An Interview with… multi-media artist, curator and writer Leah Gordon
Leah Gordon is a multi-media artist, curator and writer born in Ellesmere Port between Liverpool and Manchester: two ports connected to her exploration of capitalist accumulation and expansion originating in the slave trade and industrial revolution. Gordon’s practice often returns to Haiti, where the guiding themes of her work are closely imbricated in Haiti’s history of the slave trade, the plantation system and revolution. Kanaval is a photo series Gordon developed over 25 years in the southern commune of Jacmel, Haiti. The masqueraders of Jacmel’s annual carnival and their costumes are the subject of Gordon’s images, which visually recount an oral history of Haiti, spanning the Tainos to the modern day. Leah Gordon transformed this photographic body into an award-winning feature length documentary Kanaval: A People’s History of Haiti in Six Chapters. In her most recent work, Monument to the Vanquished, Gordon has approached the history of the Enclosures act: the legal process in which common lands were converted into private property with exclusive rights to a landowner.
Leah Gordon’s work has been exhibited internationally; her recent solo exhibitions include ‘Leah Gordon: Kanaval’ at Ed Cross Gallery, London, ‘Monument to the Vanquished | Part II’ at Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery, Shrewsbury and ‘Monument to the Vanquished | Part I Commoners’ at Hive Gallery, Shrewsbury. Gordon has curated for international exhibitions, biennials and art fairs including RISING, Performance & Arts Festival, Melbourne, Australia, Atis Rezistans | Ghetto Biennale, St Kunigundis Church at documenta fifteen, Kassel, Germany, and PÒTOPRENS | The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince, (co-curating with Edouard Duval-Carrie) at MOCA, North Miami, FL, USA and at Pioneer Works, Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY, USA. She is co-director of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
We have had the pleasure of getting to know Leah Gordon through Ed Cross Fine Art, where her solo exhibition ‘Leah Gordon: Kanaval’ was held in 2023. Wanting to understand more about the background and process of Gordon’s work, we asked her ten questions ranging from her exploration of Haitian history and the Enclosure act to the magical realism of colour in her photographs.
Leah Gordon, Henry Hand, Henley Common, Rights: Grazing Sheep and Cattle, 2021.
One of the amazing advantages of your work is that it takes you to places around the world. Where have you been to recently?
I was at the March Meeting in Sharjah to speak about the Ghetto Biennale and then I was at a Q&A for the Kanaval film in New Orleans. The film went down really well, and the audience could make the links between New Orleans’ carnival culture and Haitian traditions.
During your recent travels, have there been any works or exhibitions that have caught your interest?
I saw Gestures of Refusal: Black Photography and Visual Culture at Contemporary Arts Centre, NOLA, curated by Shana M. griffin which explores the production of Black visual culture, bringing attention to the ways contemporary photographers and visual artists regularly wield the power of the camera and their creative practices to discern, behold, celebrate, and document people, places, events, collective memories, encounters, and other ever-present moments of Blackness that refuse the violence of erasure and subjectivity.
I had the fabulous chance of a curatorial walk-through and Shana M. griffin revealed the multiple layers and histories behind this powerful exhibition.
Lea Gordon, Jij (The Judge), 1995.
Your first trip to Haiti in the early nineties was due to a post-grad photojournalism course. What relationship does your work have to journalism now?
I have very little relationship with photo-journalism and a closer relationship with documentary – although I have some problems with much of the discourse around the word documentary too. I often refer to my film and photography practice as fact-based rather than documentary. This effectively positions fact solely as a starting point and attempts to skew its instrumentalisation as an ‘objective’ tool for the sole use of hegemonic forces. This leads to a more fungible relationship to the past and an understanding that futures are often haunted by the shape-shifting spectres of past histories. It also allows me to broaden the pool of sources and possibilities for retelling history.
Could you briefly explain your photography process?
