“The face was not important in the history of nude photography,” Simpson said, in an interview not too long ago. And what has Simpson used to obscure the faces of the subjects in her photographs? That mask we call “African,” a designation nearly obliterated of all meaning. One of the ideas Simpson seems to be working out in her masked-nude series, I think, is the clash between the commercial and the spiritual. In the early nineties, Simpson, by then a magazine photographer whose pictures had been published in Vogue, the Village Voice, Unique NY, and other well-known style periodicals, had deepened her experiments in the fine-art mode, casting sitters like pinups—Jet Beauty of the Week stances—and then undercutting their openness with those masks. The masks do not make us think of the authenticity of the motherland, per se, but of shops uptown, where they, or facsimiles of the real thing, are sold. And so we look at the nudes with thrilling, complicated emotions, emotions that go past simplified notions of glorification and celebration of the woman who has been maligned historically in visual culture.
“Black Girl with Eye,” 1991 / 2021.
“Man with Curl,” ca. 1990s.
I saw Simpson’s series in 2022, at Fotografiska, in New York. The Nigerian British curator Aindrea Emelife had organized a show that would travel the diaspora, “Black Venus.” Right upon entering, you knew the Enlightenment and its hypocrisies, its taxonomizing of the races, were a target. Archival material from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries situated the contemporary examples, all chosen from between the nineteen-seventies and the present, as responses to three historical Venuses: the Sable Venus, the Hottentot Venus, and Josephine Baker as a jezebel. Alongside Simpson’s masked women, Emelife had brought together works by Renée Cox, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Mickalene Thomas, Widline Cadet, Ming Smith, and many others. Coreen Simpson’s images resonated with me, in part, because I had not seen them before but felt that I had.
“Toni Morrison,” 1978.
