Soul Searching
and Rendezvous with the Underground Railroad
Stephen
Marc
by
Deborah Jack
Stephen
Marc began his presentation by giving us the primary foundation for
his work, which seems to illustrate a tireless work ethic. He credits
his approach and success to his involvement with Track and Field
as well as growing up and traveling between the communities of Champaign,
Springfield and Chicago. The former gave him the strength to persist
in the face of difficult photo situations and the latter provided
him with the skills to communicate across communities and cultures
that were both familiar and foreign to him.
The
first body of work presented was entitled Urban Notions. This
photo book project was an exploration of his community, as a counter-narrative
to what was being portrayed in the media. Marc insists that his work
is not documentary, but rather a combination of "found situations" and "directed
moments". The photos
were mainly a look at the people and neighborhoods in the urban communities
that Marc lived in and visited regularly.
In
his next body of work, The Black Trans-Atlantic Experience,
Marc expands beyond his personal neighborhood community in order
to discover his extended Diasporic community. By photographing black
communities in the United States, Jamaica and Ghana, which were all
part of the British colonial framework at one time, his work reveals
the ties that bind. In
his portrayal of the collective black community, he did not set out
to create anything definitive, rather his was a personal journey,
which echoed the journeys of his youth when he visited his family
and friends in the various communities of Illinois. The
result is a series of images whose locations are interchangeable
while also being fixed in a certain geographic and cultural space.
In Soul
Searching Marc notes a shift in his work from straight photography
to digitally manipulated images. Using
scanned images of his photos of shadow patterns, he created new
patterns, which were first made in to ceramic tiles because of
their strong design element. The computer allowed him to work in
an additive as well as subtractive method and provided immediacy
not available to him before. By re-examining earlier photos Marc
recycles images of his many family members including his Aunt Ruth
and Uncle Frank, who appeared in his early photographs. He further explained how he incorporates patterns like the
web grid of aunt Ruth's burglar bars, the striping of Uncle Frank’s
car detailing business as well as other shadows, and combines them
with images of the El Mino slave castle. The
patterns and designs he makes reference coded quilt patterns and
groupings of family photos. In this work the narrative is implied
rather than set.
Marc
presented a topic that has continued to inform his current work,
namely the Underground Railroad. In Awakened in Buffalo and Passage
on the Underground Railroad images of the locations of important
safe havens for runaway slaves are presented to us in the form of
straight color images. The work, which was started in Buffalo
also extended into Ohio and other sites. These were then digitally
manipulated and made into his trademark images that intermingle composites
and montages. He outlined that this project is part of a larger community
effort to document these sites and use them as an educational and
research tool. Here Marcs' work moves again to another level where
it comes full circle and creates a dialogue between the historians
engaged in the subject of the Underground Railroad and the artist,
on how these historical sites are represented and projected to the
community. In this project, the photographer’s role as artist
changes to the role of cultural activist.
Stephen
Marc presented his work in an engaging anecdotal manner in which
his passion was evident. Every image seemed to have a thousand words
to illustrate it, which was appropriate given the narrative nature
and depth of the work. We were indeed privileged to hear the background
tales and inspiration that informs the work of Stephen Marc.