Interview with Lyle Ashton Harris

by Alanna Airitam

Alanna Airitam: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. I'm a huge fan of your work, your journey, and your process, and excited to learn more about you. I did want to start with talking about your studies of economics at Wesleyan and how that translated into your career as an artist. How did you make that jump and what made you shift gears?

Lyle Ashton Harris: My grandfather was an economist, and at the time if you were African American or a person of color or any minority, certain careers were considered safe in terms of ensuring a stable income. I had an aptitude for math, so I went to college intending to pursue economics initially. It was during my sophomore year that I realized I wanted something different, and I was drawn to photography classes. My first photo course was with Professor J. Seeley, head of the photography program at Wesleyan. On the eve of taking that first class, my camera—which my stepfather, the man who raised me, had given to me—was stolen. Professor J. loaned me one of his cameras for the course—a Pentax K1000—and the rest is history.

AA: And that's where you found your voice?

LAH: Well, I would say that’s how I began to develop my voice. I come from a family of photographers. My grandfather shot more than 10,000 Ektachrome slides of our family and friends over several decades and later continued that documentation practice when consumer video became available. I'm not sure if he thought about in quite this way, but what resulted is a major family archive. That’s something that has nourished not only my work but also the work of my brother, filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris. A lot of my brother's films draw on that family archive, both the photographs as well as the moving images.

AA: You know, I often find when speaking with artists that there is some sort of familial lineage that continues to run through the family generation after generation. So, it's interesting to hear you talk about your grandfather and your brother being both involved in the arts. And of course, you've also used your grandmother's image in your work. Can you speak a little bit to that?

LAH: I included a large-format color Polaroid portrait of both of my grandparents in my first New York solo gallery exhibition titled The Good Life at Jack Tilton in 1994. There’s also an iconic large-format Polaroid portrait of my grandmother, which was shot in 1998; it forms part of a larger set of Chocolate Portraits that were published in my 2010 monograph titled Excessive Exposure. I believe my grandmother and the artist Chuck Close were among the first subjects that I shot for that series.

AA: I didn’t know that. What's your connection to Chuck Close?

LAH: Chuck and I had become friends around that time, and so we photographed each other. When he was sitting for my photo, I remember him saying to me, "Be gentle because I'm going to be painting you next."

AA: It goes both ways.

LAH: Yes, it does!

AA: You started your photographic journey as an undergrad with a study of nudes and that led you to Americas and Constructs. So, when and how did you find the safety to explore the concepts of sexuality and gender and race in such a bold way?

LAH: I grew up in an African Methodist Episcopal church tradition. My grandfather was his church’s treasurer for thirty-seven years, and my grandmother oversaw the young people’s division of its children and youth ministry. Although the congregation wouldn’t have been considered particularly liberal, it had a strong ethic of tolerance. Also, having been brought up in a well-educated, working/middle class Black family, that environment was instilled with an ethic of love and acceptance. I would say all that influenced me. But in terms of the larger concepts of sexuality, gender, and race, I find it curious how those things can trickle down. I was a young man from the Bronx who had spent several formative years living in east Africa and had a South African stepfather, who along with my mother, was directly involved in the struggle against South African apartheid. I think my early photographs reflect the culmination of a multiplicity of things that had been happening in my life, if that makes sense.

AA: It just occurred to me, when you were in the process of making Americas and Constructs, for you to start talking about queerness and being gay and being open about that, was there any sort of moment where you felt guarded or that it was having some effect on how you were expressing your voice at that time? Or were you just happy to break down those doors and let it all out?

LAH: It was a time of social and cultural challenges from the margin to the center, which shook up issues of race, gender, and class. In relation to the cultural shifts that were occurring around issues of gay identity, I’m not sure there’s any consensus on how to best contextualize that. I’ve tried to ground it with some specificity in relation to certain historical traditions, whether that's the history of photography, American history, a larger global history, or the history of representation. I think it may have less to do with what I was engaged in as an individual, rather it concerns our relationship to those histories—what does it mean for an artist to be interested in engaging with that history, with what came before? Also, I think it's important to remember that we are all complex individuals—you know what I'm saying? The fact that there are historical traditions of (European and African) photography, the fact that each of us is an amalgam of a multiplicity of identities, the fact that we are able to draw on multiple identities and histories—I think it's also important to talk about that.

AA: Yeah. And that's a very good point, and I think there are a lot of artists who can try to push aside some of these other cultures or influences that have created who we are. We are basically a living soup of our environment, our culture, our histories. So to take all of that in and look at who we are in the context of it all.

LAH: Exactly. I appreciate you articulating that. I'm currently listening to Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste, and its first couple chapters speak in a very detailed way to how our country as a whole has been robbed of many African-American contributions to our culture and history. And this is where we find ourselves right now. Recognizing this allows me to hold compassion for those who were drawn into the recent events of January 6, which I don’t condone in any way. Some of our neighbors have been consuming a certain steady diet of propaganda—and not just over the last four years of the previous administration. There has been an absolute paucity of African-American history in public education from its beginning.

AA: It's really amazing how Wilkerson is able to take this bird's eye view and be able to connect it all together. She’s not saying anything that we didn't already know, but to be able to see it from a large scope.

LAH: Absolutely.

AA: I think that this is a great segue into representation. Do you feel like we've made any headway in terms of representation in art, in photography?

LAH: I think so, without question. And in the last few years a lot of it has been driven by social movements such as Black Lives Matter. There's a direct correlation—not only nationally, but internationally—with what been happening in the streets and the cataclysmic shifts in the art world in terms of representation, of who gets hired, of the new wave of people who are leading institutions and curating exhibitions. Obviously, there's also much more room for growth—without question! But I think it's important to acknowledge the shift that has been taking place.

AA: It's an interesting thing for me when I look at this holistically, thinking, "Yes, we're here, we are emerging onto the scene. We have a voice now." I'm seeing this, but what's also striking to me is that a lot of our work is political and I'm wondering if you think that that's something that is just inherent in our nature because us as people of color are inherently political or do you feel like it is ever going to be possible for us to be able to make work that is not labeled from a black photographer or a black queer photographer? Are we ever going to be able to get to this point where we are just photographers?

LAH: We live in a space and time where much is political—who is not touched by political power? I think it's important to realize that getting up in the morning or just breathing can be considered a political act. To have a bottle of clean drinking water or not noticing the effects of climate change—such things are political acts. And that’s also part of the systemic impact of caste and class that Isabel Wilkerson writes about. We shouldn’t be afraid to embrace our political agency as artists, because that makes some of the most interesting artists—whether they're BIPOC or white artists for that matter—I'm drawn to those whose work is actually engaging a political framework.

AA: I appreciate you saying that because I think I was a little hung up on this thought for a while. It just felt very limiting to me and I think that hearing you speak about this has allowed some air into that space for me, personally. In our remaining minutes, could you share some advice with emerging and mid-career artists who have witnessed your career and the success that you've had—some tips to help them along their journey?

LAH: I'm still looking for helpful tips myself! Right now, I’m beginning the next arc of my creative journey, and I don't yet know what that's going to be exactly, where that’s going to take me. I’m really feeling the weight of history, so I’d like to imagine it could be epic. Right now we’re in such a deeply, deeply rich time, but how do we find the quiet time to allow for research? How do I nourish myself so I can continue making work to share? Particularly right now, I think it's important for younger artists to understand how valuable it is to pause and reflect, and to embrace self-care in order to explore even greater depths in their work.

AA: I absolutely agree. Thank you for taking this time with me. Lyle, it has been such a pleasure to meet you, really.

LAH: It’s been great to meet as well, and I look forward to seeing you in person later this spring.