'Black Box: A Photographic Memoir' Dona Ann McAdams' intimate collection of stories and images

  • by Jim Provenzano
  • Saturday January 18, 2025
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'Junior's horses, Sandgate, Vermont' 2001 (photo: Dona Ann McAdams)
'Junior's horses, Sandgate, Vermont' 2001 (photo: Dona Ann McAdams)

From urban protests to plaintive animal farm imagery, Dona Ann McAdams collection of photos and brief autobiographical essays in "Black Box: A Photographic Memoir" (Saint Lucy Books) offer a view into the artist's life and work, their parallels, as well as her expansive and precise artistry.

From childhood memories of learning how to take care of horses to her urban photojournalism at performance spaces and nightclubs in New York City, McAdams vision extends beyond categorization or eras (1970s to today). Compositionally, her work rivals Diane Arbus (an early inspiration, she notes in an essay about a school trip to the Museum of Modern Art), Robert Frank and other classic 20th-century photographers.

From the book's cover image, dating back to 1955 with an infant McAdams staring into a glowing television screen, to a family portrait in 2023 (on a Vermont goat farm, where she lives with her husband, author Brad Kessler), McAdams works span decades.

Her prints have been exhibited, and are in the collections of, several major international museums, and she's received multiple grants and fellowships. Her work has been published in Aperture, The New York Times, The Washington Post and many other books and publications.

In 1965, her first camera was a Polaroid Swinger, which she loved, but the film was expensive, so she moved onto 35 mm later on.

'ACT UP, Grand Central Terminal, New York City' 1991 (photo: Dona Ann McAdams)  

In the Afterward essay (longer than all McAdams' poetic entries), Joanna Howard defines the insights in MacAdam's work:

"Dona Ann McAdams 'Black Box' is a work of exposure in all its richest connotations. Bringing to light — noticing that which is around her, an eye for detail, the fine print in memory. Her photographs are famous for their canny historical capture, but relationship between image and text is already present in her photographic archive, ample examples of the potential for meaning making between the juxtaposition of word with image: often cheeky, sometimes uncanny, at times harrowing or prophetic, and this book gives an opportunity for her to look at her life and practice in detail, and to expose their strange collisions."

'South 9th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn' 1979 (photo: Dona Ann McAdams)  

Little ditties
McAdams abbreviates her memoir into short essays that she calls "little ditties." One of her unusual career beginnings was assisting her mother in a dentist's office, noting that her first photos were of teeth.

Other essays recall her dad's love of roadside hotdogs, and other nostalgia-twinged tidbits, like being expelled from a Catholic school.

Most of the photos do not directly parallel the essays, but they serve as symbolic or metaphoric images. Some are specific, like the image of the massive dust cloud of the crumbling Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

Full disclosure: I've actually been photographed by McAdams at ACT UP demonstrations in the 1980s/'90s, and at performances at P.S. 122 where she was the house photographer for 23 years. Photos of much better-known performers like Diamanda Galas, David Wojnarowicz and Meredith Monk are included in the book.

McAdams talks about her encounter with David Bowie, which at first at the Mudd Club was only silent nods. But then he appropriated one of her prints of performer Ron Athey for a series of his own electronically-colorized images. Lawyers are referenced, and in the incident essay, she says she would've settled for simply sitting down for tea with Bowie. The image is not shown, but is accompanied by a blank page.

'Self-portrait in rearview, Belcher, New York' 2006 (photo: Dona Ann McAdams)  

In 2005, McAdams returned to horses as a subject at the Saratoga Racetrack in upstate New York. Equine grooming and training images offer a stately attitude. The book and its accompanying essays are poetic, prosaic, and a beautifully distilled telling of the photographer's life, career highlights and cathartic moments.

In her epilogue, McAdams shares an astute summation. "Photographs don't speak," she writes. "Photography is a silent art without explanation. Photographs can tell a million different stories, voiced and captioned by the viewer. These ditties are like songs meant as melodies for the photographs. Sometimes they have a relationship with each other, but often they do not. The ditties are as truthful as memory serves but memory fades and the Blarney runs thick in my veins. Yet this is as close to what I recall. To all within them, I hope I've done it right."

She has, in abundance.

Dona Ann McAdams' 'Black Box: A Photographic Memoir,' Saint Lucy Books, $50, 256 pages. www.saintlucybooks.com
www.donaannmcadams.com


Watch John R. Killacky's mini-documentary:



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