The Fidelity of Stillness:
Abigail Hadeed
Monday, May 7th, 2012A review: based on a talk with, and engagement of Abigail Hadeed and her ‘Tree without Roots’ collection.
The breadth of Abigail Hadeed’s oeuvre is extensive, and a full review of her work is a task too gargantuan to attempt in anything less than a full-length feature. From the pictures of those very special years of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, to carnival, to her more commercial work, the task of appraising it all looks more and more impossible as one peruses her massive output. Yet anyone who is to take the work of this photographer seriously has to see her in more than one light. She is photographer yes, but traceably a frugal cultural researcher.
Abigail Hadeed 'Black Star Line Bonds'
Let us begin by exorcising the rest of this attempt at a review of its demons. It is obvious on observation there isn’t any attempt to ‘dazzle’ in ‘Tree without roots’. And this is deliberate. Abigail expressly eschews the ‘intellectual’, a position I think, which may just be one of the supreme disorders of our generation. There is the idea in Caribbean that art is supposed to be for ‘the people’ and I am not opposed to this idea, simply because I do not understand yet, what it means. Obviously ‘the people’ refers, (I am still guessing here) to the layman. . One completely understands the needfor sympathy with any disenfranchised group within their society. Not merely sympathy, but the need for any individual to acquaint themselves with the various cultural levels within their society whatever their organizing principle. Yet this compulsion of so much of our art toward any one class, is always dangerous— as dangerous as the monopolies which many of us decry and criticize. Not merely that, but given the fluid nature of interaction within our society (especially Trinidad) , by trying to focus too narrowly on a class, we may be creating formidable barriers that previously were more permeable. What Hadeed is against really, is the obscurity and highfalutin attitudes of academia. But like the best and the worst of us, we misfire our anger at ‘Academia’ and not at its perverts. And this misfiring produces an easy hurdle for the bohemian artist whose first ‘revolutionary’ step is to reject the intellect’s central role in the circle of the creative.
Serious photography many times echoes the academic. Who is more academically audacious than the ethnographer, the man or woman who sits amongst the poor and dispossessed and writes them into literature or art, the interpreter of maladies outside him/herself. It is no wonder then that in speaking with Hadeed, I couldn’t help thinking of Leni Riefenstahl’s work ‘The Last of the Nuba’. Her work is just as precious and as absolutely necessary and important both to the society that they may save from visual and memorial extinction as well as to their own pilgrimages of self.
One must ask then, what is the allure of Hadeed? And the answer is simply that where the abstruse (or what I would refer to as ‘the intellect in the mirror’) has been swept from the forefront of the creative process, the heart has spilled. And though this inundation doesn’t thoroughly blind us to the short-comings and implications of the path she has taken, it allows us not to miss too much what she has chosen to shunt. There is almost always, even where the photograph itself falls short of the iconic, a redeeming humanity in the works, a soft-texturedness of the vision that directs the lens. And despite her ostensible outsider status amid communities or groups she has sought out to photograph, there does not seem to be the outsider distance that may help in producing iconic pictures. I am speaking of those photographs that, by their astonishing accuracy of depicting human passions, raise suspicions that allow us to perceive a distance that is invariably there.
Abigail Hadeed 'Clean Cut'
Hadeed works intuitively. Her concerns are clear enough, and her position in relation to these concerns could not be any clearer (something one would not be able to say for most artists around). Her collection ‘Tree without roots’ is, to say the least, a vestige of something we forgot to remember. Hadeed, visited Colon, Panama and Limon, Costa Rica, and before she could pull out her camera, she had to learn what light flashed within these people, what light had deserted them, and in what new light they had moved on and continue to move on in their lives. She mingled and got to know people. She made acquaintance, enraptured by the presence of these dispossessed Caribbean people and their descendants, living in both cities. One of my personal favourites in the collection is ‘Clean Cut’: which touches both the quotidian, the act of grooming oneself, as well as these persons being cut ‘clean’ from the Caribbean and its people. The poignancy is invoked by the sense of detachment or pensiveness in the mature face of the man in the barber’s chair. He has one of those soul-deep stares in his eyes, his facial structure hard, angular and accustomed, his cheek absorbing the shade being cast from outside the Barber shop. The stillness: the surrender of the head both to the barber, and to the stillness itself, the fading rattling of the mind as the head is held rigidly in place.
