Between Sound and Citation: Zora J Murff’s True Colors

Zora J Murff’s photographs expose entangled histories of spectacle, commodification, and race in the United States. No stranger to MoMA, his stirring portraits, sparse landscapes, and granular engagement with appropriated imagery were featured in Companion Pieces: New Photography 2020, curated by my colleague Lucy Gallun. Equally dedicated to making pictures for the page and for the exhibition space, Murff is releasing his fourth photobook, True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) (2022), later this month. It joins At No Point in Between (2019), LOST: Omaha (2018), and Corrections (2015). I recently spoke with Murff about how self-awareness and vulnerability, sound and citation play out in True Colors—a polyphonic meditation on Blackness and the photographic image.

True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) is the subject of a forthcoming Aperture PhotoBook Club Conversation on Wednesday, March 30, at 6:00 p.m. ET.
—Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator, Department of Photography

A page spread from Zora J Murff’s True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis). 2022

Oluremi C. Onabanjo: Reading this book feels like getting a glimpse into the inside of your mind. Could you talk me through the process of making, specifically decisions around design? I know photobook making is a big part of your practice as a photographer.

Zora J Murff: The book is a product of the Next Step Award [a partnership between Aperture, Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, and 7G Foundation]. Getting this award was an opportunity for me to try something new with a publication. I knew I wanted to have a lot of collaborators and I wanted the presentation of the work—the content and the physicality of the book—to be striking. As I was working with the appearance of Blackness in visual culture, it was important to work with Black designers, people who could pick up on the nuances of what I was trying to lay down.

I hired the dynamic duo, Danielle and Kevin McCoy (known as WORK/PLAY), who are phenomenal artists and designers. We’re all around the same age and they also grew up in the Midwest, so we were exposed to a lot of the same culture. They also know what it means to be a Black creative in predominantly white spaces. They were masterful at synthesizing the visual and conceptual ideas seamlessly. We decided to use my photograph, 31° 7' 25.94" N, 81° 33' 22.45" W, an honorific I made for Ahmaud Arbery, as the cover image. They sampled purple from the flowers that carried into the inside cover. They did the same with green from the foliage that’s printed on the spine, back cover, and book thread seen on the exposed spine. We chose gold foil to play off of the soft pastels, and it loudly exalts the title and all of the contributors.

We wanted the book to be elegant and grand without losing a level of subtlety or nuance. Even the scale of the book reinforces that. It’s not a handheld experience; you have to put it out on the table to get the full range.

True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis)

True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis)

It’s wonderfully self-aware. This is a book that requires physical space, and has the capacity to command attention and cultivate it. The way the pacing functions with the images and the interplay of text—the interruptions, the play of textures—it’s really smart. The momentum dictates itself rather than the way some photo books work, which is at the reader’s leisure. This one has its own agency in a way. I know your work is a lot about holding space for other people. But here I feel you’re also holding space for yourself. Could you talk a little bit about how you appear here?

I knew this was a moment to be direct, to talk about things I was seeing and experiencing right now. I decided to go back to my beginnings as an artist, and pulled every image I thought was worth something. This was happening during lockdown and was a point of intense reflection for me from both witnessing the state-sanctioned murders of Black people again, the administrative faculty at my school being silent about what we were seeing, and it taking large amounts of movement from students and faculty for there to be any forthright addressing of what institutionalized racism is and how it exists in our immediate environment.

Of equal import was trying to navigate teaching remotely and having to find ways of helping students understand what was happening in our community and society at large. I taught a book-making class and we spent our semester appropriating imagery in service to self-reflection. I worked alongside them, and in that act, I found space to breathe. I wasn’t going into a workplace every day where unchecked whiteness exists, and therefore, where I have a high probability of experiencing some form of aggression. That clarity led me to ask questions like: What does it mean for me to trade in this medium that has crafted stereotypes? What does it mean to work for this institution that continues to commodify my Blackness, me? What does it mean to be winning awards where it’s very obvious I am a box that institutions check off to say they’re doing the work of diversity? I carried all of those questions into the making of True Colors.

