Nona Faustine

Nona Faustine was introduced to photography as part of her upbringing; for her, photography was a way to bond with family, both near and far: her father and her uncle were the family photographers, taking pictures not only of Faustine and her sister at their home in Brooklyn, but also of the extended "family down South." Fittingly, her first camera was a gift from her uncle.

Faustine initially didn't view the medium as something serious, nor as a potential profession for the future, but rather something that families did just to preserve and share memories. It wasn't until her parents gave her a series of Time Life books that she understood that photography "was something that people do." Some of the artists that inspired Faustine into getting serious about her art are greatly known photographers such as Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, but the one that influenced her the most was the work of Ernst Haas because, in this Austrian-born photojournalist's images, she realize that "you can create ...with the camera."

Though Faustine admired Haas' work, she said that she struggled to find herself in the limited documentary model that the lush Time Life books offered up, perhaps in part because the books––like the history of photography itself––celebrated photographers who were disproportionately male and all white.

She got her BFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and then earned her MFA at the International Center for Photography-Bard College program, at 2013. During these years, especially while pursuing her MFA degree, Faustine began to move away from the traditional documentary model. "It just didn't work for me anymore," Faustine said. "I wanted more room to play with communication. Conceptual works appealed to me."

It was at College that Faustine found the abstract language she needed to embark on "White Shoes." Influenced by the groundbreaking work of Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems, Faustine began the series as her thesis project in 2012 and continued to add to it over the subsequent three years.

Nona Faustine had history––both personal and political––to work through as she made White Shoes. At first she approached the collection as a way to portray her research on the history of slavery, specifically of New York; then, she shifted to the concept of the body––how her own body and the body of other black women were represented in the media.

But for the photographer Nona Faustine, many of the lost histories of this city still have powerful personal resonance. In the background work for her most recent photographic project, she meticulously tracked the history of slavery in the five boroughs, uncovering the locations of ancient slave burial grounds, slave markets, slave owning farms, and the landing spots of slave ships, going back even before the Revolutionary War. She then visited these places in their current form, and made self portraits at the various locations, collapsing time in a sense, or at least connecting her current life back to the lingering ghosts of the past.

Faustine’s images aren’t simply a before and after look at architecture and social change – their purpose is not to show us a bodega where once a church stood. Her pictures are much more of a search for identity, an attempt to both viscerally remember the past and to come to grips with its influence on her present. At each of these places, she stands naked, except for a pair of white pumps, her ample curves exposed for all to see, often in the obvious cold. Her performative stances bring together a complex mix of emotions and realities, both past and present, where extreme vulnerability (especially as a woman) and a sense of being stripped and devalued are blended with resistance and defiance, of standing up to forces (as embodied by her constraining white shoes) that would push her down. The best of these pictures richly reverberate with all of these layered feelings, making them much more nuanced than just a nude woman standing on the courthouse steps.

The show at Smack Mellon, in Brooklyn, NY, was reviewed internationally, by newspapers including The Guardian. Standing in white shoes, she reminds viewers how often African-Americans must adopt white culture. Posing on a wooden box at locations around New York where slaves were once sold, "baring her flesh to history, she conveys the most fundamental horror of the slave trade, the way it reduced people to mere bodies, machines of muscle."

"My Country" was her critically acclaimed solo exhibition at Baxter St. Camera Club of New York. "My Country" continued the tradition of "white Shoes" by including portraits of herself in white shoes at important sites of slave history around New York, but introduced photographs of monuments, such as the Statue of Liberty or The Lincoln Memorial, with a black line slicing through the image. The New Yorker wrote that "Faustine’s photos serve to mark the places that belong to a history too often hidden from view, whether by design, or neglect, or the ever-frenetic pace of change inherent to life in New York." The Village Voice wrote that her work was "a frank rendering of America's disgraceful and all-too-buried legacy of marginalization" and explained the impact of the monument photographs: "the graphic interruption stands for the scores of mistreated Americans for whom such structures and their supposed representation of the common good have remained inaccessible"

• "Your Body Is a Battleground," Curated Section, VOLTANY, New York, NY 2017 Group Exhibition
• "My Country", Baxter Street Camera Club, New York, NY, Dec 8, 2016 - Jan 14, 2017, Solo Show
• "MAMI", Knockdown Center, Maspeth, NY 2016 Group Exhibition
• "Race&Revolution", Governors Island, NY 2016 Group Exhibition
• "I can't breathe", Art Gallery at the College of Staten Island, NY 2016 Group Exhibition
• "The Art of HERstory," The Center For Arts & Culture At Bedford Stuyvesant Brooklyn, NY 2016 Group Exhibition
• "White Shoes", Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY 2016 Solo Exhibition
• "3 Graces", Space 776 Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2016 Group Exhibition
• "Constellation," Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY 2015-2016 Group Exhibition
• "Women As Witness", TI Art Studios, Brooklyn, NY 2015 Group Exhibition
• "The Future Is Forever", International Center of Photography, Mana Contemporary Art Center Jersey City, NJ 2015 Group Exhibition
• "Feminism (n.) Plural": Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, IL 2015 Group Exhibition
• Epic Epoch, Con Artist Gallery, New York, NY 2015 Group Exhibition
• "Respond", Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY 2015 Group Exhibition
• "Take 10", International Center of Photography, New York, NY 2014-15 Group Exhibition
• "Sixteen Sweet", Ivy Brown Gallery, New York, NY 2014 Group Exhibition
• "I Found God In Myself"...The 40th Anniversary of Ntozake Shange "For Colored Girls..., The Schomburg for Black Research, (New York, NY) 2014 Group Exhibition La Maison d'Art New York, NY) 2014
• "Identity", Loft594 Brooklyn, NY 2014 Group Exhibition
• "The Photographic Self", Woman Made Gallery Chicago, IL 2013 Group Exhibition
• "Reconstructions", MFA Solo Exhibition, International Center of Photography-Bard, Long Island City, NY 2013
• "Enter From Above", MFA Group Exhibition, International Center for Photography, New York, NY 2013
• Presenter, Memories Can't Wait, Symposium International Center of Photography, New York, NY 2012
• Presenter, "Symposium/Unconference," International Center of Photography, New York, NY 2011

• The Princess and The Queen, 2012