Street, Wise
Duquann Sweeney and the Currents of Urban Life
Jersey City artist and activist Duquann Sweeney has been quietly amassing a body of photography that displays a sure touch and a hard-earned beauty. Currently running at the Hoboken Historical Museum through March 7, “Dignity, Beauty, and Everything Between” announces the emergence of a energetic new talent and of a budding oeuvre of highly distinctive and striking image-making.
Largely self-taught, an autodidact and self-made scholar, Sweeney began taking photographs around his home neighborhood of hardscrabbe Bergen-Lafayette, New Jersey, several years ago, gradually refining his approach and experimenting with different techniques, until he had established a style and a visual signature all his own.
The resultant photographs, taken in a silvery, austere black and white, are a visual journal of a Black community that practically vibrates with connection. “I once was asked, ‘Why are you taking pictures? There’s nothing good here,’” Sweeney said recently, “and the question baffled me for a second. My response was, ‘You are good and so many others.’” The act of recording Black life, of documenting the people around him, of him, becomes in Sweeney’s hands a form of witness, testifying to the resilience and beauty that lies latent in the quotidian.
To my mind what makes Sweeney’s work so startling and memorable is a very subtle inner tension that is difficult to describe. It stems from the union of a classical formalist approach to composition with a subject matter of great warmth and joy. The street scenes that Sweeney records are brimming with energy, joy, chaos — they are hot with life. The framing of these scenes, however, displays a nearly classical command of the formal vocabulary of photography — the mark of a cool, intelligent eye at work. This combination of heat and coolness, of chaos and control, is the driving energy, the tension, that makes Sweeney’s work so memorable.
Take “Jump 4 Jerry,” from 2019. The photo catches a young Black man in the midst of a frenetic freelstyle dance, his body suspended mere inches above the ground while a circle of onlookers observes, their faces frozen in absorption. The photo practically blares with energy and heat — you can almost hear the thumping of the portable stereo — yet the composition is as serene and precise as a Giotto. A stripe of paint on the asphalt runs from left to right along the bottom of the frame, compositionally parallel to a rope that slices off the upper quadrant of the frame. Within this angle the young boy’s legs and back form another, smaller triangle, one whose point almost bisects the line made by the rope. This series of wedges is counterbalanced by the the gentle arc made by the circle of onlookers compose a gentle arc across the top of the picture. The photo’s formal balance pushes back against its raucous subject, creating a pleasing and complex effect.
The dynamic extends even unto Sweeney’s photographs of single persons. (I hesitate to call them “portraits,” since they are not posed, not the product the formal context of a studio.) Take “Ronnie,” from 2020. The titular subject is a middle-aged Black man, dressed in a hooded sweatshirt, stocking cap, and jacket bearing the legend “Tsigonia Paints and Lumber.” He is bumping his fist against his chest in the time-honored demotic signal that conveys “heart” or “loyalty,” but the expression on his face, which is looking away from the camera towards something not visible outside the frame, is unreadable. This quotidian but mysterious figure, meanwhile, is framed within the angled lines of a chain-link fence and a row of storefront, receding into the background towards the vanishing point. Once again a subtle dialectic between the photo’s formal elegance and its gritty subject matter lends the artifact a tensile inner strength.
These days photographs like Sweeney’s, with their palpable sense of community and their emphasis on Black humanity, dignity, and grace, seem to carry an extra dimension of meaning, of truth. They are a way for a Black man, and a Black community, to say, “We matter. We exist. We are here.” In the context of contemporary America, their creation and existence alone feels like a radical act.
