HALF ART:
CHRIS THURMAN: Shooting the contrasts that Michael Jackson embodied
Pluralities of Being seeks to question "the role photography plays in the transmission of history and cultural identity", asking visitors "to rethink the inherent value of the images we consume
Michael Jackson was once an enigma. However, even before the flood of obituaries and think-pieces following his death in 2009, he had become all too explicable through a series of cliché paradoxes. First, he was a prodigy; then he was the boy who didn’t want to grow up. The son of an abusive father, he had problematic relationships with his own and others’ children, and he was repeatedly accused of sexual molestation. Jackson was a physical wonder whose dancing changed the choreographic landscape, but whose body collapsed after decades of mistreatment. He was part icon, part freak show.In the racial politics of the US during the final decades of the 20th century, he was a figure of black pride – yet the progressive distortion of his appearance seemed to undermine this. I imagine that few people have a better sense of these contradictions than Todd Gray, who was Jackson’s personal photographer in the 1980s. Gray draws on this archive in Pluralities of Being, overlaying images of Jack...
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