Photographer Faith Couch on the Powers of Gesture, Memory, and the Mundane
A LESSON ON HOW THE PERSONAL IS ALWAYS POLITICAL.
Written by: Rachel K. Godfrey
Photography: Faith Couch
“In the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.”
These words — an offering from scholar Christina Sharpe in her book, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being — presents Black readers with a guided opportunity to fully realize themselves through a lineal lens. She stitches together a comprehensive study of history and knowledge production, captured by poems, anecdotes and theory. Life in diaspora can be a difficult and tense thing to illustrate, but Sharpe’s arguably successful attempt reminds us that the image is not complete without a delicate, thorough understanding of the past.
In the work of photographer Faith Couch, a similar opportunity awaits her viewers. Couch, a 22-year-old photographer from Durham, North Carolina, has the profound ability to create strong visual bonds between the simple and the intricate. In doing so, she creates compelling narratives about what it means to exist as a Black person in the contemporary moment. Focusing on the subtleties of the body and the small ways through which people express themselves allows Couch to create photo series that “rupture the present,” as well as remind us that Black life — Black abundance — knows no spatial or temporal boundaries.
“I have seven siblings. The rule was that you had to go to undergrad in the state, and for grad school, you could go wherever you liked. I knew that I wanted to pursue art but in North Carolina, there aren’t really any major art institutions. So my parents said if I got a scholarship to an out-of-state art school, I could go.”
And Faith did. While her parents were still concerned about her being 300 miles away, they believed in her and her passion. “We kept our suitcase packed for four years,” Finesse, Faith’s mom, tells me over video chat. “‘She’s always been an artist. So we thought, if this is your gift from God and this is what you need to do, then we have to let you go.” MICA, or the Maryland Institute College of Art, became her creative stomping ground in 2015.
Before becoming a photo major at the Baltimore college, she started learning about photography in the 10th grade. While she had always been interested in art, she had been seeking a medium that could helm the kind of precision she needed to start relearning how bodies — as well as the perceptions of different bodies — occupied space.
“Collages were my entry point into photography. I used old National Geographic books, ranging from the early 1900s to the late 80s. The way images were printed then were completely different than how they are printed now. The richness of the colors, the layering process of those colors. It inspired me.”
When Faith started taking photos, she focused on her friends and families. “Photography was a way for me to understand myself. The people around me [in high school] were making all kinds of assumptions about where I was from, what kind of people my family members were. I felt like I was being overanalyzed.
I started taking pictures of things I thought were beautiful in my own home. I was taking pictures of my family and friends. It was a way for me to teach myself how to look at the world. I was simultaneously teaching other people how to view me.”
Faith recalls one photo of her mom as the product of this personal exploration: “One memorable picture I took was of my mom laying on the covers at a hotel. But I cropped it so that you can only see her arm, her watch, and her rings. She’s holding a tissue very gently. That was the beginning of me looking at gestures, and understanding the Black body more in-depth.”
During one of her class critiques, Faith shared images with her class that showed a Black man with chains. While she took the picture to preserve the beauty she loved locating in her everyday life, her classmates’ analyses consisted of comparisons to nooses and lynchings. In these moments of overstepped boundaries and careless probing, Faith found herself more centered than disheartened.
“Concepts outside of the stereotypes they were used to looking at the world through seemed outlandish to them. Plus, I kid you not, we’d waste time doing things like critiquing white nipples for an hour. It was challenging, but I was honestly prepared for it. I’ve never really cared about whether people liked me or my art, or whether or not they understood me or my art. Because at the end of the day, I’m making shit that matters.”
It was this commitment to building a new language for herself that led a photography teacher to tell her parents that she had to go to art school. There was simply no other choice. His faith in Faith, coupled with her sheer talent, has since led to a promising career start for the young photographer. Faith notes fellow Baltimore creatives, journalist Lawrence Burney and multimedia artist Theresa Chromati, as two of the people who showed her care and support when she first started navigating the city’s artistic landscape.
