A Habit of Tenderness

On an extraordinarily sunny day, on a secluded shore of Lake Huron, Michèle Pearson Clarke stands before her own camera. In the distance, the sky is a perfect gradient of blue, and even her straw hat with its fire-engine-red rim cannot protect her squinting eyes from the sun. Besides the hat, Michèle wears only a bracelet and a pair of black, goldfish-patterned trunks. Her knee is covered in sand. Directly above the horizon her arms curve into what bodybuilders have dubbed the ‘front double biceps pose.’ Is this a power pose? If so, why do I feel so vulnerable and filled with shame as I trace the tan lines along Michèle’s chest with my eyes? Why have I suddenly become aware of my own weakness in the face of her flexed muscles, of her undeniable strength? What else is this photograph trying to tell me? What more is there to see? What does it need to say? 

This image that I have been continuously looking at and listening to is unassumingly titled Cowboy Hat, and is part of Michèle Pearson Clarke’s 2018 exhibition “A Welcome Weight on My Body” presented at Gallery 44 in Toronto. The exhibition was a culmination of Michèle’s six-year-long relationship with Gallery 44, and an exploration of a theoretical idea she calls ‘affective grit.’ It’s a slushy afternoon in February when we meet in Michèle’s home to discuss how she came about coining this term and what this past year of photographic exploration has taught her. Our conversation begins with the title of the exhibition. Of that welcome weight, Michèle tells me, “I was chasing that tremendous feeling photos by artists, primarily African American artists, gave me. I know what that feeling does for me as a Black person, to stand in a gallery and feel that presence—it’s worldmaking in that moment. It’s a feeling that is both constraining and liberating, heavy and comforting, kind of like a weighted blanket.” I laugh, but I know exactly what she means, and it’s often this very feeling that will bring me to tears. To be truly seen and validated through an experience of an image is inexplicable and profound. Michèle continues, “on a daily basis we are inundated and surrounded by images of Blackness that we simply know not to be true. It doesn’t matter if the images are negative or positive; they just don’t feel real. But when you stand, for example, before a Deana Lawson photograph, you just know that you are bearing witness to something, to a moment that you know to be true in the world as a Black person.”

It was this experience of ‘truth’ that Michèle set out to capture with analogue photography, which, in addition to her own personal experience, was informed by the scholarship of Tina M. Campt, Elizabeth Abel, Aria Dean, bell hooks, and others who expound on Black visuality. Tina M. Campt, in particular, presents a complex argument in favour of ‘affective frequencies’ in her monograph Listening to Images, and encourages a practice of listening to and looking beyond what we see in a photograph. Doing so, Campt states, will attune our senses to the frequencies that inform how our encounter with a photograph moves, touches, and connects us both to the sitter and the event of their photo being taken. It is from this starting point that Michèle developed an understanding of ‘affective grit,’ which she says is a further investigation of ‘affective frequencies,’ as it varies from analogue to digital photography. “If we agree, as Campt theorizes, that photographs produce frequencies, then it directly follows, to me, that a digital photograph, which is a smooth, clean thing would differ from an analogue one. If you run your hand over a marble countertop and a shag carpet, different things are happening,” Michèle says.

Campt illustrates this theory of ‘affective frequencies’ through the example of a passport photo. What emotional or historical insight is this artifact of surveillance and governmentality able to offer its viewer? Ostensibly, it tells no story and says nothing about the interior life of the person we see. But, Campt argues, passport photos of the Black diaspora, in particular, demand a different, deeper kind of attention that will attune you to its lower frequencies. In this lower register, the history and memory of the sitter are made visible along with their hopes and dreams, and their refusal to be contained by the journey across the Atlantic that made these documents possible.(1) I hold onto this analogy as I return, once again, to Cowboy Hat. I asked Michèle for insight into why, when seeing a portrait of a physically, emotionally, and aesthetically strong Black woman, one who is comfortable with vulnerability, I seem unable to siphon that strength into my own consciousness. Why, instead, am I filled with antithetical emotions of shame and self-doubt? “I think shame is the most difficult emotion that we experience as humans, and is the most limiting and constraining. Anything we feel shame about is the thing we are least comfortable sharing and being vulnerable about,” Michèle says. Listening to this, I blurt out “but what happened to your shame? Why are you so comfortable with vulnerability?” First she chuckles, then lets out an exhale, and suddenly tears spring to her eyes as she responds, “I have huge amounts of shame. Huge amounts. It’s been part of my grief work to understand how much shame I feel and how shame is a thing that has been the most dangerous and damaging emotion in my darkest moments. It’s difficult to free yourself from shame, but it’s been part of my healing process to learn to live with it and not have it impede me.” Without prompting, Michèle gives me the answer that I did not know I was seeking: “I think about how much being an artist, and putting these images of being out into the world gives us permission to be vulnerable, to accept our shame, or simply permission to feel.”

