A Black photographer inserted himself into places where history had excluded him.
In the 1967 romantic comedy “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Sidney Poitier’s charming doctor disrupts the lives of the Draytons, a White middle-class family, when their daughter announces her engagement to him. The liberal parents are shocked and uncertain about the interracial marriage. Despite his impeccable character and dashing looks — after all, he is Sidney Poitier — his presence as a Black man in their previously all-White space causes an upheaval.
Now, imagine we know nothing about the Draytons. They could be civil rights activists, staunch conservatives, or even members of the KKK. And there’s no guaranteed Hollywood ending. This provocative ambiguity is the realm Omar Victor Diop explores in “Being There.”
British photographer Lee Shulman and Senegalese self-portraitist Omar Victor Diop conceived this series, utilizing family photos from 1950s and 1960s America. Diop inserts himself into these intimate scenes — public and private — representing spaces from which Black people were often excluded.
The series comprises around 60 photos, drawn from Shulman’s “Anonymous Project,” which features Kodachrome slides purchased on eBay. Shulman has no knowledge of the identities of the people in the photos, which has inspired multiple side projects, including a collaboration with British photographer Martin Parr and now “Being There,” which debuted at Paris Photo in November 2023 and was recently published as a coffee table book.
“Being There” was sparked when Shulman noticed many slides with an empty seat, presumably left vacant by the photographer. “There was an absence,” Shulman told CNN in a joint video interview with Diop. Given their origin in America during the civil rights era, and sometimes the segregated South, these empty seats became symbols of those excluded from White America’s privileges. “Every time I saw that chair, I saw Omar in it,” Shulman said.
Although Shulman and Diop had never met, the collaboration felt natural. Shulman owned several works by Diop, an acclaimed self-portraitist known for depicting Africans outside Africa at various historical points in his series “Diaspora.” In “Being There,” Diop brings a playful, often cheeky presence to each photo.
Shulman and Diop curated the images together, selecting a broad spectrum of life — from ski holidays and Hawaiian trips to roadside picnics and zoo visits. These snapshots of everyday life, captured by cameras, indicate race and class privilege, Shulman noted.
Some photos, by their settings, carry more weight. Diop is seen splashing in a public pool, graduating from college, and sitting in a busy bar, surrounded by White faces in historically segregated spaces. “The political potential of this series made it very easy for me to jump into this,” Diop said.
“We tend to glamorize history, forgetting how easy it is to exclude those who are different,” Diop added. “(The series) invites us to examine our lives today and consider how many people different from us we welcome into our intimate circles.”
Ironically, inserting Diop into these spontaneous shots required meticulous planning. He used period props and costumes on a greenscreen set, with rigs mimicking the lighting of each slide. Digital post-production then seamlessly integrated him into the photographs, matching the Kodachrome film’s grain and grade, along with any shadows, blur, and movement.
Dressing up for the project, Diop was struck by his resemblance to his father, who “laughed a lot going through the book,” he said.
“He’d been a student in Europe in the late ’50s, so he’d been sitting at these tables,” Diop added. “Of course, you can’t really compare (being an African in Europe) with what African Americans went through in the same era, but the idea of being different is something (they had in common).”
The collaborators never resolved whether Diop is portraying the same character in each photograph or simply appearing as himself, perhaps even as a time traveler. This ambiguity extends to Diop’s relationship with the camera. “One of the reasons it works is the gaze he sometimes directs towards the camera,” said Shulman, “it feels as though he knows the photographer.” Conversely, if Diop is breaching the space-time continuum, the photographs suggest he is letting the viewer in on the secret.
Similarly, the project doesn’t clarify whether Diop is a welcome presence or an intruder in each scene. Despite owning the slides for years, Shulman still knows very little about the people in them.
“As much as they’re anonymous, they tell us a lot,” he emphasized. “Every time I look at these images, even without Omar in them, I feel these people are communicating something about history.”
There is another, perhaps unintended, dimension to the photographs. The anonymity of the White individuals, coupled with Shulman and Diop’s lack of desire to delve into their identities and inner lives, forces the viewer to rely on signs and symbols to construct identity. We don’t know their politics or how they would respond to Diop’s presence. Deprived of details, these lives become homogenized and bundled together, much like how people of color were portrayed by the predominantly White Western lens for decades, often stripped of nuance. Diop’s playful, Black, and African presence seems to say, “Look where I am,” but also, “See how you like it.”
Shulman asserted that “there’s no finger-pointing in this book,” and mentioned that neither he nor Diop feel they “own this project” now that it’s out in the world and “lives its life.” They welcome all interpretations, a fact they find exciting.
More than 60 years after these photos were taken, much of America appears different now. Yet, through gentle probing and playful satire, Shulman and Diop remind us that much remains unchanged.
“It’s a very contemporary project,” Shulman said. “It has a lot of relevance to the world we live in today.”
