I'd like to introduce Dr.
Maurice Wallace,
associate professor
in the department of English,
and associate director
of the Carter G. Woodson
Institute for African-American
and African Studies
at the University of Virginia.
Dr. Wallace is also
the co-leader of the Race,
Faith, and Culture Project
and is primary contributor
to the Vocation and Common Good
Project at UVA's Institute
for Advanced Studies in Culture.
A scholar
of 19th and 20th century
African-American literature
and cultural studies, Wallace
focuses on the intersection
of the visual arts, especially
photography,
with identity
and political movements.
And the subjects have ranged
widely, including 19th and 20th
century
African-American literary
and cultural production,
19th century
American literature, slave
narratives, black manhood, Civil
War photography, race,
and psychoanalysis.
And he's written extensively
on iconic figures
such as Langston Hughes
and Martin Luther King, Jr.
And we'll hear more about him
today.
In 2002, Duke University Press
published his book, Constructing
the Black Masculine: Identity
and Ideality in African American
Men's Literature
and Culture, 1775-1995.
And this work, which was awarded
the MLA William Scarborough
Prize for Outstanding Scholarly
Study of Black American
Literature explored how
black American males have sought
to both realize and deconstruct
America's ideal portrait
of masculinity
across a wide variety of media--
photography, modern dance,
theater--
and how it has done
so in dialogue
with, but also in challenge to,
a very flawed and impoverished
racial imagination.
More recently, Wallace co-edited
with Shawn Michelle Smith
the important volume,
Pictures in Progress:
Early Photography and the Making
of African American Identity,
which also includes a chapter he
wrote on the representation
of black soldiers
in photography.
His talk today, entitled King's
Vibrato, Martin Luther King, Jr.
and the Sound of Photography,
is drawn from his current book
project focused on civil rights
leader King's
oratorical eloquence, a skill,
I might add,
that Wallace himself shares.
Please join me in welcoming Dr.
Maurice Wallace.
[APPLAUSE]
Good afternoon.
I am very grateful, of course,
to be a part of such
a fine program.
I, like those who have come
before me,
am very grateful to Sarah
Greenough and Sarah Kennel
for being generous enough
to extend this invitation to me
to participate in what I think
has been a tremendous symposium.
Ironically, it seems
that the University of Virginia
has framed this symposium.
I was happy to hear
my colleague, Grace Hale,
give a tremendous keynote
lecture on yesterday,
and to have this morning
to spend with new friends
and with old friends.
So with that, I shall move
ahead.
It is now commonly said, not
unbelievably, that Frederick
Douglass, black abolitionist
and author,
was the most photographed
American of the 19th century.
By Stauffer, Trodd,
and Bernier's accounting,
Douglass sat
for an estimated 160 portraits,
while Lincoln, by their best
count had 126 portraits made.
Between Douglass's 160
distinct photographic posings
and Lincoln's 126,
General George Custer, Lakota
Chief Red Cloud,
and the inimitable Democrat Walt
Whitman appeared in 155, 128,
and 127 portraits, respectively.
That Douglass specifically was
so profoundly charmed
by photography's 19th century
allure as to exceed all others
in number and degree of photo
indulgences
may well have indexed
the confidence
of many an ex-slave
in the social power
of photography
to affect, as Laura Wechsler has
posited,
quote, "an image of a new birth
of justice
by black inclusion
in American society."
Under this logic,
it comes as no surprise
that a century later,
another black freedom fighter
seeking a second image
of a new birth of racial justice
with all the Protestant baggage
attached to that turn of phrase
would contend for the title
formerly enjoyed by Douglass.
Anymore, it is near impossible
to avoid the dozen or more
books, hardback and soft cover,
picturing galleries of portraits
and journalistic photographs
taken of the short life
and career of Martin Luther
King, Jr. They are, it seems,
everywhere--
for now.
Photographs of King 50 years
past his death abound.
King is as
visible in the checkout lane
at Wegmans food market
in Charlottesville
or the news stand at Terminal
B in Reagan National Airport,
as he is more formally
and in a more considered
context, in the second floor
gallery space of the New York
Historical Society.
Public depots
of popular American visual
culture and consumption,
these are the new geographies
of Martin Luther King Jr.'s
amplified visibility
in photographs.
Here, if we care to look,
we are the everyday or weekend
witnesses of America's
belatedly beloved civil rights
rock star,
holding forth
against southern segregationism,
forcefully declaiming
the high ideals of democracy,
praying in the public square,
preaching, marching, musing,
or stiffly posing
for the professional portrait.
Here, if we care to listen,
a new noisiness may be heard
above the din of coworkers
chatting it up in aisle three,
gate change announcements
over the public address system,
and airy museum whispering.
This new noisiness, however,
issues not
from this embodied announcements
overhead or the ordinary speech
of everyday social intercourse,
but from nothing
other than a repressed property
in King's photographs
themselves.