Given the history of Michèle’s artistic practice and the content of our conversation, I am surprised when she tells me “I wasn’t asking my participants in ‘A Welcome Weight on My Body’ to be vulnerable in any way—except to sit for a photograph. I asked them to collaborate with me in sharing only their appearance, and not their interior lives.” Looking at the photographs, I am still able to sense, at one frequency or another, a vulnerability that seems comfortable on the faces of those sitting for a portrait. I ask if it’s at all related to the nature of the project, and Michèle’s own concession is that it was in itself one of vulnerability, a collaborative manifestation of her developing a relationship with photography as an artist. “I originally had another project in mind, which turned out to not be viable for a number of reasons, and after having a mini meltdown, I started thinking through everything in my relationship with Gallery 44, and the many ways it had given me permission to experiment, explore, and learn, and I thought, well, what if that becomes the focus of the exhibition?”

I follow Michèle on Facebook, and I clearly remember the post she made in the summer of 2018 calling for participants. The language was clear, and begins with her signature greeting: “Hello babies! I’m looking for Black folks who would be willing to sit for a portrait. I am learning how to shoot with a medium format camera, and the exhibition will document my learning and feature images from my ‘practice’ [quotations are Michèle’s], including the trials, the errors, and the successes.” She signs off, “thanks, as always, for helping me do this thing.” The process was new, but this way of working is intrinsic to Michèle’s artistic practice: “All of my projects have required recruitment and participation from my community, and I work to be fully transparent and accountable to those who participate, while also sharing my own vulnerabilities. Each project I work on, I’m building my credibility both as an artist, and for how I work with and treat people. I take that very seriously.” And of the process, Michèle says, “I was completely seduced by it. I’ve worked primarily in moving images until this project, and while aesthetics are very important to me, the primacy of my work is what the work is about, and what it’s trying to communicate. I’m making photos that are trying to tell you something about the world.”

In a project pivoted on Michèle’s vulnerability, “A Welcome Weight on My Body” also conveys her conviction to ‘affective grit’ and Black visuality. Of that feeling she ‘knows to be true,’ Michèle says, “as I got more confident and more comfortable with what I was doing, I began to direct people more, because I had a certain composition, a certain affect, this way of seeing you that I wanted to create collaboratively.” In the next phase of her practice, Michèle is considering new ways of holding space for her participants, realizing that the vulnerability she asked for in the past was, sometimes, too much. While thinking through ways she might be able to produce affect by proxy, Michèle tells me, “even though my default is to be as vulnerable and as open as possible, [I’m interested in] how I can continue to work with themes of grief and loss and healing and repair, within my ethic of care.”

I left Michèle’s home thinking mostly, again, about Cowboy Hat and reminding myself that vulnerability is never without fear and never without effort. Much of Michèle’s work in recent years reflected on the grief of losing her mother, but “A Welcome Weight on My Body” is a clear indication of healing, and has made room for more artistic experimentation and new ways of being tender: “Grief changed me, but some of what I lost has started to come back. The grief was so consuming and brought me so much anxiety that it made me someone unrecognizable. It took a long time to get here, and it was horrible. Enough healing has taken place that now I’m able to reintegrate all parts of myself back into myself.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m glad that you are where you are.”

Michèle chuckles, and says, “I’m glad I survived. And I’m glad that being an artist provided me a way out.”

1. Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 24-29.

This article is published in issue 36.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue