The grass at the two men’s feet is high, but somehow not unkempt. A breeze would make the blades dance.
The image is in “Beautiful, Still”, a new book of photographs by Colby Deal. The title is a succinct artist’s statement about the enduring grace of Deal’s subjects, the people of Houston’s Third Ward.
After the Civil War, African Americans who had been enslaved began settling in the Third Ward, the southeast quadrant of Houston. Third Ward landmarks include Emancipation Park, site of annual Juneteenth celebrations commemorating the end of slavery in Texas.
Deal, born and raised in Houston and a graduate of The University of Houston’s Bachelor of Fine Arts program, grew up visiting his grandmother in the Third Ward. Perhaps he started when he was the age of a group of children in one of his photographs. They are playing on a porch. One little girl with a ribbon in her hair is a blur of energy.
Deal began the project that would become this book in 2013 by visiting people who knew his grandmother, asking them to pose for photographs, then returning to give his subject prints of his work. Portraits are the anchor – a couple framed by their front porch and lit only by an bulb, the kind you leave on to guide latecomers home; a pensive young man with his chin in his hand; a woman in a dancer’s pose, head turned to show the profile of a Benin bronze. A mother gazing tenderly at a plump baby in her lap, the child gazing at a shaft of sunlight.
Deal’s subjects are beautiful, and still in the Third Ward. Other photographs are cityscapes that attest to harsh realities outside the frame. In one photo, what appear to be the household belongings of an evicted family are piled in shopping carts under a street sign pointing the way to the “Third Ward Multi-Service Center & Health Center.”
Climbing land prices and property taxes are resulting in more and more Third Ward residents selling their homes and scattering. The cost to buy and rent new homes that are replacing the old in the Third Ward are out of reach of many Black Houstonians who, because of racism, have been denied opportunities to advance and build wealth.
“Beautiful, Still” is both a title and a list of the central elements of both Deal’s photographs. There is beauty, though not always prettiness. And a wordless stillness. The book has no captions. Deal gives viewers silence, space to imagine the stories he’s telling, to fill in the gaps with our own histories and hopes.
Some of Deal’s photographs evoke death’s stillness. In those, faces are shadowed and ghostly, streetscapes eerily empty. In a decade or so, such photographs and memories may be all that is left to attest to the Third Ward that was.
Deal has experimented with incorporating his images into giant collages that included paint and found objects. That work memorializes the Third Ward by making his photographs monumental.
“Beautiful, Still” is both a title and a connection to a tradition of finding elegance in the ordinary.
Among Deal’s heroes is the photographer Earlie Hudnall Jr., whose images of Black life in Houston have been widely exhibited. Some of Hudnall’s work can be seen in “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse”, an exhibition that is orchestral in scope and opened at Denver's Museum of Contemporary Art on September 16. It closes there on February 5.
Deal says Hudnall’s “photographs have that Gordon Parks tinge to them, but with a different kind of atmosphere, like the kind that Atget created surrounding empty spaces. And compositionally, his photographs are always on point; self-explanatory of a narrative.”
While Deal’s work is rooted in one Houston neighborhood, his tale of displacement will be familiar to people in cities across the United States. Including Denver, where from 2018 to 2020 Deal was an artist in residence at the Redline Contemporary Art Center. We’re privileged to have one of the images he made at RedLine in my family’s collection in our Denver home.
Deal chose lines by the Denver poet Hakeem Furious as an epigraph for the book. The poem ends: “Papa got a brand new camera and it’s to be inherited by the sun.” Deal and Hudnall are both the sons of photographers, a coincidence that brings me back to the book’s last photo. The two men pictured in that photo could be Deal’s and Hudnall’s fathers. The men are playing chess. One wears a crisp shirt and white fedora, his legs crossed, an impossibly shiny shoe angled just-so to catch the light, a hand hovering over a pawn. He and his companion, equally carefully dressed, are sitting in elegant dining room chairs, their board on a Queen Anne side table, arranged in the garden in front of a house whose paint is peeled and its windows boarded.
It’s almost as if Deal is holding his breath so as not to miss the possibility in small moments. His is a way of looking that offers a way of thinking about our world.