Dirty Little Secret   If Blackness was a Landscape   What would you see

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This work has emerged from many years of research and documentation of predominantly the British landscapes and number of European urban city-scapes, including Naples, Palermo and Marseille, which Forbes has been pursuing as he makes his way through life as an artist. Until recently the work has been developed in the background to other works within Forbes’ practice. The work has recently revealed itself, as what it wants to be as an artwork and the form it wants to take in the visual presentation to a potential wider audience.

 

For Forbes it has been the slow documentation of two areas of interest within the term of landscape photography, the rural and the urban, which in many ways each allows the other to exist by their own nature. Each has their own beauty and dullness in equal measures. In the series prior to being combined Forbes seeks to offer up an alternative ‘notion of beauty’, which has blackness and landscapes are at the heart of the intent - where there are question marks over its history and rights, beyond legal ownership and entitlement.

The dictionary definition of what a landscape can be seems very simplistic, but gets the basics correct, in terms linguistics and the visual reference points.

1. all the visible features of an area of land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.

2. denoting a format of printed matter which is wider than it is high.

The current status of the works brings together these definitions of the landscape as largescale photographic images as an installation, using aluminium wall partitioning exclusively or be presented with Forbes’ other projects, such as sculpture, photography and text based work.

 

In the title of the works Forbes, asks Dirty Little Secret, If Blackness was a Landscape, What would you see – leaving the question open for the viewer to answer in their viewing of the work.

Forbes also asks, the following questions, whilst at the same time finding answers in the making of the work:

• Why Dirty Little Secret – a black man photographing landscapes; what does it reveal about him, is it a secret, uncool, unexpected of him by society

• Can he walk in a landscape and be free of his blackness or does the landscape mirror his being in all experiences

• Do black and brown people exclude themselves from the countryside and thereby not visually engaging with the representation of landscapes

• Is there a fear of being attacked or being Othered as the attacker, which in turn creates an unease in the countryside.

• Understanding land ownership associated to power and wealth, through British and European history, such as stately homes, castles and châteaus with their links to exploitation of black and brown people.

• Is there a clash between the urban and rural landscape notions of beauty, as reflected in these images, including the haves and have nots – ‘white flight’ has historical roots, which plays out in contemporary life.

• Is there a direct link between darkness, blackness and fear.

• What are the influences of the enlightenment period, the romantics and the sublime all linked to the ‘great’ philosophers and pseudo-science in relation to ‘race’.

• Is gentrification and homelessness having an impact on the urban landscape, which sees black people displaced from traditional black neighbourhoods[1], through the disproportionate income and generational wealth of white people.

 

With the rural population in the UK being 97%[2] white, it presents a challenge for black and brown people to feel a sense of belonging and ease, without escaping the white gaze, which creates feelings of being unwelcome and can cause an anxiety about safety, from racism and microaggressions.

 

I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema ... I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects ... I took myself far off from my own presence ... What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood

Franz Fanon[i]

 

[1]. Harlem, Brooklyn, Brixton, Hackney & Oakland etc

[2]. Office of National Statistics figures that are taken from the census – quoted on BBC Radio 4 Anti-Social by Ruth McAreavey professor of sociology at Newcastle University

 

[i] Yancy George Black Skin White Mask Pg. xxv