Portrait as Encounter

A man reclines on the floor of the portrait studio, propped up on one elbow while his other arm rests on his left leg, which is crossed over his right. Wearing flared pants, a trim light-colored jacket, and polished dress shoes, he appears to be relaxed yet confident as his gaze meets the camera. It is an undeniably stylish photograph, accented by the visual contrast between the geometric floor covering and the sitter’s clothes. In Untitled (1970–85) by Burkinabe photographer Sanlé Sory (born 1943), the laid-back intimacy of the sitter’s pose belies the public nature of the studio space in which he is depicted, perhaps indicative of the trust between Sory and his subject. A similarly stylish portrait of a young man, also Untitled (1974), can be found in MoMA’s collection of photographs by Kinshasa-based photographer Ambroise Ngaimoko (born 1949). In this image, the shirtless subject stands before the camera, dressed in long bell-bottom pants and a patterned straw hat. His left arm, which is bent, crosses his body, making his pose seem more spontaneous and natural. As in Sory’s photograph, this fashionable, intimate depiction of a young man suggests a feeling of trust or collaboration between photographer and subject.

Ngaimoko and Sory’s respective studios photographed a wide range of clients. In Untitled (1976), another image from Ngaimoko’s studio, we see a young couple seated on a bench, the woman’s polka-dot dress in contrast with her partner’s dark jumpsuit. Each of the sitters has one arm wrapped around the other’s shoulders, and the woman’s crossed leg casually extends into the man’s personal space in a gesture of intimacy. Both of their gazes meet the camera, a visual confrontation made more striking by the muted cloth backdrop on the wall and floor. A different photograph from Sory’s studio, Untitled (1970–85), shows three women seated in a group and engaged with props. The woman in the center, who wears a dress and matching headscarf, holds a teapot as if she is about to pour tea into the crystal glasses held by her two companions. The other women, who are also dressed in patterned gowns, raise telephone receivers to their ears. Seemingly mid-action, all three women look directly at the camera, as if to acknowledge they are enacting a portrait of an imagined gathering. In their staging of ladies’ tea, they invoke luxury and leisure in their representation of themselves. Together, these four portraits gesture toward the range of Sory’s and Ngaimoko’s studio photography practices, arising in part from the diversity and creativity of the sitters themselves.

As they have been historicized, the photographs from Sory’s and Ngaimoko’s respective studios are often framed as representative images of the years immediately following independence in the Republic of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and Zaïre (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). Like the work of other studio photographers in Africa, including that of the internationally known studios of Seydou Keïta (1923–2001) and Malick Sidibé (1936–2016) in Bamako, Mali, Sory’s and Ngaimoko’s studio photographs offer a look at what were their local communities. Sory operated his studio out of the regional capital Bobo-Dioulasso in the 1970s, then a cultural center in the Republic of Upper Volta. Besides portraiture, Sory is known for his photographs documenting the city’s nightlife and its thriving music scene, including prominent bands such as Volta Jazz or Dafra Star. Contemporaneously in Kinshasa, Ngaimoko opened Studio 3Z—symbolic of the three Zaïres: the river, the currency, and the country—in the same year the president rechristened the country Zaïre. His studio was popular with local young people seeking portraits.¹ The photographs that resulted from these two local studios are, as Allison Moore notes, “not only aesthetic social documents, meant to be hung on walls or kept in albums, or sent to family in rural areas to display the cosmopolitan sense of the urbanite away from home,”² they also privilege what historian Carlo Ginzburg calls “microhistories.”³ This is to say that though they capture a spirit of autonomy from the nascent postcolonial era, they do not purport to represent a new “national identity” or totalizing image of the sociopolitical context. Instead, their collective output is the aggregation of thousands of individual, discontinuous stories or representations of their historical moment. Each portrait or encounter is a fragmentary expression of the new national context. As a group, these images allow us to see the expertise of photographers like Sory and Ngaimoko, and they testify to local histories of communal expression in the postcolonial era.

