Composite - Timelapses
During my residency at Cité des arts internationale in Paris (Summer 2025) I developed this series using archival footage spanning almost 100 years of observational cinema. Starting in 1904 with At the foot of the Flatiron by A.E. Woods, the original 2 minute and 46 second clip observes as a crowd walks on the sidewalk clutching onto their hats during a very windy next to the newly erected Flatiron building in New York City. The film camera, also a relatively new invention, becomes a focal point for many of the passerby. When a Black man walks past the camera, he turns around twice, making a double take staring directly at the lens, losing his hat to the wind. I focused on this moment as an early example of the provocation of the camera, where the camera itself becomes part of what is being observed, and a variable in the document.
In the later half of the 1920’s, Zora Neale Hurston would become the first Black woman to be considered a field ethnographer, documenting the lives of mainly Black living in the South and sometimes including herself in the footage. In Children Playing (1929), Hurston documents a group of children in a playground in Miami. This moment here, the children surround the camera, staring deep into the lens and viewer. Hurston’s work as an ethnographer posed an important question in the narrative around this work, who must the camera be filming in order to be “observing” and who is it filming when it is gathering information?
In the 60’s, Sara Gomez would become the first Black Cuban woman to make a film. Her first and only feature length film, De Cierta Manera (1974), is a narrative-documentary hybrid telling the love story between a factory worker and school teacher and their differences in their revolutionary perspectives. In the documentary asides, the film explores the life of various characters throughout the film. In this scene, the camera wanders into an Abakua ritual, where men sing, dance, and play music. The wall built by the narrative fiction is deconstructed as the men in their ceremony look directly at the camera, and sing.
In Juancy cumple cinco en Cuba (2001), I take from my personal archive, a video my mom took of me at Museo de la Revolucion sitting at the foot of the tank in which Fidel Castro and others rode into Habana after the Bay of Pigs. I point at the sky and look at the camera, calling to my mother.