Put another way, and somewhat
against reason, I admit, I want
to suggest that it is not King's
visual form
or physical comportment alone
we are made to see in the most
iconic pictures of him which
circulate in our public culture.
Rather, I contend that we are
made to see his sound, as well.
By this, I mean to imply
in exactly these terms--
that synesthetic experience,
the amazing Roy DeCarava
projected onto The Jazzman
as the sound I saw.
Or alternatively, that which
experimental filmmaker Arthur
Jafa has come to
view
as the looked-for possibility
of visual intonation
in black visual culture
specifically.
I mean to imply, that is,
these two understandings
of the photographic capacity
for sound at once
and their instinctive
recognition
of an essential sonority
to the being, the very idea, one
might say, of photography,
which I take to also approach
the more general condition
of spectatorship
the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj
Zizek has described alluringly,
if still somewhat cryptically,
as quote,
"seeing in the mode of hearing."
I mean to argue still more
directly, that in as much
as the photograph--
any photograph-- is already
always the precluded possibility
of video or film, and thus also
a reflection of its most
elemental lack.
A reflection, that is to say,
of what it is willed
or in itself willed not to be.
Photography may not be at all
disabled in its condition
of presentation or display
to produce sound,
but may be perfectly silent,
in any case, rather than mute,
as we might otherwise assume.
What I am trying to say here,
as Zizek suggested so many years
ago under the banner
of philosophy is this, quote,
"Sound does not simply persist
at a different level with regard
to what we see.
It rather points toward a gap
in the field of the visible,
toward the dimension of what
eludes our gaze," end quote.
If we dare imagine sound, then,
not as not there, but there so
intimately as to dwell
with the picture hidden,
as it were,
in a perceptual blind spot,
then with the slightest turn
and tilt of the head
and a gaze more
intense than our gallery habits
of pause and promenade,
we may see the silence
of pictures
yet, and hear with our eyes
their lower frequencies
amplified.
If, as the great Shawn Michelle
Smith put it, photography is
subtended
by an optical unconscious,
an unnerving sense of living
in a world only partially
perceived in vision, which
recognition, she says, graduates
to quote, "a revelation
of an unseen world
that photography does not fully
disclose,
but makes us
aware of its invisibility."
In the place
of this optical unconscious,
however, which, Shawn Smith has
so carefully parsed from Freud,
Walter Benjamin, and Rosalind
Krauss, I want to posit
a corresponding and contrapuntal
aural unconscious
at photography's ground.
By photography's aural,
A-U-R-A-L, unconscious, I do not
mean a subliminal condition
inherent to the mechanical
or digital processes of picture
making, as if the camera
possessed a psychic life apart.
I mean, rather,
a metaphorical domain, where
the sounds formally adhering to
or otherwise called up
by the photographic event
before the picture of it
is finally materially made
are, in a manner of speaking,
archived for those with ears
to hear.
There, in the photograph's
blind spot,
the aural unconscious resounds.
Its unseen properties reflecting
only that aspect
of the photographic not
available
to visual apprehension.
Few photographic subjects teach
us this as forcefully,
or should I say as noisily,
as Martin Luther King,
Jr. Regularly mis-recognized
and presumed to have in view,
the 1963 March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom,
a 1957 photograph, probably
taken for the British Picture
Post magazine features King
speaking from the same Capitol
platform where he would deliver
the "I Have a Dream" address six
years later.
The Prayer Pilgrimage
for Freedom,
observing the third anniversary
of the historic Brown v. Board
of Education ruling
was the occasion for King's
picture.
The near silhouette outline
of King's clerical robe
has him ceremonially straddling
the line,
as it were, between judge
and priest
on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial.
But his facelessness, preserved
by the photograph's reverse view
of him, and his ample sleeves
flowering
with the demonstrative stretch
of his arms are an invitation
to also consider
an apparitional subjectivity,
whose death is not
so much prefigured as, for us,
past.
Unlike the more obscure
machinations of those later
canonical photographs of King
standing in the very same place
in 1963, this photograph does
not conceal its threats,
it owns them.
Taken from an angle at which
King could never see himself,
Picture Post's image of King
sounding forth "Give us
the ballot, and we will,"
was his sonorous refrain,
discloses obliquely the threat
of a panoptic state power
sufficient to kill him.
The angle is predatory,
I mean to suggest, and thus
consonant
with that peculiar confession
of the late Susan Sontag, which
we might take to first index
then warn us all
of the routinely understated
potentiality
for a symbolic, though no less
real, violence
that cameras placed
in the wrong hands can effect.
According to Sontag,
to photograph people
is to risk, quote,
"turning people into objects
that can be symbolically
possessed."
Still worse, the neurotic who
lifts his camera to shoot
a subject commits,
quote, "a sublimated murder,
a soft murder," she calls it,
"in the act of picture taking."
