SLIFF Documentary Takes an Unflinching Look at the History of the Black Image in America

Thomas Allen Harris’ newest documentary, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and The Emergence of a People, is many things: poignant, honest, and, at times, downright painful to watch. The film will be screening tonight as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival at 7:30 pm at Washington University.

Below, the director talks about the emotional, 10-year journey it took to make the film and what he hopes to accomplish with the interactive experience he created to accompany it, The Digital Diaspora Family Reunion Roadshow, which will take place at the Nine Network Studio this Sunday at 3 p.m.

The making of the film must have been emotional for you. Is there anything about the process that surprised or upset you?

I think [what surprised me was] the degree to which I really had to think about forgiveness in making the film. Whether it’s forgiving my country for not seeing me or criminalizing me as an African American man, or forgiving my dad for not being able to see me as a son. I think part of it has to do with this idea of the truth and reconciliation, you know, like what happened in South Africa following the end of apartheid. In this country we never really had a national discussion on slavery and how it has informs the complexity of who we are as a people, as a country. So I had to really allow myself to have a certain compassion and forgiveness for myself and for others, so that took a while.

When I first started making the film it was a lot more filled with anger. You know, “I’m going to show them these horrible images they did of me,” and then when I made the shift, it was really about “Actually, I’m not so much interested in speaking with, you know, this anonymous white public television audience, as much as using the knowledge I’ve gained and this journey to speak with the next generation of young people, young Americans, who have a different relationship with race, particularly young people of color, but young people in general.” Also, younger men who are so vulnerable, younger men of color, to these historical forces which conspire against them. The pervasiveness of it, even if we don’t necessarily have images of blackface in the newspapers every day, or people don’t do these blackface kinds of spectacles in schools, at their churches, institutions, etc., like they did up until the 1950s, where you have the images of lynchings that circulated widely in the mail.

And also the importance of just showing up and showing African American families how we have evolved over the last 180 years or so. That’s something that because black photographers had been so undervalued, and haven’t been included in the history books and their archives haven’t been celebrated, that is the evolution of our families, making their way out of bondage into building themselves up, like [through] segregation and Jim Crow to the present day, that’s something we don’t have access to. Even one of my early editors was looking at an image of a woman from the 1870s and she thought it was a fake image because she had no idea. One of my funders also told me with certainly that “Well of course, most black people don’t have images of their families going back.” But we found so many families and so many images. Part of it was through the film, and part of it was through our transmedia Digital Diaspora Family Reunion Roadshow that we started when we began the production of the film, gong around and inviting people to share their family photographs on a live stage and digitizing a lot of these images that haven’t been digitized before, and having people understand the value of them. You know, we collect a whole bunch of images that way, and that’s something we’re going to be doing in St. Louis as well. We’re showing the film at Washington University in a free screening at a 400-seat theater and then we’re also doing, later on in the week, the Digital Diaspora Roadshow with Nine Network. We’re inviting people to come and share their family photographs. This is the first time we’re actually doing this in a TV studio, which is quite exciting to see. The vision is actually to create a digital Diaspora family reunion TV show.

How long did it take you to gather everything for the film, not just the interviews but your own family photos and stories?

I worked on this film for about ten years. Deborah Willis, who approached me about making a film that was inspired by her book Reflections in Black, she approached me I believe in 2002 or 2003 and in 2003 we got our first small development grant. I was in the middle of making another film, Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, so I wasn’t able to work full time on this film until 2008, really.

How did your family feel about it?

They’re very supportive. They were very happy to have their photographs and their archives celebrated in that way, on both sides of my family, my mother’s side and my father’s side. They were able to see things they hadn’t seen. I was able to find images that only a few people had and then I was like, sharing it with the collective. And they came out in huge support of the film and yeah I was a little bit nervous about it because it’s like, you know, airing all of our stuff out there, you know? I haven’t had a chance to share it with my dad yet, who’s still alive. He has not been receiving me and my brother. He is a little bit of a recluse, and so, you know, trying to get to see him has been a longer and separate story so I don’t know if we really need to go into that but I’m looking forward to showing it to him and hopefully he’ll see his beauty.

I showed it in Brazil and there were lots of Brazilians that were there, people who were depicted as white in Brazil but they have black grandmothers. In Brazil, in order to gain social status you marry lighter. They call them morenos—kind of light skinned people of a much higher status in that society, and so all these people who are white Brazilians came up to me after the screening, which sold out in Rio, and said “Oh my gosh, now I understand my grandmother and my grandfather in a different kind of way. I want to show this film to them so they can see how beautiful they are and celebrate themselves.” So that was really moving. The film also is doing a lot of amazing kind of work in the larger Diaspora. It’s had a big reception in Nigeria, where it won the African Movie Academy Award, the only American film to win that award in Diaspora Documentary.

It also showed in Melbourne, Australia, and it showed in Cairo, Egypt just last week. It’s been showing in European festivals and avant-garde film festivals. In America, it’s getting awards as a social issue documentary. For example, the Santa Barbara [International] Film Festival gave us an award as the best social issue documentary. Now we’re contenders for an American Oscar award in the documentary category, so that’s exciting. For a historical documentary and a black independent film… We’ve been blessed to be able to get so much exposure. We’ve been working on it full-time, more than full-time.

