets in the summer grass. But in listening through it, I was struck by how a lot of the discussions people were having over the past sixty-five years still feel pretty unresolved today. Like the relationship between fact and fiction. We talk about facts as if they’re the opposite of fiction. But the thing is, the two are always connected. I mean, for any fiction to be relatable, it has to be grounded in some way in the daily realities we live. And facts have no meaning in and of themselves until they’re injected in some kind of narrative. RaMell’s photography is about creating a space where nonfiction images of African Americans confront the mythologies that are constantly projected onto them. But sometimes, the reverse happens. Black filmmakers make works of fiction, and then audiences demand to treat them as fact. Like back in the summer of 1979, when Charles Burnett was invited to show his master’s thesis film at the Flaherty. It’s called Killer of Sheep (1978).

It’s an impressionistic narrative portrait of Watts, a working-class and predominantly black neighborhood in Los Angeles. Burnett shot the movie himself on borrowed equipment and salvaged 16mm film stock. And he used nonprofessional actors, which gives the film a strong sense of place. At the center of the film is the character of Stan, a slaughterhouse worker who stoically accepts the tedium of his job and the life of poverty it produces for his family.

In this scene, the competing forces in Stan’s life collide, just outside his front door. It starts with a sedan pulling up in front of Stan’s modest home. Two men hop out of the car. They’re wearing leather jackets. They seem pretty confident. They knock on Stan’s door and ask him to step outside for a minute. They need a favor. Stan sits down on his front step. The two men hover like bees.

JF
Suddenly Stan’s wife appears just inside the screen door. She steps out onto the stoop to interrupt the scene.

Ina Archer
You know, Terri was laughing during the scene on the porch.

Terri Francis
They’re just so goofy. They’re just ridiculous. Like, you’re really gonna roll up to this man’s house and ask him to help you with a murder? Come on, man.

JF
That’s Terri Francis. She’s a professor of cinema.

TF
And that’s like one of these moments where this movie is real and not real. It’s like a tall tale. Maybe they happened. Maybe they didn’t. Who cares.

JF
And this is the artist Ina Archer.

IA
I feel like the first time I saw it was sometime in the early 90s. I remember that I lived in Brooklyn. Friends that I was hanging out with at that time, we went to see it, but there was also somebody that I . . . developed a romantic interest [with] there. So it was also kind of like a first date.

TF
Sure, yes!

IA
You have a first encounter with the film over and over again. It feels that way, I think, because of my sort of using the film as a test film for people. To be blunt, to see if they have a humane view of films and probably a humane view of black film. I guess I do have an expectation of at least a positive response, despite Charles Burnett not wanting to produce necessarily positive images. The “fail” would be the person in my group who basically felt like it wasn’t making a strong enough case for the situation of the characters and their poverty or their troubles, which to me seemed a failure to see the movie as a film. As a narrative.

JF
In 1979, Charles Burnett was invited to the Flaherty Seminar just after finishing Killer of Sheep. And a warning here: the quality of the recording isn’t the best, because there were a lot of crickets and cicadas around, and they didn’t know it was going to be on a podcast five decades later.

TF
At the time that Mr. Burnett is engaging this audience, he’s a recent graduate. He’s a young man who has made a movie for his thesis, right, to get his master’s at UCLA, and finds himself in intense and remarkable company for something that he was submitting for a grade, that he had made in his neighborhood with his neighbors, and made it a certain way. And they asked him, like, “Well, who did you imagine seeing this?”

So he says, “Well, I was imagining the people who looked like the people in the film, and then also others.”

JF
[narrating Flaherty audio clip] And the guy interrupts and asks if he’d want the film shown on PBS. Burnett is sort of thinking about it for a second, not quite sure what the question is about. Then the guy follows up to say that what the film is is marvelously wrought, but it’s going to serve a tragic purpose because it’s going to reinforce racism for people who watch it.

