Jamie Robertson

Jamie Robertson is a visual artist and educator from Houston, Texas. She earned a BA in Art from the University of Houston in 2012 and a MS in Art Therapy from the Florida State University in 2014. She is a former recipient of the Pearlie Roberson Award for her joint Frenchtown Mural project. As an educator, Jamie is interested in cultural community development through creative youth development. Her creative practice explores history and identity in the African Diaspora through photography, printmaking and sculpture. Her work was featured in the 18th Annual Citywide African American Artists Exhibition at the University Museum at Texas Southern University and FAMU Foster-Tanner Fine Arts Gallery Through the Lens: Identity, Representation & Self-Presentation. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Studio Art with a concentration in photography and digital media at the University of Houston.

Visit Jamie Robertson’s website to see more of her work.

Interview by Dana Stirling

First Tell us about yourself

Hi Float Magazine! I’m Jamie Robertson, a visual artist and educator from Houston, Texas. I recently graduated from the University of Houston with an MFA in Studio Art, concentration in Photography and Digital Media. My creative practice is an autobiographical exploration of the African Diaspora.

What was your first experience with photography? What made you decide to use photography as your main art medium? 

I have always loved photographs. Particularly photographs of my ancestors. I think I was always trying to find my likeness in theirs. The natural progression is to start making photographs which started in middle school. Back then I carried a disposable camera to photograph friends and different things I found interesting at that particular age.

I don’t necessarily feel like I chose photography but more like it chose me. I am interested in history and culture and one of the ways to represent that visually is through a photograph. I like that a photograph is believed to be a truthful and reliable document but what a photograph is and what it is doing changes over time. Photographs are subject to the time and cultural context of the viewer.

In your project Making Reference you write in your statement “I explore my perceived identity and question how I see myself versus how others see me” which I think is an interesting statement. Can you tell us more about this project and how it might have shaped your perception of personal identity and cultural identity?

When I started Making Reference in 2017, I was researching and collecting historical images of Black Women; looking for common threads in how we were represented throughout time. I started searching digital archives like the Library of Congress and New York Public Library for images. So many beautiful portraits of Black women in varying degrees of agency. One in particular entitled, A mulatto woman of Dutch Guiana, in the archive of the New York Public Library is my favorite. She looks regal in her traditional, Kotomisi. That particular image was taken by Prince Roland Napoleon Bonaparte and can also be found in the archives of the Rijksmuseum. His intentions in photographing this woman in the 1800s  (a quick google search of his name will yield lots of ethnographic photographs)  and my interest in 2017 of it vary greatly.

 In addition, I was collecting and re-remembering  microaggressive statements and questions that had been made towards me by people of all ethnicities in regards to my identity. Things like the ever so popular, “What are you?”  or “What are you mixed with?”. All of this had a profound impact on how I chose to represent myself in my self portraits. As they stand at this moment in time, I feel my self portraits speak more to what has been projected onto me more than how I see myself and maybe in some cases a little bit of both. Identity is not a clean cut facet of oneself. We are constantly evolving and so is our identity. I’ve left Making Reference open for that reason. Self Portrait series never really end.

In the same project, you tackle the notion of studio photography and how it has shaped not only the way we do portrait photography but also shaped our perception of historical times that have been colonized by the lens. Could you expand on that? Do you think photography still has the same qualities today? What do you think has changed and what might have stayed the same?

With colonial photography, there was the desire to capture the Other. The subject is taken out of their actual environment, placed in front of a “neutral” background, given objects that are meant to mimic their own as props and we as the viewers are meant to believe this image as an authentic representation of a person or culture. The photo studio in that regard feels sterile and the fullness of the subject’s lived experience and history become swallowed up, lost in the void.

The photography studio functions as a void. I don’t think this is a good or bad thing, it simply is. Things can be lost in a void or spontaneous pop into existence. The void of the photography studio is filled with props and people to simulate a reality distanced from the actual reality. Whether or not the void is problematic depends on the photographer. There is a lot to unpack with colonial photography studios, all of it fed by eurocentrism and white supremacy.

The void can also be an equalizer in some instances, as well. I’m thinking particularly about school pictures or yearbook photos. The students may have drastically different home lives, socio-economic status but the portable studio in that regard acts as an equalizer for a brief moment in time. It can also function as a liberator, I am thinking particularly about the work of Seydou Keïta and some of  Malick Sidibe’s photographs of a liberated Bamako.

In your installation work For Those Who Protect you created a visual that is familiar to so many of us – the collection of family members and their representation within the home as a memorial for our home and personal life. The images are of the women of your family only. Why was it important for you to focus on the women of your family? Can you tell us more about this installation and why you decided to create it in such a way?