After working on this film for so long, how did you feel watching the final cut for the first time?

I watched the final cut—more or less the final cut—when it was released at Sundance. Sundance released the film, and we also launched Digital Diaspora Family Reunion there as well. But the main thing about it—how getting such amazing feedback from so many different places, like experiencing the power of the film through the feedback from young people, old people, African American, European American, Latino American, just the resonance has just been amazing. People are thanking me for having made this film. They’re saying all kinds of amazing things about the film. You can look at my Facebook page and the comments that people are making, it’s just been really gratifying. Ten years is a long time out of someone’s life, you know? It’s a labor of love, but even more, conviction. There have been times when we’ve wondered “How can we finish this film? Are we going to be able to raise the money? Are we going to be able to make our way through this complex structure of the film? Are we going to be able to keep it going?” And it took a village to do that, and dedicated people, to be able to survive and keep going. So that’s been a huge blessing, huge huge blessing. We did a crowd-sourced funding campaign and that was amazing, that’s been really wonderful.

What’s the one thing you hope audiences take away from viewing the film?

That the way in which we look at ourselves and other people—a lot of it can have a lot of baggage to it, especially in this country. It has the baggage from colonialism or from the circulation of stereotypes, so that’s what I want people to really understand, the history of that, so that you have a visual literacy, that you can be able to see one another in a more profound way and a more complete way and see our families in a larger kind of way that allows us to see the humanity of one another and each other, particularly for younger people and black folks, to see our own humanity. That’s a big part of it. To see our humanity and also understand the value of the image. There’s two types of representation: there’s one person, one vote, and there is also the way in which we’re represented in popular culture, which is much more subtle and yet so important because if you are represented as human, you have to be treated humanely. If you are represented as something other than human, you can be treated as less than human.

Actually, while I was talking to you, I just saw someone posted something on my timeline, a young woman from Houston who just saw the film earlier this week and she said “This man right here is brilliant. I went to a screening last night of Through a Lens Darkly and listen up, everyone reading this post, black, white, whatever, you need to see this. This work embodies a piece of American history that was shoved up under the rug. It’s enlightening, powerful, honest, and most importantly, makes you feel all warm and pink inside. I strongly believe that a lot of issues we have are centered around self-hate. Not only do we not know enough about our ancestry, it’s because we really don’t know what went down right here in American. I’m African, I’m Haitian, I’m also American. I claim that culture and I demand to know the truth. Thank you so much to Thomas Allen Harris for this piece of truth. Check out the link to view the trailer.” That’s the kind of response we’re getting from people.

The Digital Diaspora Roadshow feels like a natural extension of the film, which to me felt like a call to action. Was that the intention of creating this interactive experience that sort of accompanies the film?

I’ve been making these films about family archives and connecting with larger historical movements, so if people all over the world, when I travel with my film, and people would say to me, “I want to do something creative with my family archives, and my photographs and film,” and I was always too tired at the end of the film to do anything, to create them something that would allow for people to engage with the content and would support them in creating something with their own archives and their own family stories. So with this film I have built off my work and Debra Willis’ work and create something like that [the Roadshow]. As it turns out, I was able to find images to be included in the film because of that, and also take it forward, you know, in this other kind of way. It’s been a blessing. And it is a natural kind of outgrowth.

What advice would you give to someone who wanted to use photography and film as a way to tell the stories in their families and communities?

I would say start with your own family, your family photographs, speak with people within your community even if they’re not biologically connected, [they’re] genetically related to you, because it’s all part of our history, you know? It’s so important to understand that and to practice our storytelling and sometimes turn the TV off and make your own film with your own family archives. If you don’t use it, then it just sits in a box, on a shelf. It’s so important to do something creative with your family photographs.

You can check out our website, 1world1family, upload your pictures to Instagram. If you want to make a short film we’ll help you, we’ll help you promote it through our network in terms of connecting your story. I think it’s so important for individuals to connect their family story to a larger public record. So many of us are influenced by the great migration; how does your family connect with the great migration? How does your family connect with civil rights? How does your family connect with freedom? How does your family connect with World War II, World War I? These types of stories are so interesting. They bring together a community of people that normally would think they were separate, and you know, we are separate, but connected.

We tell people that you can upload your family photos to Instagram and tag it [with the] hashtag “1world1family” and you become part of our touring family album. Those people who use the hashtag, we’re going to meet them hopefully at the Nine Network when we do our Digital Diaspora Roadshow.

What’s next for you?

In addition to doing the Digital Diaspora Roadshow TV show that we’re developing, I’m developing a narrative film about migration; a woman comes to this country from another place looking for her brother who disappeared in an American city and it’s about her trying to find him and operating in these two parallel worlds. That’s one film…We are working on a comedy as well, and a couple of TV shows and then we also have another documentary that looks at the evolution of African Americans from being property to being equal in Hollywood [and how that] has shifted.