A “black box” – different a flight data recorder, theater and camera – is essentially a repository for different memory modes. Many are in close conversation in American photographer Dona Ann Mcadams’s Moving New Autobiography, appropriately entitled Black box. Just as her images are emphatically her own, including the form of this book that maps her four decades as a photographer, activist and witness of history. Two expressive strands, one a retrospective of its strongest visual work and the other a series of flashememoirs, arise to produce an object that is larger than the sum of its parts – a single merger of literary and photographic art.
McAdams, born in 1954 in Ronkonkoma, Long Island, states that her most current parent as a baby was the television set whose “way of seeing” led her for a life behind the lens. Indeed, one of the most arresting images in the book shows Baby Dona, frightening alone, for an overexposed screen that glows like an unearthly robot domination. Most children from the middle of the century can relate, although we may not have proven the astute student of his visual lessons that McAdams did.
The next childhood memory she offers is that of seeing her first horse, a Shetland -Pony. Its primacy on these pages indicates the transforming role of horses in her life and work. Her photos of people and events, taken with a beloved Leica M2 In the course of a decades of career, situish her square in the tradition of the 20th-century documentary and street photography, including the work of Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlanderand Helen Levitt. But her horses (and also goats) are visually one of a different world, their beauty is almost abstract, their obdurate mystery intact.
Black box Is not an illustrated life, but a depicted life – which I intentionally mean as a work of art in my own class. Growing up with working parents, her relationship with Catholicism, her attraction of her attraction to women in all respects, and other details of McAdams’ personal history are entangled with accounts that illuminate the development of her practice, of her first camera – a Talismanic – A Talismanic – A Talismanic – A Talismanic – A Talismanic – A Talismanic Polaroid Swinger whose instant film turned out to be too expensive for much use – for the image she showed in 1974 for criticism at the San Francisco Art Institute, although it was not formally registered. Winogrand, then a guest instructor, has chosen the photo with encouraging praise: “This is really a good photo.” It is, as well as unmistakably influenced by the eminent photographer. This also applies to various others, in particular those who have the type of American landscape in which signage overshadows people for which it is intended.
A feeling of the creepy penetrates both photos and texts everywhere Black box. 1980s and 90S New York City, where McAdams was accused of catching the groundbreaking implementing artists of that time as a house photographer at Performance space 122Was a busy intersection with a broken traffic light: large socio-cultural movements constantly clashed. Yet McAdams had a creepy capacity to encounter the influential movers and events of the day, wherever she was, from San Francisco to Australia to Central America. It is her generous openness for the moment that magnetized crucial personalities and incidents. A memorial for these moments made of poetry and light, the book of remembering by Dona Ann Mcadams is not easily forgotten.
Black Box: A photographic memoirs (2024) By Dona Ann Mcadams is published by Saint Lucy Books and is available online and through independent booksellers. The accompanying exhibition Dona Ann Mcadams: Black Box Will be on display in the Pratt Manhattan Gallery (144 West 14th Street, West Village, Manhattan) from April 18 to June 7.
