Felt Surface, Visible Image: Lorna Simpson's Photography and the Embodiment of Appearance

Abstract

In 1994, Lorna Simpson began serigraphing photographic images onto felt. Simpson is known for overtly engaging issues of race and gender in her work, often juxtaposing images of black female bodies with provocative text. Her felt photographs, however, remove the figure and explore the atmospheric, sculptural, and narrative qualities available in its absence. Many critics viewed this as a shift from political content to formal experimentation. This article will argue, however, that the temporal and tactile dimensions of Simpson's felt pieces relate her early and recent photography, developing conceptual and formal concerns that her work consistently engages. It focuses on the role of hair in Simpson's images, from early depictions of the back of African American women's heads, to images of braids and wigs, to photographs printed on matted hair. Recalling historical and theoretical connections between hair and photography, it explores how Simpson's engagement of race and gender is structured by a broader investigation of how the surface of the body and the photograph relate, how identity becomes embodied and represented as visible. Rather than asking how an image indexes the identity of whatever it pictures, the felt photographs explore how appearance emerges within dynamic and material relationships of embodied visibility.

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