Harlem In My Heart

Harlem, or the Poetics of the Body

by Margo Jefferson

The photographs of Martine Barrat submit us to an exercise of perception that is out of the ordinary. In effect, today we have become more and more accustomed to imaginary models imposed on us by the producers of cultural marketing. These models, oversimplified, are bound to images torn from their contexts and sociopolitical realities, and subjected to market forces, to an ugly, hollow aesthetic. A veritable poison to imagination and creativity, these forces all too often transform the immense domain of the arts into a feeble and inoffensive vector of (vehicle for) esthetic, social, and political innovation, and engenders the major pandemic that is the sterilization of creative potential. However, with her photographs, Martine Barrat shatters the somnolescence of our senses, she launches us toward a more turbulent space, and roads less traveled. Lured from the realm of mercantile clichés, exposed to a permanent course of intensive variation, we are thrown into the powerful world of Harlem, into its life. This life, so far removed from our own. forces us to revisit our understanding of the world and of the body, it brings us closer to this extraordinary vitality, to this mighty/grand/powerful and exceptional mode of existence. This life is a desire, a giddy beauty carried aloft by all these evolving points of view. Here, the unhealing wound of systemic poverty, which infects the social body shamelessly and in plain sight, is transformed into an art of political resistance. Or rather, an art that recreates its bonds with the political vocation of art: the political art of joy, the art of giving. Martine Barrat, by her overwhelming gesture, by her incessant efforts to persevere in capturing these forces, has developed a politics of the street, of progress, of effort, of dance, of breathing: an ethics of movement. And looking at these beautiful images, hearing the sublime music that radiates out from them. It is difficult to dim the feeling of revolt they awaken in us when we are confronted with the reality of this "self-hatred" that, propagated by a false humanism, continues to contaminate minds. Martine Barrat inaugurates the joyous affirmation of "becoming other," so present in Harlem. She is truly a cartographer of the senses: with greatest care she folds and unfolds the wandering paths, the trajectory-narratives, and with each roll of the dice, she reinvents history. She recalls us to a free and inventive history, free because it is carried aloft by the joy of Harlem. A whole world flows from the inhuman violence. the unbearable precarity, and the indifference of a society intoxicated by a totalizing and oppressive sense of reason.

Martine Barrat truly is the New World's Eugene Atget of late 20th century. Harlem is her Paris, and she brings to it the same kind of documentary acuteness and aesthetic pleasure. She is more interested in portraits than in the street senes Atget treasured. And that's exactly right, because the citizens of Harlem, USA, have been seen too often as objects-objects of pity, curiosity, shock. excitement: fetish objects in short. The larger world is there in her portraits: the grimy fire escape stairs behind the little girl in fresh-pressed denims who has climbed up a street light; the Players Club with its rickety card tables and memorabilia-covered walls; the fabrie of those white tank tops and jeans (you can guess how much they cost) worn by teenage girls marching down the block in triumphant "bootvlicious" formation Harlem is a great black metropolis and Harlem is perpetually under siege. For much of the twentieth century it was a popular subject for photographers as different as James Van Der Zee, Aaron Siskind and Gordon Parks. But the last 30 years have been hard for Harlem, for its real life and for its photographie life. Visually, they have too often been years of neglect, ("we're tired of urban decay," say observers) or of cliche ("get a picture of that junkie shooting up!" cries the photo editor). Barrat knows that even under siege people go on with their lives. She won't let us sensationalize what we see or feel. There is emotional and formal beauty in her work. But it isn't sentimental beauty: it isn't achieved at the cost of what we know about life outside the photographic image. The teenage girl posing for her stardom close-up- legs perfectly arranged in a Motown star stance, skirt swinging, ruffles and bow in perfect formation-maybe stardom is within reach. But if not? The fragility of her moment in the sidewalk spotlight, the vulnerability of her charm, the intensity of her desire... all there, never to be diminished or forgotten. I have been looking at Martine Barrat's photographs for more than 20 years now. Always, I am moved by their formal and emotional exactness. I am watching someone caught in a characteristic or intimate moment: this dogged little boxer almost fainting against the ropes; this sassy dancer, this 70-something woman lowering her body into a swimming pool in a way that is gingerly yet eager. I catch my breath, suspended between the endless known moment and the endless, unknown future.

Margo Jefferson Pulitzer Prize-winning critic. Staff writer at The New York Times for 13 years, author of On Michael Jackson (Pantheon, 2005 and Vintage, 2006)

The photography of Martine Barrat attracts my attention and subsequently feeds my emotional hunger with a taste of reality, inspiration, sensitivity and provocation. She has delved into my culture with insatiable passion and captured the underbelly of a society in conflict with itself. America, the epitome of capitalism is laid bare by Martine's images that uncover racism, sexism and governmental treachery through pictures of socially degraded residents of New York Citr's Harlem. She distributes emotional images of children of Harlem, the social clubs of the Bronx and the street life, including open fire hydrants (Harlem baptisms) and block parties. She captures the sincerity of Sunday and the churchgoers begging their god for forgiveness and constantly renewed faith. Martine Barrat has become a part of American society and has come to be respected and revered by her subjects in her photos. They trust that she will present them in an honest and kind manner, not one of caricatures as normally exhibited by most European and American whites. She not only goes around photographing people but she becomes part of their lives and contributes to their community by taking care of their children, offering elder care and guidance and emotional support to seniors. She participates in the day-to-day social events (birth, wedding and funeral events, social rallies and protests, sit-ins, lunch food programs) she photographs; she is therefore part of her own exhibition. Her life is connected to the lives of her subjects. Each photograph has an explanation and story which help unlock the many mysteries that make up the conundrums exposed in the underbelly life of New York. For your eyes only, one of my personal favorites, is electrifying as a positive snapshot of Harlem life; These are the Breaks. Blacktown (Harlem) as a source of creativity for the world to feed upon. It shows why Harlem is at the top of the creative list of America's 26 "chocolate cities" and why the world depends on the ghettos of despair to transform this negative energy of depression into something inspiring like dance, jazz, rap, hip hop, song and general hip expression. Her pictures of Harlem protests offer us a journey into lives of a people who have been persecuted for five hundred years without reparations while living in the richest country in the world. How accurate are her pictorials of the young boxers in their quest for victory, in the midst of struggle around them. The beauty that Martine summons in her work offers us a glimpse of the complexities of New York City wild life.

David Murray

Composer and saxophone player

It was a big surprise when David played at the opening of the show in Paris.