The Erotics of Coreen Simpson

"She has given us everything but her face. Which means she has given us everything and nothing. "Masked Nude, Harlem NY," a black-and-white photograph from 1999, is as paradoxical a work as the name suggests. A Black woman lies on a couch. Her open limbs dangle all over the velvet, her pubic triangle hardly concealed. She reclines as the sitters of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Gustave Courbet reclined."

"But this woman would never have been their muse. She has been photographed by Coreen Simpson, a twentieth-century Black woman artist, with twentieth-century matters on the mind. Simpson-a photographer, a jewelry designer, and a writer-is, at base, a recorder of fashion. For decades, she has trawled uptown and downtown to understand who the people are by capturing how they want to look. Or not look: by presenting us with bodies and not faces, Simpson engages in a kind of anti-representation."

""The face was not important in the history of nude photography," Simpson said, in an interview not too long ago. And what has Simpson used to obscure the faces of the subjects in her photographs? That mask we call "African," a designation nearly obliterated of all meaning. One of the ideas Simpson seems to be working out in her masked-nude series, I think, is the clash between the commercial and the spiritual."

Coreen Simpson's masked-nude photographs present Black women as figures of withholding by obscuring faces while exposing bodies. "Masked Nude, Harlem NY" (1999) depicts a reclining Black woman whose pose echoes Renoir and Courbet nudes but who would not have been their muse. Simpson works across photography, jewelry design, and writing, and she documents fashion and self-presentation uptown and downtown. By photographing bodies without faces Simpson practices anti-representation and interrogates identities formed through style. The masks labelled "African" are ambiguous, invoking commercial facsimiles from uptown shops rather than an authentic motherland. The work probes tensions between commercial and spiritual meanings.

Read at The New Yorker