Depth of Field: Christopher Cook
Chris Cook © Cook Studios 2019. All Rights Reserved
“You can’t talk about the struggle for human freedom unless you talk about the different dimensions of what it is to be human. And when we’re talking about art you’re talking about meaning, you’re talking about love, you’re talking about resistance, you’re talking about imagination, you’re talking about empathy. All of these are part and parcel of what it is to talk about human freedom. And so, art is about those who have the courage to use bits of reality to get us to see reality, in light of a new reality. So, it’s about vision by means of imagination, it’s about empathy in terms of looking through this world and seeing the possibilities of a new world, a better world , a more decent, a more compassionate world. And so, be one a painter, musician, sculptor, dancer, in fact, be one human being who aspires to learn the art of living, because in the end I think that’s what the arts are really about, how do we become, all of us become, artists of living? Which has to do with courage, which has to do with love, which has to do with justice, which has to do with leaving the world better than we found it.”
-Cornell West
At first glance, Christopher Cook is shy and self-effacing. He is a young man whose warm and open demeanor invites the question, “Who is this person and what is his story?”
It begins 28 years ago, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He was nurtured in a household where he was encouraged to become a reflective, insightful, curious, confident, socially, and politically engaged citizen. His interdisciplinary spheres of interest led him to pursue computer engineering at City Tech where he also enjoyed skateboarding. The comradery he enjoyed inspired him to take photographs as documents and souvenirs of the fun, laughter, and friendship specific to skateboard culture. Within this spirited way of life, independence and fierce opinionated individualism are the revered badges of honor and respect. Once an outsider sport, skateboarding has always had a profound influence on activities and ideas that had nothing to do with it, because of the interdisciplinary discourse among skaters.
Once a small counterculture activity that emerged in the late 1940s /early 1950s, among off season surfers, skateboarding has permeated society by making a significant impact on global pop culture through fashion, music, and politics. By 2016 it became an Olympic sport. Encouraged by his friends, Cook took a photography class at Kingsborough Community College and three years later met respected New York City based photographer, Curtis Willochs at K & M Camera. His sterling reputation as a teacher who is committed to cultivating the best in his students at the International Center of Photography, Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons, has made him one of the most sought-after photographers to have as a teacher/mentor.
Within the last eight years, Cook has simultaneously been working on several series. Thematically they include Black Lives Matter, Gentrification, Covid-19, Skateboarding, Subways, Relationships, Shadows and Night Photography. The work presented in this monograph focuses on work from his Black Lives Matter and Gentrification Series.
Cook’s Gentrification Series reflects a commitment to photographing his childhood community by honoring the increasingly distant memory of the businesses, families and social gatherings that are captured beyond the passing of time. Like a phantom limb, his childhood Brooklyn is sometimes present even though it has largely disappeared. His focused interest in documenting and archiving the people, places and events emphasize the saturated spaces where family, music, art, food, and community is rapidly displacing and alienating Black life and culture. Cook’s vision for the Gentrification Series is “ Because I am a product of my neighborhood, I want to document and archive the beauty and feeling of what Brooklyn means to me, especially to show the next generation what existed before. Through my lens, I am making historical artifacts that reflect the culture of Black identity within my community.”
Chris Cook © Cook Studios 2019. All Rights Reserved
Gentrification and Brooklyn have become synonymous and is the globally recognized poster child for the face of Gentrification. Around the world, city-dwellers have started to refer to their own respective “Brooklyn’s,” a term that has evolved to broadly categorize a place as “bohemian,” “hip” and ultimately, “expensive.” Yet, more than simply the movement of people into and out of a neighborhood, gentrification is a process that unfolds through the structural forces of government and business, which create urban environments where only wealthy people - who are often White - can afford to live. And this happens at the expense of low-income residents who have lived there for generations. The term “gentrification” has entered common parlance to define neighborhood change resulting from wealthy residents moving into a community. The term was first coined by sociologist Ruth Glass in her 1964 book London: Aspects of Change. At the time, she sought to describe the changes happening in the borough of Islington, an area of London that had been home to working class West Indian immigrants, until young creative professionals began to move in. Her choice of the word “gentry” underscores the class-based conflict inherent to the gentrification process, in which housing, economic, and health issues affect a community’s history and culture, simultaneous to reducing social capital. Specific to the gentrification process is shifting neighborhood racial and ethnic compositions and income. This includes adding new stores and resources in previously run-down neighborhoods that tend to outprice the buying power of the original residents. The primary beneficiaries of this calculated effort are wealthy developers, new residents and businesses in these communities. Their presence leads to commercial development, improved economic opportunity for themselves, lower crime rates and an increase in property values. This is at the heart of Cook’s Gentrification Series. His urgency to bear witness to the past and present, in his community, before it is too late to immortalize a face, a building, a corner, a playground or a community center is ever present.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Cook’s unassuming demeanor is the strength of his work so early in his career. How he emerges within his first decade of making photographs with a commanding and insightful body of work for him to warrant a monograph at this juncture in his young career is astounding, given the fact that it takes most photographers several decades to accomplish such a feat. One of the interesting aspects of Cook’s foray into photography is that his innate curiosity became a springboard for him to trust his own sensibilities first as a means to systematically create building blocks for an artistic practice that fully embraces the analog photographic process; of loading film into the camera, combined with the magic of eye hand coordination to articulate light on surface through the lens, only to see how the light interacts with the chemicals in the film to make a recorded image.
