Everything Is Connected
i.
Photographer Alison Rossiter’s recent work is made without cameras from expired photographic paper. In her show, Substance of Density 1918-1948 at Yossi Milo Gallery in NYC, she dates these abstract images both from the time they were created (2019, 2020) and the paper’s expiration date (the first half of the 20th century as referenced in the show’s title). For instance, the four small gelatin silver prints, positioned together in a rectangular frame, titled Density 1930s (Gevaert Gevaluxe Velours), 2019 run the gamut from a solid black rectangle to a floating white blob like a monochromatic Rothko painting. Rossiter’s images seem to channel abstract expressionist painters like Rothko who championed painting-as-subject matter as a sort of aesthetic purity. But in Rossiter’s case the subject matter is not photography-as-subject matter, but development-as-subject matter, the prime example of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. And yet, even as these works go through the motions of mechanical development, they produce singular artifacts grasping toward Walter Benjamin’s “aura” of the unique artwork. So not only does Rossiter’s tetraptych connect the Great Depression and our own doom-laden times, but also modernism and postmodernism going so far as to name the now-defunct corporate brand of paper stock in its own title. These artworks reveal abstract expressionism’s limitations especially in the idea that an artwork can only be about itself.
ii.
Regardless of intentions, nothing stays itself for long. I think about the death of George Floyd. Unless you’re a monster, anyone who has watched this murder of a Black man by a white cop will not leave that viewing unchanged. It takes up the world with its horror. You can see why so many people—Black, white, brown, Asian—hit the streets to protest despite the fact that we were in the early months of a pandemic and had already watched another white man suffocate Eric Garner on video just six years earlier. In fact, since we all listened to the 911 call of a white neighborhood watch coordinator’s execution of an unarmed teenaged boy, Trayvon Martin, in a Miami suburb back in 2012, various lethal and non-lethal-but-repugnant events have been recorded and presented to us with astonishing frequency: a twelve-year-old Black boy, Tamir Rice, shot by a white cop for playing with a toy gun; a Black woman, Sandra Bland, threatened with a tasing and handcuffed on the side of the road after refusing to put out her cigarette; a Black teenaged girl, Taylor Bracey, body-slammed by an adult male cop in a math class. Somehow, though, the brutality and lengthiness of George Floyd’s torture and death did something to America and the world: Floyd’s mild demeanor, the fact that he never resists violently, the clarity of his requests for mercy and air, even calling for his mother in his final seconds while an officer kneels on his neck and doesn’t bother to look away from the cameras filming him, hands in pockets as if this murder is not shameful, just a casual affair, on his to-do list for the day. The crime both repulses and sucks in all similar crimes becoming a symbol for a country’s shameful history and that history’s manifestation in modern times. Within days, this murder was no longer just itself nor even all the other similar acts of state violence piled on top of it. The protests widened from anti-police brutality to defunding police departments to abolishing ICE to a more generalized frustration about COVID-19 and the unequal manner in which our citizens of color have suffered under that pandemic to, finally, a protest against Trumpism and all that that ideology entails: white supremacism, predatory capitalism, misogyny, xenophobia, cruelty, indifference.
iii.
Our previous president used white America’s fear of the urban (i.e. Black) landscape for the entirety of his campaign for president and his four-year term, constantly tagging these places as “crime infested,” “falling apart,” “rodent infested mess[es]” and so on in order to fire up his base. The pestilential quality of his descriptions was not simply to align uncleanliness with real estate and disrepair, nor was it just to lay the blame for this squalor at the feet of whatever Democratic politician he was trying to tar in the moment; it had the collateral damage of covering the residents of these neighborhoods in a residue of grime, pollution, blood, and other unpleasant matter. Trump didn’t create this line of attack, neither did the reactionary political party that he took over. It has been a political strategy at least since the beginnings of industrialism, and has been a fearful reminder of white America’s dominance of people who lived here before them, has even been filtered through mainstream entertainment for decades.
As a white latchkey kid who grew up in the mostly white suburbs of a college town, I watched a lot of TV growing up and nearly all crime shows are set in big cities. At some point, I realized that I feared the urban landscape although I had spent almost no time there. Once, in the 1990s, I headed into the streets of Washington D.C.’s Chinatown at night with my then-mother-in-law in search of a tea set. Unlike some Chinatowns, Washington D.C.’s neighborhood, at least at that time, was a dark, foreboding place for the tourist who has not spent much time on the streets of a city with more than 300,000 inhabitants. I asked my mother-in-law why she wasn’t scared to go traipsing into “unfamiliar” neighborhoods and she looked at me with a puzzled expression. “I go where I want to go. You can’t be ruled by fear.”
