LAURA HARRIS

December 1, 2010

To Whom It May Concern:

Martine Barrat is an extraordinary artist who has influenced a remarkable array of people - Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Gordon Parks, Ornette Coleman, and Hélio Oiticica, to name but a few - but has gone underrecognized by the general public. She has been working for years with people in the South Bronx and Harlem, however, is well known and well loved in those communities for her photographic and video portraits. From her groundbreaking 1978 video, You Do the Crime, You Do the Time, to her most recent series of photographs, We Are the Light, Barrat has produced a unique and incredibly rich body of work. I urge you to support her in preserving and extending this work. What Barrat attunes to and brings out so exquisitely in her portraits is the creativity of the people she photographs, their capacity to invent, from what most people think of only as situations of deprivation, other ways of living that defy such deprivation. The range of poses, gestures and forms of congregation she renders, from the quietly dignified to the joyous and exuberant, show that this creativity is not just a matter of survival, but a conscious commitment to making something beautiful and pleasurable. This is, she shows us, what is sc central to blackness and black expression, which takes shape in and through the innovative practices, aesthetic and social, formal and informal, that are linked historically to black people but that constitute, at the same time, an open formation, a resource for anyone who wants to find ways to live otherwise.

What really distinguishes Barrat's portraits, however, is not just her deep understanding of these kinds of practices, but the particular way she engages them, the way she opens the space of the image to their performance. She makes an claim on these practices in and for her work but, at the same time, invites those involved in these practices to make a claim on her work, appropriating her media, her authorship, as a means for further elaborating what they do. One can see this lovely interplay in so many of the photographs, in the snapshots (Crumpin' comes immediately to mind, as do The Retired Working Class and Holy Bound) and the portraits (in the stances of so many of the young boxers, or Mrs. Lancaster's Garden of Eden, or the kids who are deciding whether or not kids from another block can be included in her/their photo). One can see it in the video, The Last Day of the Rhythm Club, in the way the members of the Rhythm Club, an old social club for musicians and their friends, engage her, the videographer, in conversation, and the way they seem, through that conversation, to be directing the video as much as she is. And one can see it in the fascinating way in which the video redocuments the photographs she has taken of the members of the Rhythm Club over many years, documenting, in the process, the way they have made use of those photographs (through the collage they compose, the stories they tell, etc.) to extend everything that went on in the club, all of the different practices that developed there and the various forms of participation and belonging these practices made possible. This extension continues, in the very conversation that shapes the video, at the very moment when it seems that everything that has developed in the Rhythm Club will be lost. But if dispossession and dispersal is part of the ongoing history of blackness, her video- and one thinks, also, of all the work she does with children - reminds us that this history is not just about loss, but about the ways in which blackness is always being reconfigured and renewed. Martine Barrat has positioned herself right in the middle of this, offering her audience a privileged view.

Sincerely,

Laura Harris

Lecturing Fellow, Department of English

Duke University