The Meaning of Various Photographs to Tyrand Needham

The teenager Tyrand Needham, a friend of the artist, comments on a range of photographs of Black sub-jects—both famous and anonymous—and of places, from domestic scenes to spaces marked by violent protest. Needham’s descriptions are humorous and selective; his inclusions and omissions suggest what Steffani Jemison calls “tensions between what can be read, what can be intuited, and what refuses to give up its secrets.” Responding in part to artist John Baldessari’s 1973 film The Meaning of Various Photographs to Ed Henderson, in which his friend responds to news photographs stripped of their context, Jemison trades Baldessari’s strategy of flagrant banality for an equally strategic deployment of opacity.