As often as King was
in the camera's eye
from those early days
in Montgomery
to his Memphis murder, who can
doubt that this precise genre
of sublimation
rife with pathos on the one
hand, and still yet murderously
motivated on the other, did
inspire many of the most
widely-circulated photographs
of King.
Caught as he so often was
in the crosshairs of so many
cyclops lenses, King is already
always a dead man in pictures,
it seems.
As much then,
prior to his assassination,
as now, 50 years
past that ear-splitting crying.
To the extent that so little has
been contemplated about King's
life and career in pictures
per se, it is scarcely
stretching things, given
the auditory content
of photography's ground,
to posit that the fullest
possibility of what King sounded
like has yet to be heard
or imagined, tape recordings
and rhetorical analyses
not withstanding.
To put this another way and more
specifically,
I submit that if photographs
in general
bear a phonic substance
constitutive of the condition
of the visual broadly,
then the picture of King holding
forth on the National
Mall in 1957, for instance,
or that which
witnesses
to the felt sublimation
of an imminent
though as yet
unrealized civil rights victory
in Memphis from the nerve
center of the Church of God
in Christ there in 1968
reflects the very repression
of sound by which photographs
maintain their pretense
to pure visuality.
With their amplification
technology and public address
apparatus in plain view,
we may think of these images,
then, as meta pictures--
photographs depicting nothing
less than the phonic anteriority
of black voice,
a negative sonority at once
prior to and productive
of King's visual capture
on camera.
More than coincidental details,
the countless deesis,
King at Stanford, polished wood
pulpits, and hard metal
microphones that so commonly
staged King's public life
in pictures
hint at this repressed remainder
buried behind or somewhere very
deep within the many photographs
of King preaching or performing
speech-making.
The amplification apparatus
especially so wholly
naturalized into the scene
of speech and performance
it passes nearly unseen,
deafening the view
to the very sounds helping
to achieve the desired image.
In other words, amplification
may have augmented the tonality
of King's voice
in Washington and Memphis
with farther reaching
reverberations
than their immediate time
and place, but it is also
certain that that technology
helped mute
the constant clickings
of the state threat,
or its mobocratic underside
in cameras, recorders, timers,
and triggers,
and all
their common sonic terror
for a man
resigned to die a violent death.
In Memphis on the eve of King's
assassination,
to take another example,
the weather was foreboding.
Every thunderclap
and wind-blown slam crash
of the hinged windows in Mason
Temple auditorium
was, to the increasingly edgy
speechmaker, a rifle discharged,
or so it seemed.
Who can doubt,
then, that holding forth
from Mason Temple's in the round
pulpit, King,
on the eve of his assassination,
was answering back
with a thunder of his own,
facing the mortal threat he
surely heard but could not
for the life of him see.
To have been present at Mason
Temple that fateful night would
have been to experience
the sound
of that remarkable voice
in the flesh, as it were,
to have been compelled
by the force of it,
to hear and admit
that the grain of it, as Roland
Barthes would surely have said,
is if not something
else, something out
of this world, then clearly,
it is something more.
The grain of King's voice
that something else there
beyond or before words is best
heard sensed aurally in that
soaring vibrato speak of his,
whose pathos and authority
so many black clergy,
elected officials,
and public intellectuals
have sought and failed abysmally
to replicate.
King's vibrato, the play
of overtone and resonance,
lament and ecstasy is
the approach to a black meta
voice bearing the weight
of accumulated black injury,
rage, and creative suffering.
"I've looked over.
And I've seen the Promised
Land," brings to near conclusion
King's April 3, 1968 address
at historic Mason Temple Church
of God and Christ.
"It doesn't matter with me now,"
he preached, "because I've been
to the mountaintop.
And I've looked over.
And I've seen the Promised
Land."
Testifying to terrors seen
and unseen, though still yet
devoted
to the eschatological hope
of freedom that was
his consistent text,
King's vibrato resounded
to the rafters.
If the picture of King
performing, preaching, or speech
making
is, as I have said, the picture
of King already always dead,
each photograph bearing
the shadow menace
of the assassination which
is to come,
then even on the night prior
to its deadly achievement,
King speaks in Memphis
as from the dead.
His tremolo,
"I've seen the Promised Land,"
a death rattle and a visitation
of spirits.
Oriented, therefore,
toward a silence that
reverberates precisely
because there are no words fully
fit to the non-world,
the vibrato
is
vestibular to the perfect pitch
of the terrible
and the sublime that seems so
impossible to represent.
Simultaneously excessive and
partial, King's vibrato
is a bridge
between the verbal visual
and the substance of life
beyond what we can see or dream.
If photography may be looked
to to sound off, to reproduce
not only the object
of the camera's attention,
that is, but the noisiness
of that which no camera can ever
fully see, much less reproduce,
then looking at King performing,
preaching, or speech making
is, at root, a listening.
And you have to keep looking,
the poet and theorist Fred Moten
suggests, so you can listen
to him.
With that, I end, and I thank
you for listening.
[APPLAUSE]