TF
That’s one of the burdens of this movie. That need that people bring to it to explain what they, the viewer, need to know in order to feel that they are learning something, because they’re seeing it as, like, the old-time after-school special, like a lesson film. I think any audience, like, just viewing it through that sort of “justify yourself, explain something to me” gaze, rather than just kind of going there with Stan. Like, what it’s like to be so tired that you can’t even sleep anymore. And what it is to have these fleeting moments of sensual attention, like when he holds the teacup to his forehead, and he himself is remembering “when I used to be a person.”

IA
And just like their accents, the style of language, I think at one point he says, “It’s marvelously wrought, which may tragically serve a negative purpose.” And I just thought, like, that should be the head of everybody’s review. I was thinking about Charles Burnett, and if another filmmaker, say, like John Cassavetes was there showing Shadows (1959), would people want to know if that was an indictment of what interracial relationships are like? Or if it was Husbands (1970), or some other scripted film, you know, that men are immature and douchebags—in that film they are—but I just think it was really a burden being put on [Burnett] to represent a community, but not necessarily his community.

I’ve had experiences with my work, you know, saying, “Oh, I’m, I’m a film- and videomaker.” And people might ask, “Where can I see your work, like, on PBS, or can you get it from an educational resource?” and always kind of assuming that the work that I was doing was documentary based. One particular incident that always makes me laugh and stands out for me is my work that’s basically a science-fiction project about a lost film archive, the Lincoln Film Company, a company that I made up, who have created a body of black-cast films that are technically advanced in the silent era. The film speculates about what has happened to these lost black films, and what happens if you lose black films in the culture. And it turns out that these films have been abducted by aliens, and are now the representative archive of what the planet Earth is like. So it was being shown in this gallery. The gallerist was very, very interested in the work. He heard the story of these lost films and how the piece was going to talk about the disappearance of these early black films. And then was kind of taken aback when it got to the point of saying, “Oh, they were abducted by aliens.” And he really felt that I shouldn’t put that conclusion on the piece, because it wasn’t respectful of the material that I was working with. And I suppose of the audience either.

TF
Man, these people make me tired, you know?

IA
He felt like he had been tricked, or that I was trying to trick somebody.

TF
Because when you take a liberty like what you’ve done, you’re saying, “This is mine. This is ours. I’m able to retell it.” It’s a lot of power. And I think, then, that means that it can’t be definitively labeled, and I think that’s disconcerting. And I think there’s a certain kind of well-meaning person that . . . they have learned to interact with black materials in a certain way. Like, they’ve learned some rules, but they are not under, well . . . “Those are your rules because you all don’t know how to behave.”

I think that one of the hardest aspects of black art is the incongruity of experience that is often navigated/expressed/engaged with—and it is often through humor, this, like, incongruous humor, humor that is about things that are painful, tragic. The level of signifying that goes on. I think being able to laugh with Killer of Sheep is a sign of our intimacy with the film, and I think with each other as well. Because blackness on screen, like, black physicality on screen, has been a comedic presence wherein blackness is the butt of the joke. And so there are many moments that I can think of … viewing moments, where I’m in an audience and I’m just like, “Oh dear, these people are laughing at all the wrong parts. This is not correct.” And it’s really painful and uncomfortable.

IA
Maybe my Killer of Sheep test is a way of trying to be intimate, trying to gauge whether or not I can be intimate with this person.

TF
Right. Can you trust this person with your story? Do they have a humanity that can hold this film, and Stan’s story, and Mrs. Stan’s story?

JF
That’s an excerpt from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), by the cultural historian Saidiya Hartman. If RaMell says that racial mythologies are projected onto documentary photographs of black life, and Terri and Ina confront why viewers need something to be true even when it’s clearly a work of fiction, then Hartman reminds us how even historical archives are often based in state fictions. Her book focuses on Progressive Era black women who are unremembered outcasts, women whose lives she found in the sorts of historical and state archives we usually treat as places of authoritative knowledge. She writes about women who are made to be statistics, whose lives were described as deserving pity or requiring intervention or needing imprisonment. But Hartman uses that documentary material to remember them differently.

