Reframing the past - Clarissa Sligh

Clarissa Sligh is another photographer who has drawn on her own family for the basis of her work, but in a completely different way.

As a young person, Sligh became the keeper of the family album. She found the photographs to be in stark contrast to the way black people were portrayed in the media: "I never saw positive images about blacks in the newspaper. Making a family album was, for me, a reaction to all the negative imagery that was in the daily newspaper, one way of resisting those stereotypes"

In an interview with Laura Marks, Film Studies Professor
Carleton University, Ottawa, Sligh explains how her own family album became important to her, and how she personalised it even more through the use of text:

“There were six of us, and as the third child and first girl in the family, I became the keeper of the family album. Part of the reason I put so much energy and time into it was that as a black kid reading the Washington Post and Times Herald I wanted to correct the media images of blacks as being criminals and on welfare and create another image for us as a family. I was trying to create a sense of pride visually, which the Washington Post didn't give me. I was trying to say, well, you won't give it to me but I will make it right here, I will do it myself, and I will have this record available to show other people. I realized the writing said a lot about who I was. So I decided to write under the photographs at first, or around them. It was only a couple of years later, when I started writing on the pictures, into the pictures, that I began to really like it.”

Sligh has a hard time keeping the balance between her sense of self as an artist and her upbringing: "As a person who was raised poor and trained to become a productive member of society, I still have a hard time relating to "making art" as my work: my father always said artists are goof-offs, that they don't want to work for a living."

She uses the family album as a vehicle for her self-expression and also for more political purposes - to counter stereotpyes.

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Clarissa Sligh

Reinscribing the Self: Interview with Clarissa Sligh