Expanding on this idea, I propose that these portraits be understood more specifically as relational encounters.⁴ The mode of analysis that I have chosen to adopt refutes a model in which the artist is the sole creative author and generator of meaning. Instead, it prioritizes the creative contributions of both the photographer and the subject, thereby acknowledging the original context of the photograph—the commercial portrait studio. For Sory and Ngaimoko, the sitter was often a customer—someone paying for a portrait that he or she would enjoy. As such, it behooved the photographer in a practical sense to collaborate with his subject. Given the pragmatic and aesthetic reasons for understanding these studio portraits as collaborative, why has this model been slow to gain widespread acceptance? Though no definitive answer is possible, it seems fair to state that to reconfigure the portrait as a coauthored document is to contradict the narrative of individual artistic genius upon which the Western art museum was built. In disrupting the idea of the artist as a lone practitioner of creative genius, a collaborative and relational understanding of studio portraiture takes precedence. The portrait as encounter thus acknowledges both the training and skill of the photographer and the agency of the often unnamed but nonetheless compelling subjects: their imaginaries, self-representation, and willful acts of parody or mimicry.⁵

Imagined Identities and Performative Portraiture

In the spirit of creative collaboration, photographic studios like Ngaimoko’s and Sory’s provided spaces for play and performance. In many studio portraits, the sitters chose to adopt different roles and scenarios, as in the staging of afternoon tea by the group of women at Sory’s studio. In other setups, the characters and styles reflect the popularity of international cinema, particularly from the United States, in the newly independent countries.⁶ For example, two photographs drawn from Sory’s studio show sitters inhabiting archetypal roles. In American (L’Américain) (1970–85), a young man leans against an iron gate, perhaps a cheeky interpretation of the white picket fence. He sports the accoutrements of 1950s Hollywood: a baseball cap, aviator sunglasses, blue jeans with an oversized belt buckle, and a cigarette, possibly a quintessential Marlboro, rebelliously hangs from his mouth. The subject’s James Dean-esque gaze is defiantly turned away from the camera. Though aware his portrait is being taken, he exudes confidence by refusing to directly confront the photographer. In another example, Intellectual (L’Intellectuel) (1970–85), a different sitter styles himself as man of thought. To perform this character, he has donned a dark trench coat, flared jeans, and transparent aviator glasses, and he holds an open newspaper out in front of him. Here the act of reading is meant as a visual signal of knowledge of current events and perhaps, in turn, the ability to pontificate on such topics. In contrast to the “American,” the “Intellectual” turns his head toward the camera, gazing beyond it, lips curled into a smirk or shy smile.

Another popular visual theme is boxing, a sport whose international popularity exploded in the 1970s. In 1974, famous American boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman staged a fight in Kinshasa for some sixty thousand spectators, in an event marketed as “A Rumble in the Jungle.”⁷ An image from Ngaimoko’s studio, Les catieurs de Kintambo (1975), taken just one year after this famed matchup, shows two men dressed in boxing regalia and posing with their arms flexed. One of the men, in a costume fighting mask, stands with his chest puffed out while his counterpart gazes menacingly at the camera. In Untitled (boxing man) (1970–85), another portrait from Sory’s studio, a man posing in the stance of a fighter ready for action, his hands wrapped for protection , stares at the camera. Unlike Ngaimoko’s boxing images, the man in Sory’s portrait stands in front of a painted backdrop, perhaps representative of Bobo-Dioulasso, showing tall, modern office buildings in a landscape of large trees and clouds. The backdrop amplifies the performative nature of this portrait, lending it a theatrical quality. A handwritten inscription on the print in MoMA’s collection reads, “Prendes garde,” or “Be careful” in French. These performative images not only attest to independence and to collaborative production in the postcolonial era as previously discussed but, in their imaginative staging, exceed such sociohistorical interpretation. They evidence a speculative, contingent form of portraiture in which a person commissions a portrait of their imagined self as an American or an intellectual or a boxer, beyond the limitations of their situated or public identity.

Negatives in Circulation

French music producer Florent Mazzoleni was traveling in Burkina Faso when he first encountered the photographic archives of Sanlé Sory. Per Mazzoleni’s account, Sory was in the middle of disposing of some of his studio negatives from the 1970s and 1980s when Mazzoleni “rescued” them and began circulating them in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.⁸ This messianic story was covered by the press at the time of Sory’s exhibitions in the United States in 2017 and 2018. Yet, its narrative is not unique to Sory. The popularization of African studio photography in Europe and the United States is often traced back to the inclusion of several portraits from unnamed photographers’ collections in Susan Vogel’s 1991 exhibition Africa Explores: 20th-Century African Art.⁹ The success of Vogel’s endeavor sparked interest in the photographs’ origins and resulted in the proliferation of the archives of photographers such as Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé. Sory and Ngaimoko are among many African portrait photographers of the postcolonial era whose archives have been acquired by institutions in the United States and Europe. Beyond well-known practitioners like Keïta or Sidibé, others such as Mamadou Cissé (born 1960) or El Hajj Tijani Sitou (1932–1999) operated successful photography studios in the 1970s and 1980s, and sections of their archives have circulated globally in the twenty-first century.

