A “black box” – variously a flight data recorder, a theater and a camera – is essentially a repository for different memory modes. Many are in narrow conversation in The new moving autobiography of American photographer Dona Ann McAdams, entitled Black box. Just as his images are categorically his, the form of this book is also the form of this book which traces its four decades as a photographer, activist and witness to history. Two expressive strands, one retrospective of his strongest visual work and the other a series of flash memories, join to produce an object superior to the sum of his parts – a singular fusion of literary and photographic art.
Born in 1954 in Ronkonkoma, Long Island, McAdams postulates that as a baby, his most present parent was the television whose “way of seeing” started it for a life behind the lens. Indeed, one of the most striking images of the book shows that Baby Dona Dona supported, invading alone, in front of a superxposed screen which shines like a supernatural robot suzerain. Most children in the middle of the century can refer, although we may not have proven the clever student of his visual lessons that McAdams did.
The next childhood memory she offers is to see her first horse, a Shetland pony. His primacy in these pages indicates the transforming role of horses in his life and his work. Her photographs of people and events, taken with a beloved Leica M2 during a career of several decades, situate it in the tradition of documentary and street photography of the 20th century, including the work of Garry Winogrand,, Lee FriedlanderAnd Helen Levitt. But his horses (and also the goats) visually belong to another world, their beauty made almost abstract, their obstinate mystery intact.
Black box is not an illustrated life but a photo – there, I mean deliberately composed as a work of art in a separate class. Growing up with the parents who work, his relationship with Catholicism, his realization of his attraction for women in all directions, and other details of the personal history of McAdams are intertwined with accounts illuminating the development of his practice, his first camera – a talismanic Polaroid swinger whose instant film was too expensive for great use – like it presented for criticism at San Francisco Art Institute in 1974 although it was not officially registered. Winogrand, then a guest instructor, distinguished the photo with encouraging praise: “It's a very good photo.” It is, as unequivocally influenced by the eminent photographer. The same goes for many others, in particular those who envisage the type of American landscape in which signaling eclipses humans for whom it is intended.
A sense of strange permeates photographs and texts throughout Black box. 1980 and 90s New York, where McAdams was accused of having captured the fundamental performance artists of the time as a home photographer Performance space 122was an occupied intersection with a broken peak fire: major social movements have collided continuously. However, McAdams had a strange capacity to meet the movers and the influential events of the day, no matter where she was, from San Francisco to Australia via Central America. It is his generous opening when personalities and magnetized pivotal incidents. Memorial of these moments in poetry and light, the book by Dona de Dona Ann McAdams is not easily forgotten.
Black Box: a photographic thesis (2024) by Dona Ann McAdams is published by Saint Lucy Books and is available online and via independent booksellers. The companion exhibition Dona Ann McAdams: Black Box Will be visible at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery (144 West 14th Street, West Village, Manhattan) from April 18 to June 7.