This was a bit dismissive, I thought, perhaps even naïve. But I shrugged and tried to keep up as she scurried through these dirty, but mostly deserted streets on her ultimately unsuccessful quest for the perfect Chinese tea set. It would be another decade, years after this trip and after my first marriage had fallen apart, that I actually lived in a city. I’ve now been in New York—first, Brooklyn and now Queens—for almost twenty years and rarely feel scared any more to be the only white guy on the train or in the street. I only feel scared now when I am confronted with the kind of toxic masculinity that sometimes emanates from a group of young men of whatever color traveling in a pack and I realize that it’s the same fear I felt when I lived in the smaller towns of the more segregated South, though then it was almost always white men that I was afraid of.
Not long after that trip to DC, I dreamt that I was walking alone there at nighttime, the streets peopled with the usual extras from noirs: junkies and drunks sprawled on benches, leering prostitutes, young men hanging out on corners regarding me with suspicion. It seemed that I was the only white person in the city and I was terrified even though no one accosted me. I didn’t know why I was in this section of town—Christmas shopping, I think, although no shops seemed to be open—but knew that I didn’t belong. Finally, my dad swooped in to rescue me and the dream shifted tone. He drove me to the nearby Virginia suburbs of DC where he went to seminary. Although he really did go to seminary in Alexandria, this is the only part of the dream that corresponded to reality. In the dream, the seminary is at the top of a steep hill where there is a party going on. Drunken white men and women run in front of my dad’s car in dress clothes and party hats. They seem very young and immature—more like high schoolers than seminarians—and throw cake, slapping the hood of Dad’s car as he cruises past. Some reach in the open window and honk his horn. Dad laughs good-naturedly, but I become unreasonably angry, enraged even. Ultimately, I end up shrieking obscenities at the bishop. It strikes me, now, reading this entry in my dream journal, how scared I was in the earlier part of the dream and how fearless I was in the second part even though it was only the white people who attacked me. Their whiteness somehow made them seem less dangerous, comical even.
iv.
Once, trying to find an image of child laborers during a class lecture I was giving, I did a Google image search of “child sewing jeans.” I got lots of images of mostly white children in jeans, some pics of just the jeans, and some sewing patterns. I did another search, adding the word “sweatshop” and this time there were a lot of images of boys and girls, many as young as eight or nine—not a single one that was white—sewing stacks of jeans. What was so striking about these images is that almost none of these kids seemed unhappy, many smiled at the camera to demonstrate their pleasure at the job they were doing. Perhaps they were afraid not to smile, maybe there was a foreman who would beat them or simply fire them once the camera person was gone if they didn’t put up a good front. Or maybe they were really pleased with the job. Maybe they competed to get it, maybe their older brother could no longer work after being killed by a drug dealer. Maybe it was what kept them from begging in the streets of their city. Maybe they had a younger sister at home starving to death.
Fast fashion, like fast food, has a high demand and a low cost. Americans, even minimum wage Americans, command too high of a wage to sew it. That’s why that happy little boy and his friends will always have work—at least until a needle goes through a finger or he develops some kind of repetitive motion injury or his place of work collapses on him. He and his friends will happily produce all the jeans, skirts, shirts and so on that we here in the so-called developed world demand. Although the demand for these products have a limited shelf life, like other forms of energy in a closed system, the clothes will never disappear. When we tire of these fast fashion products or when they fray and wear out since they’re made from substandard materials, we will ship them back to the developing countries of the world for the people there to wear. When they decay past the point of being wearable, people there will cut the clothing up to use as rags, some of it will get buried in holes, some of it will simply lie along the surface of the world becoming indistinguishable from the mud and other garbage. And the rest will go into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and float atop the ocean for the remainder of our days, a manmade island, pure and uninhabitable.
John Talbird is the author of the novel, The World Out There (Madville) and the chapbook of stories, A Modicum of Mankind (Norte Maar). His fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Potomac Review, Ambit, Juked, The Literary Review, and Riddle Fence among many others. He is a frequent contributor to Film International, on the editorial board of Green Hills Literary Lantern and Associate Editor, Fiction, for the online noir journal Retreats from Oblivion. A professor at Queensborough Community College-CUNY, he lives with his wife and son in Queens. More of his writing can be found at johntalbird.com.