I mainly use analogue cameras and film for both aesthetic and conceptual reasons. I find digital imagery lacking in a granular historical patina for the work I am creating which both interrogates and excavates the past. Also a camera changes the reciprocal exchange and power balance between a photographer and the subject. The more current digital cameras do everything so fast that the relationship with the sitter becomes less intimate and the ability to take so many images also negates the beautiful magic and chance that comes with the limited shots on an analogue camera.
In the Kanaval series and for the Commoners I use a 1960’s Roleicord medium format twin lens reflex camera and a Sekonic lightmeter and shoot onto black and white negative film. The camera is totally mechanical and once the film of only 12 exposures is loaded the shutter has to be cocked before you can actually take a picture. All exposure changes are manual and winding onto the next frame is quite laborious too. In Haiti I wander the streets searching for characters that will agree to be photographed. I always ask beforehand and pay people for the chance to photograph them. If they agree, and many do not, they always seem to be very patient with the long process, as I have to take a light reading, change the speed and aperture and focus. There is always stasis in my images as the process takes a bit of time. But perhaps with the slow process a space between myself and the sitter is created which seems to leave the hustle bustle of the street and enter the territory of the old-fashioned portrait studio. The sitters strike poses reflecting their masked characters. I do not feel that my photographs ruin any carnival energy as they are not attempting to represent any level of authentic carnival mood but more recreating a photo studio. The time and space created allows for a little of the narrative to seep through. In the Commoners series we locate the setting of the portrait in their common lands where they hold their rights and discuss with them the choice of objects to represent the nature of the rights. Again, the time it takes to set up the camera and tripod (as the light levels are so much lower in the UK) gives the people time to have some agency over their pose.
Leah Gordon, Grace Layton Travelly Well, Rights: In gross to water livestock at pool, including right of access to water place over the land, 2020.
How does time– whether as a theme or as a process– function in your photography?
I would say history rather than time. As an artist, I have often scoured back through time to unearth quasi-utopic pasts and depended on proxy histories from pre-grain societies, esoteric rituals, collective bargaining and revolutionary narratives to garner scraps of restoration. Much of my work has amplified history from below, and also, at the same time, recognised the role of carnival, folk traditions, and grassroots religions in both performing and sustaining radical histories. These rediscovered histories are informing and redefining class, race, post-colonial and gender struggles which are fundamental to a politics of the moment. Artists, however, can have more ambiguous relationships with history as they are often navigating boundaries between speculative, fictional and imagined histories. As artists we need to protect and respect actual histories without forfeiting the imaginary ones.
The use of black and white film in your work (such as in Kanaval) is striking, as it forces us to reconsider our relationship to the past and the present. Your more recent work also makes use of hand-tints, such as in your series Monument to the Vanquished: the Commoners. Could you explain the role of colour, or lack thereof, in your photography?
My choices of film are often instinctual, so the assignment of symbolic meaning often trails after the actual photography. In the case of the Kanaval images I felt that the colours were quite intense and often distracting. Stripping down to purely black and white, in my subsequent opinion, allows the viewer to reflect on the meaning and history of the costume rather than the spectacle and pageantry.
Whilst creating the commoners images the photographs were taken on the same analogue medium format camera with black and white film and the subsequent prints hand-tinted using traditional photographic dyes. This serves to highlight a lost deeper, more spiritual, and mystical, often matriarchal, and less mercantile connection to the land. We used this process to imbue the landscapes, through colour, with a form of magical realism. This process was used to invoke both the uncanny and spiritual nature of past relationships to the land, the breaking of which Italian feminist historian, Silvia Federici, argues was central to the capitalist expansion and loss of commons.
For the images of the derelict caravans I shot on large format 5in x 4in Tachihara field camera on colour Kodak Ektachrome transparency 100 sheet film. After exposure the sheet film is processed, and drum scanned. In these images I set up the camera and sat all day with it – the final image is a composite of early morning, mid-afternoon and early evening light as the backlight in the morning was equally beautiful as the early evening light. This again is another method for creating a magical, uncanny scenography which can never be experienced in the actual reality.
