Jeffrey Cook’s contribution to the collective consists of five Xeroxed collages. Each image is a combination of a photograph of an elderly slave combined with one or two monuments to African Americans. They are copied onto marbled yellow paper and matted in green and brown to suggest age. Despite the first assumption that he has placed the slaves on the same level as the memorialized, rendering them equal and giving them their rightful value, by placing the slaves with the statues Cook may be indicating rather that some people view them as relics of the past and dismiss them as documentation of the other. The slaves are not depicted at work, but are instead posed standing or sitting near their quarters. Just as the statues become ornaments when they are removed from their original context and are on display in home or museum, so do the slaves as they are removed both from their homeland and more importantly, through the distancing effect of the photograph, from the true nature of slavery itself. In this way he circumvents the potential for nostalgia as evasion of horror and hardship implicit in the character of the archival photograph.

Sarah Brewer.