Crying for the World, from the project Father’s Jewels, 2022

In the fall of 1990, as the “culture wars” reverberated throughout the art world, Aperture published an issue titled “The Body in Question.” Reproductive rights, the AIDS crisis, shifting notions of gender, and the attack on the National Endowment for the Arts by conservative politicians were among the roll call of urgent concerns (many eerily echoed today) tackled across its pages. For the photographer John Edmonds, who is celebrated for his emotive, intimate studies of Black masculinity, this issue still resonates. “I thought a lot about ‘The Body in Question,’” Edmonds says, “and had the idea of a group of individuals performing grief.” During the production in New York, in an old building selected by Edmonds for its quality of feeling out of place and time, he cast a group of men he pictured as forming a family unit. Organizing them into a range of tableaux to explore how their bodies could be oriented within the camera’s frame, he was curious as to what stories would emerge and what emotions might be conveyed. Edmonds’s references run the gamut. He views the television series The Sopranos as critical to debates around violence in entertainment and pop culture of the 1990s. Connecting to his ongoing interest in African art, the photographs also feature an Igbo sculpture, 3-D printed for this project, that represents parental spirits; the men gather around totemic objects as if partaking in improvised religious rituals. While considering the matrix of censorship, art, and religion in the ’90s, Edmonds recalled his own religious upbringing: “I was interested in art that was censored because it used religion as a framework to talk about the politics of the time. I was raised very religious, during the years when that censorship was happening. Religion is something many of us are traumatized by. I think it is a human right to use the things that have traumatized you to search for healing.” This special limited-edition print is from a series of works commissioned for Aperture magazine #248: “The 70th Anniversary Issue”.

Pigment Print
Image Size: 20 x 13 1/2 inches
Paper Size: 20 x 16 inches
Edition of 10 + 3 AP
Signed and numbered by the artist