[Essay] Josephine Sacabo: Those Who Dance

Josephine Sacabo’s art is both of our time and embedded deeply in a time past. She is an acclaimed, New Orleans-based contemporary photographer whose body of work seems infused with a powerful nostalgia for the non-digital photographic forms and techniques of photography’s nascent years as an artistic medium in the previous two centuries. As visitors to Those Who Dance, an original exhibition of Sacabo’s most recent series, will quickly realize, Sacabo (b. 1944) conjures a world of mystery and mysticism in her work, excavating stories about lives lived in secret struggle or without inhibition, reviving traditional processes of photography, and giving much-needed voice to women of the past whose legacies still inspire and haunt the artist to this day.

Any viewer of Sacabo’s work is introduced to one of the most poetic photographers active in the United States today — and, as seen throughout this exhibition, Sacabo frequently appends literal poetry or text as accompanying components of her photographs. Indeed, the text often seems as essential to fleshing out Sacabo’s complex imagery as is a close examination of the multilayered compositions themselves. Yet, when one describes Sacabo’s art as poetic, it is also meant more metaphorically, in the sense that viewers feel moved to consider something ethereal, something beyond the work itself, as a consideration of what exists both within each photograph and beyond it. 

This ethereality — this feeling of material lightness amidst psychological immersion — speaks to the transmutability of human experience. Through each of Sacabo’s various recent series that form the core of this exhibition (Those Who Dance, Disquiet, Cuentos, and Le Diable au Corps), we are invited to find pathos in others’ narratives, seeing how contemporary models can stand in for Sacabo’s historical female muses and how our own emotions can be stirred by those of people we do not know or whose experiences we have not truly shared. 

Moreover, this exhibition makes clear that Sacabo’s photographs look nothing like those of any other artist. That she revives once commonplace — and now considerably less commonly used — techniques of photography’s early years, like photogravure and tintypes, or employs now-unexpected materials, like Japanese tissue paper and metal plates, speaks to Sacabo’s prevailing interest in moving photography beyond the digital and more automated forms of the 21st century and bringing it (and us) back to photography’s quintessential artistic roots as a burgeoning creative medium in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  

By by H. Alexander Rich, Ph.D., Executive Director and Chief Curator

Josephine Sacabo: Those Who Dance will be on view in Gallery II from June 5 to October 17.