Jonathan Mark Jackson

I am a photographer that engages historic Black memory through objects, landscape, and portraiture. My practice is a visual exploration of haunting. I define haunting as the experience of entering a temporal state where the past, present, and future overlap. I photograph within the preserved spaces of my ancestors and fictive kin (African, European, and Indigenous peoples who collided in 17th century New England) to activate this temporality. I challenge the tenants of traditional preservation which shroud the complex violence of the nation's beginning. My method is built through a combination of documentary practice and critical fabulation. This method, defined by cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, is a wrestling of facts and silences to “imagine what cannot be verified ... and to reckon with the precarious lives [of the enslaved] which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance.” I restage and retouch the homes, workplaces, and landscape of my ancestors to showcase the recursive nature of time. The works included within this application represent my dialectical approach of figuring historical Black memory - the afterlife of slavery - as phantom through still life and sound. The somatic and haptic qualities of the photograph produce an experiential understanding of how historical narrative is constructed, what powers are at play within the narrative, and how Blackness ruptures silences enforced by colonial archives.

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