Saidiya Hartman
I’m always writing history of the present, and the ways in which the lives of these young women and girls were criminalized has everything to do with the ways in which the lives of black people are criminalized and disposable and precarious in the present. I mean, there are those continuities. The book isn’t about that, but rather about the way people try to live with that enclosure being built around them.

JF
In poring through the archives, Hartman discovered the file of a young woman named Mattie Nelson, who boarded a ship in Virginia to escape to New York City in 1913, only to end up in the Bedford Hills Reformatory for Women just a few years later. Hartman took some notes.

SH
The first set of notes may be based on memory. And partly that’s about just really trying to register what has struck me, to speculate about that longing that would have accompanied her on her journey to New York.

When Mattie Nelson landed at Pier 26, she was dreamy with thoughts of what the future would hold. In the crush of folks on the pier, she breathed comfortably inside her own skin, enjoying the self-forgetfulness that she had imagined was possible in a free territory.—Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

SH
And then in those circumstances on the steamer, from Virginia to New York; in the crowded, in the segregated section . . . what did this young girl think might be possible in the grandeur and the splendor of New York City?

SH
Basically, people were living together, and you were overhearing your neighbors’ lives. You know, Duke Ellington also spoke of that music of the airshaft and how it enabled his compositional practice. And it’s that sense of the close proximity really defying the notion of our privatized, bounded bourgeois homes. And that’s the part of urban existence which is so wonderful. We do have access to the lives of others. Does it afford a kind of intimacy or understanding? Does it make relation possible? Does it make music and poetry possible? And everyone seemed to say yes. So, the counterhistorical work that I’m involved in is really wanting us to understand a kind of historical period or a set of relations differently. And a set of texts for me are the films of Oscar Micheaux. Oscar Micheaux is also dealing with the question about the character of black life in the city. And one of the things that’s also so fascinating about Micheaux’s films is within his narrative cinema, there were these moments, these actualités. You know, footage of a parade going by, or footage from shows inside of a nightclub, so that there’s this kind of seamless blending of “documentary material” with narrative material, but that both are essential in rendering a certain complex and nuanced representation of black life.

Cut to the dance number on the club floor, which is pivotal, obligatory, and never inessential in a Micheaux film. Everything terrible about the club—the alcohol, the debauchery, the infidelity encouraged by the environment, the loose, jaded women—would be balanced by this scene, which would condemn the cabaret and at the same time exalt it. In the cabaret scene, black virtuosity is on display. Then comes the chorus, and the dancing bodies are arranged in beautiful lines that shift and change as the flourish and excess of the dancers unfold into riotous possibility and translate the tumult and upheaval of the Black Belt into art. The extended musical numbers might first seem like digressions, except that they establish the horizon in which everything else transpires and foreground the lovely actuality of blackness. The dance scene is crucial, the movement of bodies, the chorus as well as the ordinary folks crowding the floor, reveal other lineages of black cinema, understood broadly as a rendering of black life in motion in contrast to the arrested and fixed images that produce and document black life as a problem.—Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

SH
The relationship between fiction and nonfiction . . . it’s a really interesting and fraught division. I like to quote a passage from Toni Morrison where she says that, for her, the distinction isn’t between fact and fiction, but between fact and truth. The case files are ripe with fictions and constructions and projections of the state. But those projections or fictions are authorized with state power. So the facts of the state are endorsed as an absolute truth. And sometimes the way of countering that truth, of trying to destabilize it and to critique it, or to destroy it even, is by simply playing within the messiness of the fiction by dealing with the incredible, contradictory character of the archive.

The sociological note appended to the case file stated: The maternal home was a poor environment. The mother did not appear to feel very keenly disgraced by her daughter’s behavior. She is lax in supervising her daughter. Her immoral conduct has been repeated by her daughter. Probation officer did not believe her home would be a good place to send patient.—Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

SH
I wanted the reader to experience my practice, whether of critical fabulation or speculative history, as not constructing another fiction in response to the fictions of the state, but really trying to produce a radically different vision of the conditions of existence, a radically different account of truth based upon the experience of black folks.