Vision (Bump’n’Curl)

2019 - Photography (Photography)

101.6 x 81.28 cm

Dannielle Bowman

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Vision (Bump’n’Curl) by Dannielle Bowman is from a series of photographs titled What Had Happened . The series blends a major historical event with small, personal images. The photographs retain fragments of the artist’s own heritage and investigate the concept of home, while gaining inspiration from the Great Migration, a movement in which African Americans from the South (including Bowman’s grandparents) moved to the North, and also the American West from 1916-1970. In making this series, Bowman returned to where she grew up in the Baldwin Hills, Inglewood, and Crenshaw neighborhoods of Los Angeles, CA. Diving into her family history to ask questions about the role location and landscape play in personal evolution, Bowman began photographing her family members’ homes in Los Angeles. She then quickly broadened her scope, documenting numerous homes around the country and even going through her own archives, finding a strong need to chronicle Black American histories that have mostly gone unrecorded. Vision (Bump’n’Curl) depicts a woman in her garden, standing with her back to the camera, regarding her tomato plants. The intense sunlights reflects off of the woman’s striking hairdo (referred to as a bump’n’curl), her glamorous outfit, and the slanted lattice behind her. In particular the woman’s hair reminded the artist of the many generations of women in her own family, as well as many other older Black women for whom this particular hairstyle is a significant intergenerational cultural marker and repository of memory.

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Working in photography, Dannielle Bowman’s photographs are multilayered, pushing a more nuanced understanding of American history and culture across various physical locations and time periods. Bowman’s photographs often consider the passage of time and memories of home—or, more specifically, the homes one creates along the way in search for better places to thrive. Working mostly in black and white, her images recall the events, objects, and sites that mold Black culture and history in order to explore themes of displacement, family, and home. Noting that she is interested in producing images that are considered “too Black”, the interplay between light and shadow, their formal properties, and metaphorical implications are also recurrent preoccupations across Bowman’s work.

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Colors:

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• family.n.01
• home.n.01
• supplanting.n.01
• landscape.n.01
• migration.n.01
• monochrome