These are crucial questions, and they surface throughout the book as a testament to vulnerability. True Colors is clearly a product of inward looking, but it’s also rather generous, and not in a lovey-dovey way. This book is a challenge, and if we take your prompt seriously, we might be able to look differently. While I don’t want to overdetermine the capacity of art and photography—because I know you’re also dissuading us from doing that—I do feel you’re divulging different possibilities here for relating to the photographic medium.

Something I often talk about is how we have this tendency to categorize photography as a bad thing, right? “Photography is a tool for colonialism, it supports imperialistic agendas.” Don’t even get me started on surveillance. But to me, that categorization, while partly true, is obviously more complicated. We, as humans, bring those problems to technological implementation. Photography as a practice, and the camera as a technology, is passive in the sense that it has to be used to produce something; we are the ones bringing intentions and desires.

As a Black artist, there are so many expectations that come from white people—and maybe audiences more generally—for what your work is supposed to be about, what it’s supposed to do, or what it should look like. I remember a very specific moment when I presented At No Point in Between at an exhibition and someone in the audience asked me, “Do you think about the dynamics of gender when you make your work?” Sure, but not specifically. If we’re talking about spectacle lynching—which is part of the work—gender dynamics are present. A lot of spectacle lynchings were done under the guise of a Black man raping a white woman, and then white men banding together to commit murder to protect the preciousness of white womanhood and maintain a racialized hierarchy. More deeply, when we talk about spectacle lynching or even anti-Black police violence, stories about Black men are commonly centered while Black women and Black trans individuals are virtually overlooked. Gender dynamics are there; however, it is not my responsibility as an artist to touch on x, y, and z. The best thing that I can do is be knowledgeable about and accountable for what I contribute to culture.

I’m only ever speaking for myself. I’m not trying to speak for all Black artists, all Black people, or saying that my experience of Blackness is the only experience of Blackness, you dig? I’m just saying I’m a person who lives in the United States, a racialized society. In that society, I am categorized as Black and it comes with a lot of baggage. Let’s talk about it.

True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis)

Yes, let’s talk. Could you share how sound functions and echoes through the book?

Largely, the book takes on a “day in the life” narrative that I borrowed from albums I grew up on that used the same structure. Specifically, I was thinking about Kendrick Lamar’s, good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012), how he presented the album as a “short film.”

I wanted to use music to bend the genre and created an unofficial playlist for the book on Apple Music. All of the music was stuff I was listening to in the studio, some are purely aesthetic and others have specific messages. Some of my favorite songs are from Kanye’s album Yeezus, which was transformative for me in its time because he was subversive on the tracks, saying so much real shit. Not only am I gonna tell you the truth about these white spaces, what it’s like being Black in these white spaces, I’m gonna talk about me for better or for worse. Let me write this anthem and title it “Black Skinhead” so I can tell you about the ways I’ve manipulated myself to someone else’s expectations. Let me throw that in your face so you have to reckon with what it means to be manipulator or manipulated and liberator or liberated.

True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis)

Then how does language operate here? I’m thinking not only in relation to sound, but also citation. In True Colors you have conversations, you have gorgeous poetry, you have quotes, you have archival ephemera referencing the KKK, you’ve got legal pad or notebook inserts, you’ve got Google searches for Cindy Sherman….

Having a background in psychology informed how I work as an artist. From the beginning, I contextualized my work through social phenomena because I was using photography to talk about incarceration and violence done through legislation. When I’m making work, I think about the act of citation a lot, and decided to try it in the book. Through the collision of images and text, I can expand an idea or point a reader to a specific idea.

