Tenacity (n.): the determination to continue

This series of images is part of a larger body of work, titled “Fieldnotes on How Roots Flourish Without Soil”. Originally, the form of overlapping images was going to express some of the inherited cycles one encounters within the inner city. The trajectory of the project was redirected after a tumultuous eighteen months of loss. It transformed into an ode to the lives of gone-too-soon-friends: Jabari Benton, Jonathan Sandoval-Aleman, Millard Frazier Jr., and Olivia Lee.

In each image, the families I portrayed appear in the order of their loved ones’ deaths, bearing the cumulative weight of their shared history. They hold images of another family, a gesture to examine how grieving, while a personal experience, is also something we collectively endure. The process was very much a collaborative one, where the relatives of the deceased chose where to honor their brother, son, sister, daughter, father. We gathered at the sites of life or sites of death with mementos of each loved one: an airbrushed tee shirt, flowers at a gravesite, recreating a cherished memory, or using a cardboard cutout from a funeral.

The series of images culminates in the mundane quotidian perspective of how we navigate life, a depiction of how our histories and its weight we carry, are relegated to the background against life's distractions.

Over the course of the five years of the project, a concern arose about the implications of the accessibility to the grief of my friends and the connotations in general of the relationship to Blackness and death. Specifically, I didn’t want the bodies of my friends to be the anchor for conversations about death and grief and adversity. And in keeping with the idea of loss and the limits of the materiality of objects that hold memory, I decided to create another loss: I left my final silver gelatin prints in water to deteriorate over the course of several days.

The images could no longer be shared because they no longer existed. And so then the lore of the contents of the destroyed image must be told. And the question became, can we understand stories of collective grief and collective love, without seeing it, but instead hearing about it. Can that mimic what it is to lose a loved one: I can tell you about a person, but you can’t know them the way I did, but does that exclude you from understanding loss?

Water’s spiritual significance was meant to symbolize birth, rebirth, and the preservation of memories. Its encounters with the prints release spirits, allowing them to shape the piece. Regardless of the gesture's meaning, the remains are now shared, offering glimpses into love, grief, and the limitations of documenting history. They prompt reflection on the significance of oral versus documented narratives in marking our temporal existence.

These abstract images are the only version of the images meant to be seen, except when visited in-person where the originals reside on the opposite side. This gesture creates an environment where these bodies and stories in the images aren’t immediately available and can’t be passively viewed: they must be sought out, and reconciled with the abstracted gesture.

Jamil Baldwin is part of Issue 18 by Guest Editor Hank Willis Thomas.