Manifest: Thirteen Colonies

Published September 2024

Radius Books, 2024

298 pages | $70

Wendel White is a documentary and fine art photographer whose powerful renderings of African American artifacts have recently culminated in an exhibition and book in conjunction with the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University in Cambridge MA. The book, Manifest: Thirteen Colonies, co-published by Radius Books (Santa Fe, May 2024) contains 220 images which have been carefully collected by numerous museums and institutions in America, many as part of their American history and African American culture collections and chosen by Wendel White for their impact, beauty, and storytelling value. Also included in the book are the writings of Brenda Dione Tindal, Cheryl Finley, Deborah Willis, Leigh Raiford, and Peabody Museum Curator of Visual Anthropology, Ilisa Barbash.

White describes the making of this book as a very gradual process which ultimately became a body of artifacts gathered to retell the narrative and evolution of African American communities in America. He has pursued fellowships, assignments, self-assignments, and traveled across the country to gain access to the various items that have become central to the book. 

White has said that the project actually started by accident. He had begun another project at the University of Rochester where he discovered a lock of Frederick Douglass’ hair. Confronting the power of that human specimen, he abandoned the other project entirely and developed a new sort of compulsion to think about and respond to the way in which African American history and culture has been accumulated and held in public institutions. In the 19th century it was actually common to ask for a lock of hair from an esteemed person, but it is unsettling to confront such a personal item in a museum collection today.

The technique that White uses adds to the eerie and timeless transformation of the objects. All are photographed on black velvet, which makes the objects seem to float in a void. And regardless of the scale of the actual object, things exist in a similar way; he photographs them at relatively the same size within the frame of his view camera. So, a door from the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, photographed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, is the same size in the photograph as the previously mentioned Douglass’ lock of hair that’s just sitting on a piece of paper. He is working with the idea of the past as something that is not completely opaque to us, but recedes away, as the objects in the photographs recede away from the viewer. And, of course, not all of these objects in collections are accessible to everyone, so in making these documents, he makes these historical objects available to a larger audience.

He finds photographing the items often emotionally and psychologically draining, depending on the piece. Some of the objects are very painful representations of the African American experience, while others may be joyful in terms of what it represents about Black life and the accomplishments and achievements of the African American community. But the work involves absorbing one story after another that reveal the obstacles that African Americans have had to contend with in the trajectory from enslavement through Jim Crow segregation, incarceration, and to the contemporary moment. 

All of these objects seem to have a spiritual quality; they whisper the stories and represent ancestors and are “resonant in one way or another of a human life,” White explained.

White counts Deborah Willis, James Van der Zee, Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People, Gordon Parks, and James Baldwin among his influences. While the Manifest project is continuing, there are many more states and collections to be mined, White’s next project may include subjects who will be able to speak back to him. He is planning on a portrait project in the near future.

 —Molly Roberts