OUT FROM

My project explores the “Black Outdoors”, a conceptual framework within which to examine the contours of Black life and Black identity that exist outside traditional boundaries of citizenship, safety, state protection and property ownership. Emerging from the field of Black Studies, this framework, constructed by scholars J. Kameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervenak at Duke University, helps me re-imagine through self-portraiture how my Black self can be presented ‘outside’ the traditional humanistic and capitalistic enclosures that define creative success. This effort has manifested in attempts to capture myself in a perpetual state of exteriority whether I am literally outdoors or inside the studio. The feeling and presentation of exteriority frees my mind to imagine new futures through the interminable psychological state of flight I imagined was experienced by my ancestors, through the fugitivity, through the continuous act of escaping.

Beginning at the onset of the pandemic when sociopolitical, environmental, and economic crises abounded, I questioned whether I, a man in my sixties with pre-existing health conditions, would be spared; I wondered if I had lived life to the fullest. I looked around and saw nothing but diminishing enclosures, prescribed plots drawn by others for me to be shoehorned into. I found myself becoming more and more unregulated as a response. I wanted to expand to new breadth, burrow to unchartered depths of intimacy with the environment, hoping to discover new and stranger loves, more delightful labors, and other intricacies of life. So, I began to answer how I might live and represent an identity in flux, one that was living a life increasingly unmeasured, uncensored, ungovernable, and carried along by the earth’s flow. I took to grassy fields, muddy creek beds, woods, the darkness of my dilapidated shed, and even the snow-covered plains of the Midwest to make self-portraits which might reveal to the world more clearly how I inhabit myself inside a world which otherwise misrepresents, ignores, erases, me.

The rawness of the imagery presented an opportunity to self-publish three limited edition large-format zines, allowing the early work to be shared without censorship. Their titles in the order of release were “OUT FROM,” “LOUT,” and “WITHOUT LAW”. And the period of time covered by the trilogy was April 2020 – June 2021. It was an intense period of transformation. Fast forward five years and I’m now in the studio, and the vibrations remain.

At such a critical time for photography as now, I can’t help but wonder why there aren’t enough imaginative and provocative images circulating that depict or disrupt what being a senior Black man means or how a so-called Black ‘elder’ might be pictured in ways other than the stereotype or trope. My presence, as such, is more expansive and nuanced than the gray-temple retiree in a pharmaceutical commercial. And my self-portrait practice is set afoot to explore that expanse.

Inasmuch as a Black man of any age could still just as easily be murdered by police while innocently sleeping in the privacy of his home as he could in the public square with the eyes of the nation upon him while a brutal knee compresses the life out of him; or whose chances of being spared by a raging pandemic or other atrocity are slimmer than most; or for whom each day holds the distinct possibility that he might not see another sky or feel free enough to take the time to look up at it in wonderment, the mythical stereotypes regarding who and what we are must fall. We live with equal uncertainty and precariousness, but it seems no one knows what that looks like for us. We’re beset by images of politicians and wanna-be dictators too old to be in office, but none of my likeness. But we dream, we play, we show out, we resist, we fight, we love, we test our limits still, and we see ourselves in the future albeit with an abundance of decades behind us. We often are not trying to prove anything to anyone, nor trying to instruct anyone. And our presence should not be construed as foolishly trying to convince ourselves or younger generations that our youth still runs virally through our veins, because it doesn’t. Rather, inhabiting space in our fullest human capacity is our simple ambition. And inasmuch as I believe my lived experiences are more expansive and nuanced than the reductive representations seem to suggest, my current self-portrait project invents contours and thus plausibility of an expanse heretofore unconsidered: for senior Black men see ourselves in the future. And the fact that we do is an end and purpose in and of itself for my practice. I need no further validation or framework.

In school I recall reading Susan Stewart's 1984 book "On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection", in which to explain aspects of the 19th century English miniature she argued that childhood was a bourgeois construction, a metaphor for adulthood’s (chaotic) interiority, that is, a smaller version of the adult self and body as opposed to having an importance in and of itself. Whether or not a defensible argument, it leads me to think that within the context of my concerns her thesis cracks open the antithetical possibility that so too is elderliness a bourgeois construction intending to serve the chaotic interior of adulthood. And as such, my sexagenarian work should be viewed as an attempt to dismantle that construction.

We are present. We “outchea” (“out here”)!

Mitchell Squire is part of Issue 18 by Guest Editor Hank Willis Thomas.