The negotiation that takes place in any kind of photography in search of the iconic is a community of coincidences: the recognition of a beautiful face or the angle of an object that startles it with beauty or poignancy, the cooperation of light, the fall of shadow and the photographer surrendering herself to the most infinitesimal movement of the living object, the variations of light. The composition depends on a direct, telescopic concern for its subject especially because ‘Tree without roots’ draws its inspiration from the scent of life, the stench of neglect and the forgotten. It is photographing something beyond an image. The composition probes the community of coincidences for that confluence between Man, his heart and his world; for the soft detonations of something spiritual and electric that happens on the split ends of a second. Not all the pictures are that lucky to clutch that moment, but certainly ‘Clean Cut’ is undoubtedly one of those. And indeed it many times is an issue of luck and a dependency on a synaptic sharpness.
The very reason I feel even a little bit equipped to do a review of Hadeed’s work here is because her work is for people like me: non-practitioners, people who want to engage in conversation with several arts without being thoroughly equipped and ‘jargonized’ in his apprehension. And this is the deficiency I believe Hadeed was articulating in speaking of her dislike for the new language that has risen amongst many of our artists (and more particularly our critics), a language which Poet Kei Miller dubbed ‘Academicese’. The Academicese language indeed has that way of making non-practitioners/informed sympathizers feel entirely unwelcomed.
But this collection is more about story than it is about technical flourish. I am careful with my praise of this position as it is sometimes (ab)used as an excuse for artistic accidie, but I unrestrainedly and humbly offer this praise to ‘Tree without Roots.’ No photograph in this collection is, or shall ever take the route of Eugene Atget’s ‘Avenue de Gobelins’ and I certainly would hate if I were to come across something like that in ‘Tree without Roots’. My argument is not the ‘simplicity-over-complexity’ one, it is merely one that appreciates Abigail’s awareness of some of the neglected purposes of photography and art in general: to give visibility, to be a broker of light.
Abigail Hadeed's 'Dive Canal'
A picture like ‘Dive Canal’ in the collection provides one with the view of those inner ambiguities found in situations that try our humanity. It reminded one of those little ‘Ubermensh-moments’ we have as boys, with our own crude, bare-back morality, our venturing into loneliness if it teases us with the right light. And because Hadeed engaged a story, not a contrived narrative, but one she took the time to get to know, she was able to produce something properly contextualized and therefore immediately communicable.
Abigail Hadeed's 'Laundry Lyrics'
‘Laundry Lyrics’ is one of the gems in the collection (though my personal favourite is ‘Clean Cut’). It in a way expresses for me, something that the collection and their photographer is trying to capture in a lot of her work: that no matter how many theories come about, how many things are discovered to be illogical or mediocre, no matter how many artists become frustrated with backward societies, life continues to happen there, people aspire (‘Diving Canal’), children are still children and still believe themselves worthy of attention (‘Pickney Pantomime’), that history may still not leave the insulated untouched (‘UNIA document’) by its light.
Abigail Hadeed's 'Iris Morgan'
Photography, for an ultimate novice such as I am, has appeared at some points a fidelity of stillness: that of the photographer or that of the human subject, and some times, both. Hadeed’s work, like her work on traditional mas’, is hinged on a kind of stillness: the things that refuse change because there is something they think should remain visible and resisting obliteration, like rituals that must be repeated year after year in the same way. But as with true rituals, “Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow.” ‘Tree without roots’ required Hadeed to be still, to sit and watch and learn. Only after this was accomplished did she feel ready to stir. Only after this did she feel equipped to get human lives, light, and her own hands to conspire with each other. Only after her apprenticeship with the dispossessed did she seek that essence. Stillness upon stillness, life upon waning life.
Abigail Hadeed's 'Pickney Pantomine'
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Vladimir Lucien was born in St. Lucia on March 16th 1988. After leaving school, Lucien took up a teaching job which he resigned from after a year to pursue acting in New York. Lucien returned to St. Lucia shortly in 2008, and subsequently took up studies at the UWI in Trinidad where he began writing poetry. In October 2011 he graduated with honors from the University with a degree in Literatures in English and Theatre Arts. Currently he is pursuing a Masters of Philosophy in Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus.