I call attention to the international dissemination of these photographic negatives from the African continent to illuminate the complicated position of the resulting portraits in the Western museum imaginary. Often printed abroad and untitled because the sitters’ identities are unknown, these shadows of the original portraits have accumulated layers of meaning before they are even seen by a viewing public in the United States or Europe. Put differently: these images are often rightly positioned in scholarship as manifestations of their postcolonial moment in their respective countries—self-fashioned, democratic portraits of the citizens of new republics. Yet, in the contemporary art world, the negatives of these portraits of independence from colonial rule have been removed from their original context and are often reconfigured into paradigms of art and artists perpetuated by Western museums. How are these images transformed by their situation in museum collections markedly different from their original collaborative context and social purpose?

Returning to the refusal and play suggested by the portraits themselves, I end by suggesting that these images be reframed in what Fred Moten refers to as a potential “appositionality” in postcolonial discourse. Rather than reversal (independence replacing dependence), a moment of appositionality refers to “an almost hidden step (to the side and back) or gesture, a glance or glancing blow, that is the condition of possibility of a genuine aesthetic representation and analysis—in painting and prose—of that encounter.”¹⁰ These images offer, as I would have it, a “genuine aesthetic representation” of precisely an “encounter” between photographer and sitter, a moment of collaborative self-determination. In their complex situation in the Western museum, they are a “hidden step,” “gesture,” or “glance” of a self-fashioned and imaginative African portrait photography.

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1. Entrances, exits

In fall 2019, the Museum of Modern Art acquired two works by the interdisciplinary artist Guadalupe Maravilla: Disease Thrower #5, an altar-like sculpture, and Circle Serpent, a snake-like form fashioned out of dried maguey leaves (both works were made in 2019). The objects can be shown separately or together in different configurations, but as most recently presented, Disease Thrower #5 sits within a semi-circle formed by Circle Serpent. As one installation, they mark a space charged with anticipation and suggestive of ritual.

Maravilla’s own biography dominates secondary writing about his still-evolving artistic practice; his experience both as an undocumented immigrant and with cancer are prominent themes in his art. But how might the reception of his work be expanded and changed by its new institutional context at MoMA?

In 2020, as recent debates around representation and inclusion in art institutions continue apace, the acquisition of Maravilla’s work is part of a larger effort to extend and inflect the history of Latinx art at the museum. This essay aims to illuminate the new possibilities of Maravilla’s work within the collection by countering the ways in which art by minoritarian artists may become absorbed into cultural institutions (as single works meant to stand in for entire cultural groups or art histories, or as a kind of palliative that assuages forms of historical guilt). We hope to further expand the discourse around Maravilla’s work, pointing beyond the artist’s biography toward a discussion about broader issues of medicine and healing within Maravilla’s work and the context of cultural institutions today. 

Three months after the Maravilla acquisition, on March 13, MoMA closed its doors to the public indefinitely, in response to the growing threat of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The Museum, like all spaces of gathering, had become a potential vector of infection. As a result, human proximity became antithetical to well-being; shared surfaces became laced with risk. What does Maravilla’s practice, which proposes alternative modes of healing, offer for the future of the museum and beyond?

2. Host and Virus

Two profound experiences shaped Guadalupe Maravilla’s life and recur as themes in his artistic practice. In 1984, at eight years old, Maravilla immigrated to the United States as an undocumented, unaccompanied child, fleeing civil war in El Salvador.¹ Later, as an adult, he battled cancer. Maravilla was treated with radiation and chemotherapy alongside his own healing practices. 

Maravilla’s installation, inspired by these experiences, poses a nonlinear and recombinant model of disease and healing through its accumulation of materials, objects, and structures with various spiritual and medicinal properties. The dried maguey leaves in Circle Serpent, the floor sculpture, are taken from the agave plant and can be eaten, used to make liquors, adapted for medicinal purposes, and even used to build roofs and make strong twine. Maravilla has inscribed them by hand with designs related to his drawing practice, which takes inspiration from Spanish colonial maps of Mexico and the Salvadoran game Tripa Chuca.² Nestled among the leaves of the snake’s body sit bottles of Florida water, aromatic water that can be used for cleansing or spiritual healing. 