The significance of this time-honored practice is that within the first two decades into the twenty first century, a generation of photographers no longer develop film, use a darkroom, nor understand the direct relationship between seeing the photograph and the print. In fact, this symbiotic relationship precisely nurtures the development of a better photographer. Since its entry into the consumer market in the 1990s, the digital camera was born, after perfecting electrical engineer, Steven Sasson’s 1975 prototype. Unfortunately, the chemical processes in the film, and on the light-sensitive coated paper during the analog printing process, is a commitment to the medium that many photographers have either abandoned or have never experienced. To Cook’s credit, the quality of his prints are pristine, with even tones within the wide spectrum from white to black, with the full range of grey tones. His use of color in his color work, is used to highlight the composition, like a complimentary antagonist on stage.
There is a direct correlation between Cook’s integration of the thought process between his computer engineering studies and the way he organizes the frame of his photographs and pulls together key elements within the structure of an image inclusive of line, shape, form, texture, pattern, color, space, time, place, and emotion. If Cook were programing a robotic arm to pick up a cup, he would have to break down its’ movement on a component level from the shoulder to elbow to wrist to hand and each finger and all their positions in space. Then program every step into a module to control and coordinate all the movements. In this sense, programing is a type of poetry using an intricate shorthand to build a program to coordinate each separate component to control the movement of the arm so that it not only picks the cup up but hands it to him, or you. An action much larger than the sum of its’ parts, considering how many things one picks up in a day. Only by properly fitting the modules together in the proper order will the program and the robot arm work. The physicality of bracing the elbow close to the body to steady the frame, while the fingers adjust focus, f-stop, shutter speed and take the picture, can be broken down into individual steps like programming a robotic arm, hands, and fingers. Similar to arranging the program modules, in composing a photograph he must break the scene, or form, into elemental component parts and fit those elements into the frame in the proper proportions, at the proper moment. It is a way of working, or in this case – seeing - where the components are angle, shutter speed, f-stop, and light, coordinated to align the best arrangement of the components of the image within the frame. All of this occurs in a nanosecond between Cook’s eye, brain, and hand, which has enabled him to successfully capture the emotional content of the human condition in his photographs.
According to Cook, “I can defer time in any style from the past, present and future as a time traveler through my lens. This is how I capture the ideas and emotions within and before me.” The existence of photography democratized art by making it more portable, accessible, and less expensive than painted portraits, which historically were for the affluent. Cook’s images democratize a perspective that is often ignored, diminished, and distorted by the media.
When looking at the work gleaned from his Black Lives Matter Series, the value of artistic citizenship is evidenced by the way the images represent an intricate journey. Where public and private are at once the vehicle, the route, and the destination. Cook epitomizes unsullied individualism, as an inner-directed free spirit who answers to the muse, not the state. Citizenship, by contrast to the status the state affords, entails group membership with common privileges and obligations conferred from without and regulated by a national government within. Yet the individual and collective experience, where the private realm of the individual leaves off and the public domain of civic life takes up, is neither so simple nor clear cut. Cook examines the realm of the masses where civic engagements are joined to provide an arena where personal voice takes flight and strong perspectives are forged in dialogue with others. The keys to artistic citizenship lie in understanding how art and artists are brought into the world to bring people and ideas together.
In the days following the killing of George Floyd by white policeman Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis on May 25, protests erupted across the United States and many parts of the world. After weeks of Covid-19 confinement, hundreds of thousands poured into the streets to express their outrage, to demand police reforms, and to fight for social justice. The gripping photographs documenting and emerging out of the Black Lives movement have undoubtedly changed the course of our recent history, just as strong as the Civil Rights era photographs did fifty years ago. Most of the imagery documenting today’s marches and cultural struggles is the near ubiquity of cell phones. The enabling to capture everything ensures that no poignant moment, clever sign, or altercation goes unrecorded. All photographs continue to play a vital role because they document, preserve, inspire, attest, and provide evidence of the triumphs, struggles, joy, and pain of the human condition.
Stylistically Cook’s referential inspiration is garnered from the canon of Henri Cartier Bresson, Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, Jules Allen, Jamel Shabazz, Anthony Barboza, Ming Smith, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus. He is also inspired by the work of Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Titus Kaphur, Hank Willis Thomas, Dawoud Bey, Kay Hickman, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and Adama Delphine Fawundu. As a contemporary photographer of African descent, it is notable that five of the photographers he has been inspired by are members of historic Kamoinge, a sixty-year-old collective of Black photographers whose mission is to honor, document and preserve the history and culture of the African Diaspora with integrity and insight for humanity through the lens of Black photographers. The Kamoinge members whose work made an impact on Cook include Ming Smith, Anthony Barboza, Jules Allen, Jamel Shabazz, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and Roy DeCarava.
Inasmuch as contemporary art is about the ideas and values of the time in which they are made, Cook’s aesthetic elevates the ideas from mere visual documents, of a time and place, to the fine art of photography. His work plays a role in advancing the struggle for justice and equality through profound visual statements that evoke thoughtful reflection and inspired action. Cook’s work is a response to a complex world in which the global environment is bombarded by cultural, political, and intellectual diversity, thereby creating a gateway to see one another in a shared humanity demanding equality and the right to be treated with respect and dignity as human beings. This monograph honors the Brooklyn community of Cook’s childhood, as well as, an international community of humanitarians and activists of the Black Lives Matter Movement, as a testament to time, history, humanity, struggle, community, self-love, and beauty.