Other artists and curators have called on Faith’s noteworthy eye to be included in their shows. For the accompanying exhibition to his book, The New Black Vanguard, art critic and writer Antwaun Sargent invited her to be one of the featured artists. Faith was also recently selected for the African American Museum in Philadelphia’s In Conversation: Visual Meditations on Black Masculinities exhibit. What began as a tool of self-discovery quickly became the main device of an in-demand contributor on matters of race, gender, and sexuality in the visual arts.
Her emergence as one of the Baltimore creative scene’s most promising contemporary artists began with a gut feeling. “My most notable photograph was made in 2015, right after I graduated,” she says. The photo, whose composition has been praised for its sculptural features, layers four vibrant elements. Two arms, a sky, and sand come together like the collages that taught Faith about how to tell a story using subtle, fragmented forms. “I went to the Outer Banks with two of my friends. I asked them to put their arms up for me and I thought, “This. This is exactly what I’m trying to convey.
I think that picture is very important for a lot of people because of the way it forces them to suspend their judgment. There’s not enough information for them to make any inferences about anything. They can only formulate the story based on what they are seeing, right before their eyes.”
Bridging the gap between what is right before our eyes and the context that makes what we’re viewing possible is a fundamental piece of good archival work. Archival work, or “memory work,” is the light shown on a dark world keen on boiling down histories into history. It is more comprehensive, accurate retellings as the threat to some universal truth. As Faith and other cultural memory workers know, revisionism is a serious threat to Black livelihood. In turn, artists like Faith are utilizing their creative chops to build detailed catalogs of how they experience the world, while also uncovering the discrepancies in cultural norms we’ve been told to adhere to since the crib.
Within her first year at MICA, the death of Freddie Gray — a result of unnecessary force by the Baltimore Police Department — occurred. Protests filled the streets, and citizens of Baltimore demanded justice for another man whose life had been lost to police negligence and brutality. The organizing and the art that rose out of these weeks showed Faith the distinct power in authentic, homegrown work. “The Black people of Baltimore do not create for clout or anything like that. There is a level of authenticity that is unparalleled to any other city in the U.S. They create for survival. For community care.”
On June 1st, 2020, Faith published BLACKSPACE: A MEMORY LANDSCAPE, a virtual archive of Black imagery, sounds, excerpts and documents about Black people. “It is important for Black people to study our archive and to create images, sounds and objects,” she wrote in an Instagram caption. “Self-expression and creation is a political act.” Faith’s art and curation beckon two questions: What do we stand to lose when we do not commit to learning our cultural histories, and what are we in danger of embodying when these histories are documented inaccurately?
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When it comes to non-Black artists building work about Black life and people, stereotypes and carelessness often dominate the conversation and gaze alike. They render the body as an object instead of a living, breathing, loving, flesh-and-bones being. “[For example] Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography hypersexualized Black men. His use of cropping, the way he captured Black bodies? Those pictures remind me of slavery and slave auctions. The way he positioned them so that the focus could be on their genitalia? Those pictures make my blood boil.”
For Faith, her love of photography is tied to wanting to photograph her subjects just being. Doing everyday activities, lounging, talking on the phone, smiling. By capturing Black people in these positions, she speaks for our right to do nothing. She advocates for our right to relaxation, to rest, to romance and reflection. To just be, as a Black person in the American empire, is a radical act. The addition of the everyday life of Black people to the archive, not just our hills and our valleys, is also a radical act. Similar to one of her biggest inspirations, photographer Roy DeCarava, engaging and imaging the lives of Black people in her community allows her to serve as a key storyteller in our ongoing revolution.
“You can’t look at anything — the way time is studied, the way anthropology is studied, the way that knowledge and language are studied — and ignore that it is political. You cannot separate the personal from the political. For this reason, I know that if I do not create, I will die. Not to be dramatic, but that’s what it feels like. I would die on the inside first, and then on the outside. Even if I’m not making photographers, I’m cooking. I wanted to be a chef before I wanted to be a photographer.
Some people count on their fingers, some people can do math in their heads. We get from point A to point B in the ways we know how. Being creative is simply what I know how to do, how I get around. That’s how I truly feel.”
You can view more of Faith’s work on her website.
