Blood Orange’s album “Freetown Sound,” from 2016, is about the drama of returning home. For the artist Dev Hynes, who grew up in East London, this does not mean striving to be an authority on his father’s Sierra Leone but, instead, tracing the tentative shape of the mother nation in his consciousness. His is an eager, first-generation love, the insatiable kind that is based in estrangement. According to the photographer Deana Lawson, when Hynes came to visit her studio several years ago, the musician told her that the album had also been inspired by a photograph she had taken in 2009. She let him use it for the album cover.
“Binky and Tony in Love” is a totem. Lawson was in her twenties and living in the artist protectorate of black Brooklyn when, in 2009, she asked a makeup artist she knew, named Binky, to be her model for a piece “about young love,” she told Rawiya Kameir at The Fader, in 2016. Binky brought a friend, Anthony; in the photograph, which was taken in Lawson’s bedroom, he wears baggy shorts and a loose undershirt, and sits prone on a flouncy bedspread the color of curry, his head at home in the cave of Binky’s chest. Lawson wanted Binky for her diminutive height; in the photo, she stands over him, also dressed in “house clothes”—booty shorts printed with neon-tropical fronds, an itty-bitty bra. She throws her arm over his shoulders, and looks over her own to shoot at us an enchanted stare, as if to exert on us the same power that has left her lover so tender.
Lawson has a knack for identifying and arranging the strangely potent components of black interiors that mean nothing and so much—the Michael Jackson poster, unframed on the wall; the light of the unshaded bulb; the devotional candle, unlit; and the “loud” bedspread, trimmed with lace, the kind of tapestry that provides for many children their first impressions of taste, of flashy self-expression. “Binky and Tony in Love” is only technically a portrait of two people; Lawson is no journalist. Acrylic nails, Notorious B.I.G., and her mother, Dana Lawson, all count as inspirations, she has said; we might also detect the manipulated vérité of Lorna Simpson, Philip Kwame Opagya, and Lauren Greenfield as influences. What Lawson documents in her hyper-staged compositions are immense maxims; this one is a template of black love.
Lawson was raised in Rochester, New York—home to the headquarters of Kodak. As an undergraduate at Penn State, she first studied business; by 2004, she had received an M.F.A. in photography from RISD. In 2013, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship. By now, she has earned the informal title of art star. She has encountered subjects in the black enclaves of Bed-Stuy, Soweto, Port-au-Prince, and elsewhere. They tend to be acquaintances arranged in the intimate poses of lovers or family, and she tends to shoot them in their homes or apartments, or in the homes or apartments of other strangers, which she carefully arranges with the cluttered trifles of working- and middle-class life, producing an arousing feeling of déjà vu.
Lawson’s work is already attracting a certain kind of nervous praise, including the inevitable claim that hers are images of black people that we have not seen before. This dissonance—being told that honest documents of black people don’t exist, even as we walk among them—is something that Lawson seems to enjoy playing with; a viewer looking too quickly at the images on display in large gold frames at her first solo New York City show, which opened earlier this month, at Sikkema Jenkins, and think that the saturated images were found family photos, extracted from boxes in an attic. The scenes look natural, arranged in lived-in kitchens and living rooms, and yet, in their organization, distantly painterly. Looking at the broad men in oversized shirts, some crouched, some standing, in front of a backdrop of peach chintz, posing for posterity, in “Kings,” from 2016, we think we might have seen something similar on a wall in the humid home of a neighborhood auntie. We have seen these plastic-covered couches and stained carpets and kitchen tiles yellowed with grease. We have seen a lanky mother, head-wrapped, look bored as her brown infant rages in her arms. This image, especially, is the sort of classical photograph, if printed in a mainstream magazine, that could be accompanied by an auxiliary caption that would make the mother a pawn in some political fight; because Lawson is a director and a defender interested in exploiting memory, and not personhood, she needs only call it “Woman with Child.”
Lawson’s images proudly appropriate a popular black aesthetic, absorbing modes as varied as those found in old issues of Jet, in hip-hop souvenirs. And, in fact, it is that rush of assorted associations, augmented by Lawson’s almost fetishistic spatial creativity, that makes these photos fun to get lost in. Well before “Freetown Sound,” it was clear that the grain and grease of her scenes recalled album art. My favorite motif of Lawson’s is that of the odalisque by way of the video vixen. Recent generations have been just as influenced by Lil’ Kim’s cover of “Hard Core”—Kimberly Denise Jones in a sex nest choked by roses, straddling a bear-skin rug, the bear head still attached—and the pinups Esther Baxter and Melyssa Ford as they have been by Vogue. Lawson’s “Soweto Queen,” taken in South Africa, last year, shows a new kind of black female nude. The heavy lavender curtains have been drawn, a towel placed underneath her. On it, one makes out a child’s toy and a remote; the framed photos beside her complete the suggestion that she has stolen a moment away from family obligations to take a nude in her living room. For whom? The gel taming the baby hairs on her forehead, still a little wet, suggests that it is someone special—or perhaps she just wants to create something for herself.
Lawson rarely inserts herself in her photographs, but her touch is everywhere, giving her subjects permission, histories, intentions. Looking around her new show, I kept returning to “Seagulls in Kitchen.” During her travels last year, Lawson encountered a man and a woman in Charleston, who were “basically strangers,” the gallerist at Sikkema Jenkins told me. They agreed to have Lawson shoot them as lovers. The title refers to the wall decoration, the kind of sweet ornament that, were the tableau real, would almost certainly be accompanied by a story. The couple’s prom pose, the man plaiting his hands over her soft torso. Tattoos on oiled brown skin are reminders of prior lives; food on the shelf of the present one. Flickers of the couple’s personality are awakened and then drowned out by the eye that posed these subjects just so. Lawson’s absent presence reminds me of Emma Amos’s 1973 painting “Sandy and Her Husband.” Yes, it has some social force—a painting of an interracial couple dancing in their living room in the time that such dancing came hand-in-hand with suffering. But the draw is the frame on the wall that holds a miniature of Amos’s defiant self-portrait “Flower Sniffer,” from 1966. It is in this way that Lawson commands the action: bent over her flowers, one eye darting outward, making sure that we know who has arranged them.
