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

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Forbes has been documenting landscapes for many years and developed this work within the conceptual frame of his art practice centred around contemporary racial politics, migration, blackness, whiteness, history, and religion.

 

‘What is landscape’ - Forbes’ responds to the dictionary definition:  

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

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

 

In Dirty Little Secret   If Blackness was a Landscape   What would you see Forbes brings together these definitions as largescale photographic lightboxes exploring:

• 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?

• Exclusion from the countryside and the visual representation of landscapes – self exclusion, fear of being Othered alone.

• Fear of being attacked or fear of being Othered as the attacker.

• Understanding elements of land ownership associated to power and wealth, through British history and stately homes with its links to exploitation of black and brown people.

• The fear created by the mind, playing tricks in the darkness, during night-time photography.

• Is there a clash between the urban and rural landscape as reflected in these images.

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

• The enlightenment period, the romantics and the sublime all linked to philosophy and the pseudo-science in relation to race.

• The comparison of photographic landscape and the painted landscape.

 

Through the work and questions Forbes seeks to understand the relationship between blackness and landscape and thereby create Blackness as a Landscape.