Aaron Turner’s extended footnote “Invisible Man / Invisible Sites” uses text to pick apart my appropriation of an image made by a Black photographer, John Johnson, in Nebraska between 1912 and 1925, and an image I made in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Standpipe Hill in 2021. Aaron’s assessment of my gesture explains to the reader that when they look at this spread they need to understand that I’m alluding to standpoint theory by touching Black history photographically. I feel like the images Cindy Sherman did blackface (2021) and A racist student doing blackface at the University of Arkansas, again (2020) are doing something similar to the works Aaron is writing about. I’m layering screen captures to illustrate a history of white people using the camera to say that—in their white minds—Blackness is an adornment or performance. In either example the citation of history is there, but the inclusion of text makes those interrelations less opaque.

All of the contributed texts play that role of expanding or reinforcing the visual content, and my own texts were me adding notes to the harmony. The notebook paper insert “Playground Politics (Nigger Award)” (2021), was a poem I wrote one afternoon when I realized that I was being actively tokenized. It was a difficult moment to live through, but writing down those emotions was exactly what I needed to do to let go of them. I wasn’t sure if I should include it, but it was genuine and real and it needed to be in the book. Something similar happened with my afterword “Black Matters.” I wasn’t planning on writing it. I initially wanted to end the book with an image, but Lesley [Martin, creative director of Aperture] encouraged me to conclude with my words (and I’m quite glad she did). It was crunch time, one of those all-or-nothing, game-three-Michael-Jordan type moments. I’m always talking about my work through the lens of time, and the first line I wrote was, “This is the time I decided to be direct, to tell the truth (for better or worse), to be composite, to said what I said.” And then I started recalling pivotal moments in my life. The structure of the afterword reflects the structure of the visual content in the book. I’m telling you my life.

True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis)

It’s beautiful that you’re holding this space for each of them. In some ways it’s a really honest expression of who an artist is, right? It’s not just them and their practice, but it’s who they encounter, who they learn from, who they breathe with, who they’re responding to, who they’re thinking about.

With this in mind: I noticed that the last person you thank in your acknowledgements is Howardena Pindell. Given how important she is to many histories of art and practice—and the history of MoMA—could you share more about what she means to you?

The first page you see when you open the book is Nigga drawing the American Genre (after Howardena Pindell) (2020). It’s one of the first collages I made during lockdown, and one of those transitional works, you know? It sold me on putting photography aside for a while. I was reading Pindell’s 1987 lecture “Statistics, Testimony, and Supporting Documentation” at the time. She opens saying,

I am an artist. I am not a so-called “minority,” “new,” or “emerging” or “a new audience.” These are all terms used to demean, limit and make us appear to be powerless. We must evolve a new language which empowers us and does not cause us to participate in our own disenfranchisement.

She’s telling us exactly who she is in the face of being categorized by a predominantly white art world. She said, “Let me tell y’all from the jump, that ain’t me. That’s your idea of who I am, but it never has and never will be me.” And I thought to myself that I needed more of that energy. It’s on sight.

True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis)

I was going through stuff in my studio and came across this old genre painting textbook. I bought it in undergrad for a paper I was writing about the racist “Darktown” prints made by the commercial firm Currier and Ives. As I was looking through it, I wondered how Blackness might be represented. What I found was Blackness painted through white hands, which was bothersome even though a number of the painters were abolitionists or had abolitionist agendas. I put together Nigga drawing together from the title page of the book, the text “American Genre” front and center over title information for a painting, Slave Market, a figure from a photography textbook showing a picture of the minstrel Black Peter, and a postage stamp illustrating the Mayflower arriving in Plymouth Harbor.

Like Pindell, I’m engaging in self-determination. I’m drawing where I feel the American genre of Black identity in the eyes of white people stems from; conclusions they have drawn from imperialistic desires, colonial acts, and the implementation of white supremacist privilege systems. Pindell’s directness emboldened me to call it exactly what it is. It’s an honor to position myself in conversation with her because I was so inspired by how she decided to move in this world. She gave me an affirmation when I was in a moment of crisis and that act of love was important for me to acknowledge.

I cannot imagine a better way to end our conversation about the generous bounds of your photobook. Thank you for making the time and for making this book, Zora.

Remi, the pleasure was all mine. Thank you for taking the time to look.