 For Those Who Protect, is an installation I created for an exhibition, Dear Mama,  I was invited to participate in that centered on the theme of motherhood in 2018. I wanted to create an installation that honored all the women who raised me past and present. The form it took is directly related to how my grandmother arranges photographs in her home. However, I took some liberties to amplify the spiritual nature of the installation. I added things like oyster shells, angel figurines and placed photographs of dead ancestors in silver frames versus gold for the living. The silver is meant to represent what Robert Farris Thompson called “The flash of the spirit”. I use it as a means to attract their spirit to the installation. There is also a Bible opened to Psalm 91, the Psalm of Protection, with a knife across it. This is a direct reference to my great-grandmother’s alleged practice of hoodoo; an African American folk magic practice with influences from Native Americans.

 I have shown this installation about 2-3 times and most people refer to it as an altar; which I find fascinating. I think the altar association has a lot to do with showing work in Houston, a city with a huge Mexican and Mexican American population. A lot of people in Southeast Texas are familiar with ofrendas, altars built to loved ones for the holiday Dia de los Muertos. My grandma would never call her arrangement of photographs in her home an altar but in a lot ways, it is. 

Much of your work revolves around the notions of family, identity and the African Diaspora. Even Though each project tackles this from a different avenue, they all revolve around these concepts and ideas. Can you tell us more about this and the importance it has in your work and as an artist?

Performance artist, Oroma Elewa, said it best “I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to better”. I am not comfortable at this moment in time turning the camera on other people and communities when my own personal history is rich and waiting for me to uncover it. I’ve been doing genealogical research for the past 9 years that has now evolved into my creative practice. I want to explore my heritage and history for my own immediate benefit. It’s liberating. I am not worried about making work that is some kind of grand gesture against white supremacy. Yet the irony is my work does work against white supremacy because I decided as an artist that my Black family, descendants of slaves, from a small unincorporated community in East Texas is a worthwhile subject. I encourage more BIPOC artists to look at their own personal history (including their environment). The centering of our stories is important and necessary work.

In your thesis project and online book Charting the Afriscape of Leon County, Texas you create work where the personal story is on one hand your individual story, but as art and photography have great power, you are also able to talk about the broad collective story that many share in some way or another. Can you walk us through the process of making this work? I would also be curious to know how your family responded to the work.

Charting the Afriscape of Leon County, Texas came to fruition as a result of COVID-19. My thesis exhibition which was scheduled for late March was cancelled but I still needed to defend the thesis as a part of my degree requirement. The photographs were all taken over the past three years and so the big thing for me was deciding what would be in the book. A very tedious process but it felt more fulfilling than mounting the actual exhibition because there was no limit on the number of images. I spent about 3-4 weeks working on it, asking for input from trusted friends and my committee members. My family really enjoyed it. My cousin and grandma both were delighted to see images of themselves in the book.

I think an interesting part of this project and is something that I personally am very interested in and explore, is the archive. I think that reclaiming, adding and enhancing the archive, even if of a personal nature, has a great value for our society at whole. I myself am an Immigrant in this country, so I don’t have roots in this country, so for me archival images have been a way to find placement. I think when talking about Diaspora and history, it is important to enhance what might have been forgotten or moved aside for the main narrative. Not a question per se but would love to hear more about this from you.

I love archives. Majority of my work is influenced by some archive in one way or another. I’m constantly searching for information either in the form of photographs or articles. I’ve also been thinking a lot about archives outside of the traditional library. For instance, I spoke with my grandfather’s first cousin and at 91 years old she is wealth of information. I called her because I thought I had found a photograph of my great-grandma as a young woman but sadly it was not her. I told her that no one in my family has seen a photograph of my great-grandma young. She proceeded to tell me about how all the photos and keepsakes were lost when the original homestead was burned down. I had completely forgotten about there being more than one house!  Talking with her helped me to re-remember a piece of important information as well as disrupt some family myths and that had been passed down to me. The potential for conflicting information intrigues me.

What made you choose to place this project in a format of a book?

 I’ve always loved photo books and Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s Dafauskie Island has always been a big influence. Pre-COVID-19, I had planned to make a photo book as a portfolio of all of my work from grad school. I shoot mostly digital at this time so transitioning my work into an online format made sense. It was kind of a no brainer to turn my thesis work into a digital photobook. I knew I wanted to have a nice finished product and publishing a book online allowed for that.

 What was the hardest part in creating this body of work? And what was the most rewarding part of it?

The editing process was difficult. I have hundreds of images from the past 3 years. I definitely think I have enough for a second volume. I had collected lots of documents like death certificates and census records and wanted to include them but it didn’t make sense with how the work was taking shape. The most rewarding part of all of this was seeing the work come together.

 Who has inspired you and your work?

My family, of course, is a big source of inspiration for me. I grew up hearing lots of folklore like people turning into snakes, axes as lighting rods and so much more. How could I not make work about things like that?

What are you working on now? Any shows, events, talks in the near future you would like to share with us?

Right now, I am working on publishing a hard copy of Charting the Afriscape of Leon County, Texas. I have submitted to a few indie presses and I am waiting to hear back. In the meantime, I am trying to decompress from three years of school and the current global health crisis. I’ve been planting things and watching them grow and picked up roller skating. It’s important to take breaks and rest.