DESTINY BIRDSONG
(Atlantic Die Ride)
I appreciate the fact that, as a photographer (and a poet), you consistently use African American subjects, and capture candid scenes of African American life. How do you decide which scenes to capture, and, more important, how do you choose which pieces to present to the public? As an artist, do you feel any pressure to present certain aspects of African American life while concealing others? If so, how do you deal with that pressure? The cover of your most recent book, Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems, features a photograph of a young woman with albinism, a choice for which you got both positive and negative feedback. What prompted you to photograph her, and what made you decide to choose one of her photographs as the cover? TSE: I am a physical photographer and a social one. I walk the streets and I bother people or I walk the streets and wait for them to bother me and when they do I try to be ready. Summers are humid in D.C. and as I was leaving a newsstand, Chinyere aka Chee Chee was entering it, rushing in to get out of the sun. She was wearing dark shades and we were both near Dupont Circle––me with all of my hair and her with barely any. She was striking. I waited outside, photographing strangers and when she came out of the newsstand, we both just sort of waited for me to ask if I could photograph her. I did and she said yes. We walked to a bookstore and the waiter brought water and I waited for her to have a few sips. Then, the photograph was given to me. She smiled and laughed and we ate and we never said skin or albino or albinism. She said she had been looking for someone to take photographs of her and I said I would. I casually used to rolls of color film that day. I used a Leica M7 alternating between a 50 mm and 90 mm lens. I never said, ―I wrote poetry‖ and I did not photograph her with Skin, Inc. in mind. I had my heart set on a black and white painting by Kerry James Marshall that I had seen on the cover of BOMB Magazine. It was not until I began work on ―Gone Pop‖ (about Michael Jackson) that Graywolf asked for cover ideas and I remembered the photographs of Chinyere that seemed to grow on me more and more for the joy in them. It even occurred to me that many of the public photographs that I had seen of albinos contained very little joy as if they were being studied or forced to stand under the camera‘s microscope.
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