Harris’ Family Pictures USA helps people tell stories about families, both given and chosen.
by G.W. Mercure
Stories serve many purposes in our culture. Among other uses, stories can achieve shared agendas and cooperation, can entertain, and can reveal truths too complex to be stated outright. And, of course, they preserve the events, people, struggles, jubilations, setbacks, and perspectives that are the timber and clay of our ever-escaping times. To understand this about the medium of the story is to transcend its artifice, its transience—to create something that is more than art, and that belongs to everyone and anyone. A story is the shared alley off the paved industrial thoroughfare of history where governments, conquerors, and empires have dominion over all the traffic lights and street signs. That alley tells us all the truth about that thoroughfare. Have stories ever been more important than they are now? And if one accepts the vital urgency of story-keeping and storytelling right now, one must also accept that for some cultural and ethnic groups, that urgency is even greater.
“When you’re talking about stories that don’t exist, that are suppressed, in terms of being reflective of various types of communities, the action of bringing those stories to life or giving those stories an image necessitated moving outside of conventional ways of cinematic storytelling,” says Thomas Allen Harris, who will present two important events at Twenty Summers this month: On May 28, House of Haizlip, a selection of photographs from events programmed by his close friend and mentor, Ellis Haizlip, between 1986 and 1989, and Queer Ancestor Workshop: Storytelling Practice, on May 31.
Harris is a thinking-person’s artist: practical, result-oriented, and blessed with a discipline that never loses sight of the most primal purposes of art. Harris is an artist, filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist, and veteran of the early U.S. culture wars when the HIV/AIDS crisis set queer communities in literally mortal agitation with the Reagan administration, et al. His work has been acknowledged and decorated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Emmys, the NAACP, the American Library Association, and all the national and international filmmaking bodies you can think of. He moved from conventional filmmaking out of necessity.
“I had several different careers. I started out in public television. I produced a lot of public television stuff during the AIDS crisis, and then I taught, and I made personal films. But a good friend of my parents gave me Howard Zinn’s book, The People’s History of the United States. So the combination of being outside of a way of thinking about Blackness, and also being queer, I realized I had to, in some ways, make my own audience and make my own way in terms of storytelling.”
So what does that look like? What does Harris do? And what will attendees who join him for the Queer Ancestor Workshop be doing?
One of Harris’s most acclaimed works is called Vintage: Families of Value, in which he gave video cameras to three groups of Black, queer siblings and they interviewed each other over three to five years, and Harris compiled, archived, and distributes the results.
Queer Ancestor Workshop will be similar, but more immediate: “People share family photographs or photographs of people who are families of choice or biological families and celebrate queer folks who made an impact on them personally. It’s kind of like a memory project and also a celebration project,” he says, “bringing them into the space and honoring them, while also creating a kind of an album.”
The event that precedes the Queer Ancestor Workshop, House of Haizlet, Harris calls a “pop-up exhibition” at Twenty Summers’ new gallery space inside the Schoolhouse Gallery, Stanley, on Commercial Street, is connected to ongoing family photograph projects the work of which he shares with his collaborator and protege Sonnet Carter.
For Harris, storytelling can become political, can become radical, and he suggests that it can be one of the intentions of storytelling. “To speak our truth, I think, is really radical,” he says. “This gets to the core of the Family Pictures Institute.” The Family Pictures Institute for Inclusive Storytelling is a center and archive for “robust research, evaluation, scholarly discussion, and artistic interpretation.” It is the fulcrum of his collaboration with Carter.
“We’re giving a frame,” he continues. “And that frame elevates a story from ambiguity around ‘Is this a worthy story, worthy of being told?’ We’re saying, ‘yes, it is.’ And by positioning queer stories and stories from marginalized communities, we are elevating those stories to this other space.”
When something is radical, it is political. We should all be anxiously aware right now that history is written by the victors.
“It’s not just the stories of the wealthy and landowners,” he says. “It’s stories of ordinary people and marginalized people, people of color, queer people.”
What isn’t considered enough, perhaps, and what could be a manifest umbrella under which one can keep many of the cultural elements that underserve and marginalize some groups while centralizing others, is that those history-writing victors also become the models for everything: The very methodology for record-keeping and story preservation can be barricaded by those who developed it. Harris and Carter are collecting the stories of “people who don’t really have a definitive way of thinking about their story.”
So the end goal, for Harris, isn’t a digital or bricks-and-mortar warehouse of photographs, films, and stories. The goal is “to lift up these stories and to celebrate and raise a flag for inclusivity, equity, and belonging. That’s what our origin and strengths are—to be proud and fearless.”
Thomas Allen Harris’ House of Haizlip will be on view at Stanley, inside the Schoolhouse Gallery, 494 Commercial St., Provincetown, May 28 – 30, and there will be an opening reception with Harris on Wednesday, May 28, 6 – 7:30 p.m. His Queer Ancestor Workshop will be held on Saturday, May 31 at the Hawthorne Barn, 29 Miller Hill Rd. Each event has a separate $20 suggested donation. For information about these events and to register, call 508.812.0278 or visit 20summers.org.