Leah Gordon, Caravan , Ty-Rhos, Pentre Evan Wood, Pembrokeshire, 2023
In the Commoners, you investigate the history of common land rights and the enclosure acts by photographing people who still have common rights over land. While much focus is given to the people in your photographs, it could also be argued that the environment has also been an ever-present subject in your work. How have you approached land as both a literal and abstract subject?
I worked on a project, many years back, that looked at sublime notions of landscape through photographing the unconvincing backdrops and environments created in the animal enclosures in London Zoo… I also question notions of Modernity through my more architectural work called Reciprocity Failure, including images of fire station drill towers, air traffic control towers, bells in towers and airport prayer spaces. The specific environment was very important in the Kingdom of this World project, but I also used studios and have backdrops made if the particular narrative demands that.
Photography can often risk a veneer of objectivity, but the themes and histories you portray have very personal implications and resonances. How do you want viewers to understand your own role and presence throughout your works?
I actually placed myself in the Caste Portraits which investigate the practice of the grading from black to white of skin colour, which marked the extent of racial mixing in 18th century colonial Haiti. I made the Caste Portraits depicting the nine skin varieties, with myself at one end of the scale as ‘Blanche’, and my partner, Andre Eugene, a Haitian sculptor, at the other end of the racial spectrum as ‘Noir’. I was questioning my own relationship and culpability with Haiti’s history by placing myself in the series.
When I began work on Monument to the Vanquished, it was the culmination of conceptual and thematic preoccupations that stretched back for almost thirty-five years. This was a point on a trajectory from the feminist folk punk band that I wrote lyrics and sang for in the mid-eighties; to my enduring regard for and image-making of British folk traditions; to my respect for histories from below, as lauded by E.P Thomson, recorded by Studs Terkel and told by Marcus Rediker; my film, book and exhibitions on Haitian carnival; and as an expression of my class politics.
More profoundly this story has greater meaning for me because my grandfather, Jesse Walker, was a farm labourer who was divorced from the land surrounding Ellesmere Port when it was compulsorily purchased in 1948 to build the oil refinery Shell Stanlow, where he and many others from my extended family, including my father, were finally employed. So, for me, this history is not just an arcane historical event but an on-going process that has even affected my close family who have been forcibly driven from the rural to the industrial in the name of progress.
Leah Gordon, Blanche from the Caste Portraits, 2012.
Leah Gordon, Noir from the Caste Portraits, 2012.
During this very difficult period of political instability in Haiti, it’s crucial to highlight the voices and perspectives of Haitians. How does Haiti continue to use grassroots histories, religious practices and other forms of storytelling to give voice to their experiences?
Haitian culture is a potent vessel for telling their histories. School fees are excessive for the majority of the Haitian people, and education standards are poor, but you will be hard pushed to find a Haitian who doesn’t know the vast and intimate details of their own history.
Haiti, as a Nation, uses every cultural tool in its box to transmit its History, from the drums, songs, dances and possessive ritual of the Vodou religion, it uses the improvisational songs of Twobadou groups and the collective melodies and rhythms of Rara bands. Haitian history uses the words, theatre and poems of its great literary tradition and the unique visions of its painters, sculptors and flag makers. Haitian history, and not only that of the revolution, is also replayed through the masks, costumes and narratives of the carnival in Jacmel, a coastal town in southern Haiti.
What current or forthcoming exhibitions or projects are you participating in?
At the moment I am busy working on producing work for a major museum exhibition of the Monument to the Vanquished work, alongside a book, and researching for a feature documentary all on the same subject which will all be revealed next year.
Leah Gordon, Gran Manje (Fat Cats), 1997.
To learn more about Leah Gordon and her work, you can visit her website or Ed Cross Fine Art, Garrett Street, London.
Leah Gordon
