Nothing Real Can Be Threatened: Richard Avedon, Khalik Allah, and Communities of Portraiture

A camera is a weapon in some instances. In others, it is an extension of the caring eye. — Wilson Harris, The Unfinished Genesis of The Imagination (1992) The face speaks to me, and thereby invites me to a relation. — Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity (1961) On February 14, 1963, Richard Avedon travels from New York to East Louisiana State Mental Hospital in Jackson, Louisiana, and sets up his camera and supplies for a <a href="http://andrewsolomon.com/articles/the-vision-thing/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">week’s stay </a>in a room adjacent to one of the main hospital wards. Founded in 1848 as “State Mental Asylum,” the Hospital remained one of the few in the South, and as a result patients were sent in large numbers from nearby New Orleans and Baton Rouge throughout the 1900s, re<a href="http://nutrias.org/guides/genguide/hospitalinsanity.htm" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">cords</a> suggest. But because patients were often transferred here immediately after diagnoses — and, findings from the <a href="http://www.asylumprojects.org/index.php/East_Louisiana_State_Hospital" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Asylum Project </a>reveal, many were first generation immigrants— it is likely that the families of patients (often discouraged or precluded entirely from visiting) were unsure of when they arrived or where exactly they were. The Hospital is thus cast in anonymity, the personalities and suffering of its patients obscured from public view. By 1963, much of its original policy — including housing convicted felons in the same units as teachers and office workers, restraining patients with harmful tactics, and remaining closed-off to outside investigation and inquiry — are still in place, and six hundred patients are living in segregated units. <a href="https://medium.com/@jakepagano/giving-soul-richard-avedon-khalik-allah-and-the-touch-of-the-photograph-e4a0d79d0aae">Website</a>