Even now, you still can’t believe “Blue Dog Sundown” was a photograph. It looked like a painting: The light created a path on the large rocks, luring you inside the frame, compelling you to the water’s edge. It was an exquisite piece — one of eight in the exhibit Mami Wata: Capturing the Spirit, by master photographer Bruce McNeil at the Honfleur Gallery.
Days later as you ponder the experience, it’s hard to believe the gallery was on Good Hope Road Southeast in Ward 8. That certainly wasn’t D.C. Councilman Marion Barry’s or mayoral candidate Vincent C. Gray’s Ward 8, where pathologies are magnified and residents are forever sculpted into victims unable to fully affect their own destinies.
Folks may want to call it former Mayor Anthony A. Williams’ or current Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s Ward 8, if they need to cast it as agitprop.
The Ward 8 you witnessed was buzzing. McNeil and Honfleur, which is owned by Duane Gautier, were palpable examples of its budding potential; the story of the gallery, with its inspiring slogan “Art Breathes Life,” is saved for another day.
Your thoughts are locked on McNeil — the river man, as in the Anacostia River.
“This is Awareness 101. I’m telling people, ‘You have a river,’ ” he said when asked about the intent of the work. Although a New York native, who holds citizenship in the United States and Canada, McNeil has been a Ward 7 resident for the last 15 years; his mother has lived there for 30 years. “When they are looking at [the exhibit], I want them to visualize the river — how it could be. To have dialogue about it. If nothing else, to just go and visit.”
Who pays attention to the river? Politicians use it as demarcation, separating the city and its people: employed versus unemployed; low-income blacks versus rich whites.
McNeil’s Anacostia River is a healing connection. In “Celestial Beauty,” an image of a woman is superimposed in the river. Another appears in “Looking Black At You.” But the river itself holds you captive.
Where is the Anacostia whose pollution environmentalists lament? The one you saw inside Honfleur is serene, poster-card picturesque. In fact, McNeil’s “Anacostia Overview” was reprinted on a postcard to promote the exhibition.
“To really attract the public, I had to create a romantic fairy tale,” McNeil explained, adding that to do that he used Mami Wata, a mythic water spirit he learned about during a visit to the Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art.
Now he has created his own Mami Wata as a “symbol of hope” about the city, the people east of the river and the Anacostia River itself. Various environmental groups have asked to the show parts of the full 15-piece series after it departs Honfleur on Sept. 10.
McNeil said he hopes next to exhibit his Norman Rockwell-esque Metro series of photographs. If he can get you back on the subway, you have resolved to stop calling him “River Man.” Surely he would be “Miracle Man.”
Jonetta Rose Barras’ column appears on Monday and Wednesday. E-mail her at [email protected].