Disease Thrower #5, the altar-like structure sitting within the semi-circle of the serpent’s body, adds to these traditional medicinal materials with commercial and readymade objects, including loofah sponges, plastic anatomical models, and metal ornaments. The surfaces of the work are covered with a cream-colored substance that looks like bone. These draping, petrified strands are actually made by the artist by microwaving PVA adhesive (Elmer’s® glue) and then combining them with cotton. Nestled into the altar are colorful plastic sculptures of a dissected breast and a smaller, cylindrical, colon-like sculpture, taken from commercial anatomical models that refer directly to the artist and his mother’s experiences with breast and colon cancer. 

Maravilla enshrines disease and creates an altar for it. But if disease is traditionally posed as an aberration, or a battle between an organism and a foreign substance, Maravilla’s work seems to inhabit both positions at once: it creates a ritual space for disease as it invites a form of cleansing, healing, and repelling sickness—the work is, after all, a “disease thrower.” 

Maravilla proposes a deep connection, possibly a causal relationship, between the trauma he experienced as a refugee and his battle with cancer. This position advances a holistic understanding of illness, in which emotional trauma and physical illness are treated as related or even as one and the same. By drawing this link, Maravilla allows us to see that both migration and disease are marked as abnormal or pathological states. In the same way that being an undocumented immigrant is marked as a deviation from the normative subject position of citizenship, being ill is marked as a deviation from the normative position of health.³

By adopting this position, Maravilla challenges the authority of Western medical paradigms. Borrowing the concept of sanitary citizenship from medical anthropologist Charles L. Briggs, wherein a citizen is one who fundamentally recognizes “the monopoly of the medical profession in defining modes of disease prevention and treatment,” we might understand Disease Thrower #5 and Circle Serpent as documenting the modes of illness and treatment that exist beyond the authority of the medical establishment and therefore beyond the boundaries of citizenship or society.⁴ In enshrining non-traditional healing substances, like Florida water, alongside treatments like chemotherapy, referenced in the anatomical models, Maravilla proposes a new, recombinant understanding of health and disease that validates multiple systems of knowledge. 

Maravilla’s alternate epistemologies now reside in the space of the Western art museum, itself traditionally conceived as an apparatus to engender citizen-subjects through cultural education and appreciation. However, since their inception, art museums have transformed and attempted to address broader and more diverse publics. In this evolving museum, Maravilla’s work offers an analogy for re-imagining the citizen-subject of the museum as one that accepts and creates multiple forms of knowledge. Perhaps Maravilla’s work suggests a sort of “un-sanitary” citizenship, following Briggs, and this unruly citizen might suggest unruly modes of viewing. 

3. Vibrations and Echoes of the Object

Maravilla proposes active forms of care beyond the sculpture’s symbolic significance. Disease Thrower #5 and Circle Serpent are used as instruments in Maravilla’s sound baths and healing workshops, often organized exclusively for undocumented immigrants. The top of Disease Thrower #5 consists of a custom-made gong covered by an intricate circular weaving made of straw. The gong, even when still, serves as a visual cue for healing, where the viewer can imagine the ringing sound emitted after it is struck. 

Maravilla discovered sound baths during his own battle with cancer. After finding it difficult to walk after coming out of a chemotherapy session in New York, he stumbled onto a gong sound bath by musician and healer Don Conreaux. Following a thirty-minute session, Maravilla found himself able to walk, and began training to learn about the ways in which specific sound frequencies emitted by the gongs can resonate with tendons and chakras within the body associated with trauma, movement, and anxiety. “Now that I’ve learned to heal myself, I have to teach others how to heal themselves,” Maravilla recounted in a 2019 interview.⁵

In 2019, Maravilla hosted sound baths in which participants could spend the night in the museum while listening to a choreographed sequence of healing sounds and meditations, seeking to “cleanse latent political phobias” in audience members. To create the aural landscapes that participants hear, Maravilla uses a mallet to both strike and seemingly draw on the gong, emitting different frequencies and volumes of sound. Multidirectional and immersive, sound can be experienced communally without crowding and without touch. Perhaps forms of community and sensation that have been with us all along, such as listening, can be reimagined to accommodate a distanced and contagious world. 

Upon reopening, the museum will not be the same as it was before. If large crowds to view even larger collections were once the vital signs of a healthy art system, the control of those crowds is now paramount to the safety of the museum’s visitors. What kinds of care or healing experiences might Maravilla’s work engender in the specific context of MoMA? Perhaps his project might pose a new way of thinking about the care of subjects (museum visitors) and objects (artworks). 

Maravilla’s works are performative, they are hybrid object-subjects—at once sculptures, relics, performers, and catalysts. They join a conversation with other such performative objects in MoMA’s collection, like the trumpet-sculptures of Terry Adkins, or the cloth wearables of Franz Erhard Walther, or the performative installations of Senga Nengudi, all acquisitions that have entered MoMA’s collection within the past decade. These artists have not re-invented the subject nor the object; rather, they have dissolved the oppressive and artificial divisions between the two. 

Such performative objects point the way toward a museum where the border between caring for subjects and objects continually disappears. Museums have never just been the stewards of objects. They have always imagined and sought to produce subjects. Over time, museums have worked not only to care for objects and envision their subject but also to care for that subject through education, engagement, and other outreach. As the pandemic transforms museums from guardians of public places into guardians of public health, the ways in which the museum provides care also transforms. Practices like Maravilla’s adapt well to these new demands. Though rich in symbolic meaning as a visual object, Disease Thrower #5 and Circle Serpent are also tools that can be deployed to provide holistic care.  

4. A Serpent Eats Its Tail

Maravilla himself offers one proposition that his childhood trauma from migration caused his cancer. Another is that his mother’s cancer signals a familial predisposition to cancer—an intergenerational occurrence of the disease. Whether or not these propositions are ultimately accurate in a scientific sense, we would argue, is irrelevant. Instead, Maravilla points us to an anachronistic understanding of illness as a phenomenon that occurs and reoccurs not only across geographies but also through time. Consider the global pandemic underlying many of the cultural histories in the Americas that Maravilla references in his sculptures—namely, the outbreaks of infectious diseases introduced by the Spanish to the New World during the 16th century colonial conquest. In a linear trajectory of human history, this violent example is one among countless pandemics that blight the timeline of human progress. Yet these events, as with all events in the past, also exist in the fugitive territory of memory. Instead of falling prey to historical amnesia, on the one hand, or assuming a linear teleology that marches inexorably forward, on the other, Maravilla’s work seems to bend time. It asks us to dwell in nonlinear histories, to explore the ways in which memory is embedded in bodies, matter, and sound.

In Disease Thrower #5, an upside-down animal mask rests at the base of the altar, as if performing its own birth from the structure. In Circle Serpent, the feathered quality of the woven maguey leaves recalls the feathered serpent central to ancient religions of Mesoamerica. Known as Quetzacoatl in the Aztec pantheon or Kukulkan to the Maya, the feathered serpent was often linked to death and rebirth, in part because of a snake’s ability to shed and regrow its skin.⁶ In both pieces, the adhesive and dried leaves have already begun to show visible decay and discoloration. These forms of organic deterioration challenge the norms of museum collecting and display practice, requiring careful attention and specialized conservation techniques. The installation requires desiccants to absorb moisture and regular fumigation to ensure that the maguey leaves will last. Maravilla juxtaposes signs of vitality and healing with signs of death and illness. In this juxtaposition, a cyclical vision of those concepts emerges. 

In what time do Disease Thrower #5 and Circle Serpent exist? Should we understand them as relics of Maravilla’s past performances, now archived in storage?  These works sit before us in the present tense of a global pandemic and confront us with an opaque group of symbols. They promise the inevitability of illness, or trauma writ large, but still offer the possibility of healing through tokens like the Florida water. Or they may exist in the queer, abject temporality of the “not-yet-here” (following José Esteban Muñoz and Leticia Alvarado), instruments waiting for or offering the possibility of activation, signaling a present/future of both disease and healing.⁷ We might imagine the components of Disease Thrower #5 as a constellation of various systems of knowledge, a materialization of a posture toward healing that refuses either to villainize Western medicine or to infantilize traditional medicine. Perhaps it is all of these things at once, or never. Perhaps we will go back to normal all at once or we never will.

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