Interview: Granville Carroll
By Lia J. Latty
Published July 23rd, 2021
Did you always know you wanted to be a creative and a photographer?
GRANVILLE: I did not always know this. I fell into photography. Looking at my past, I see that I’ve always been interested in art and the idea of expressing myself through these means, but I never fully thought of it as a career path or anything of that sort. In junior high and high school I took a few art classes, but it wasn’t until I actually got to college, when I was studying psychology, that I decided to take my first photo class and then I was hooked at that point. I no longer felt super passionate about psychology. Something in me was like, “this is not the path for you”. Then art came about, and one of my teachers said, you know, why not become an artist? And I was like “you’re crazy”. I thought about it further and I decided to embrace the unknown. I knew nothing about the arts, so it’s interesting to really look at my path and see how it has unfolded. I never thought being an artist was a viable career path. And then here it is, I’m living it. It’s beautiful to see it come full circle.
What inspirations influence your work?
GRANVILLE: There are a lot of inspirations. Music, I’d say, is definitely one of them. I’m constantly listening to music whenever I’m driving. When I’m at home or walking, whatever I’m doing, music is usually playing in the background. It is such an integral part of my life. One of my favorite musicians is India.Arie. I just love her voice for one, it’s just beautiful, ethereal. Yet her message to construct an identity in the way that you see fit while still celebrating the Black community and all that, saying we are so much more than our bodies, so much more than our experiences, helps me get into this really deep mental and spiritual space. Another musician I’d say is Trevor Hall, who does the same thing to help me get into that spiritual, mindful and meditative space. There are so many other artists, but I won’t name them all for the sake of time. In terms of film and TV, I’ve watched a lot of fantasy and sci-fi. That just puts me in a new creative space. I love exploring these worlds that could never exist outside of this paradigm, if you will. It helps me see the world in a new and exciting way. My day to day life is also an influence. I walk out in nature as much as I can. Being outside and experiencing the wind and feeling the sun on my skin, just the warmth and everything of the outdoors, it connects me to the earth, you know? It develops a reverence for things outside of myself as well. I try to maintain a positive and meditative state of mind which translates into the way I think about and create art. So yeah, all of that helps influence the way that I see things and then operate artistically.
How do you navigate the world of contemporary photography?
GRANVILLE: Simply put, I do what I want. I make the work I want to make because I believe in its power and concepts. I honor myself in producing art that resonates with my experiences, perspectives, dreams, and beliefs, even if the concepts seem to be different or unorthodox to the photographic medium. Navigating the art world is difficult since my physical appearance dictates so much of what others expect of me, but that is precisely why I go against the grain. I see myself as a rebel when it comes to expectations of contemporary photography. I challenge the expectations of the medium by manipulating images to show an internal experience rather than a mimicry of the external world. Some will say that my images are not photographic. They may believe that because an image is manipulated it falls into some other category of art. I refuse to accept that sentiment. I think it is reductive to put limitations on what constitutes a photograph simply because it doesn’t follow tradition or the expectations of the many. At the end of the day, I choose to speak my truth by eliminating the expectations of what I’ve been taught images can be, and instead imagine new possibilities for what photographs can represent.
Sublimation
How do you define your relationship with photography?
GRANVILLE: My relationship with photography I’d say is meditative, and it’s also a difficult one. I go out and take these landscape shots, looking for some connection to the earth, the plants, the sky, and photographing various scenes in the natural world. That’s the meditative aspect of it, just being an observer of the natural world and my internal space. The difficult aspect is being a Black self-portraitist and having to respond to certain projections that the world places upon me as a Black man. I can’t escape the way the world looks at me based on social identity constructs. It’s like I’m working in these two different modes. I just want to be this free being and explore and see the world, but I’m also weighed down by the heaviness of social constructs of race and ideas of representation. It is a very conflicting space to operate in. I love existing as I do, but I don’t like the way we have created these expectations around these constructs. That’s my relationship with photography. I’m grateful to be able to use this medium to witness the world, but it’s also troubling and sometimes feels limited.
What is your process like when you’re working with self portraiture and alternative processes?
GRANVILLE: When I take pictures of myself, it’s a whole transformative experience. I’ve had some friends and other people comment that they see two different people when they look at me and when they look at one of my artistic self-portraits. It’s like when I get in front of the camera something in me activates. As I photograph myself I’m thinking about the body as a conduit for these forces and ideas that I talk about in the work: cosmic forces, spiritual forces. So I try to embody that as I’m photographing. It’s very much an internal dialogue, an exploration of self as I’m in front of the lens.
I don’t get to work with alternative processes as often as I would like to because it’s not that accessible to me. When I do get the chance to work in it, I think a lot more about the physicality of the process and what comes from working with my hands since I mainly work digitally. It stops me. It becomes this practice of mindfulness because I have to be very careful about the chemicals that are being mixed together, because I don’t want to blow something up or create some fumes that’s going to kill someone or myself.
I think about the essence of the process itself and how that connects to the concepts that I’m working with and the aesthetics that I want to bring in. Process creates meaning and develops the concept and I do my best to marry the two with alternative processes and also in my digital work. When working with alternative processes, it can easily become a gimmick or act as a cool experiment. I don’t want it to evoke that understanding. What I want is for people to really question what it is they’re looking at and why it was made in this format to begin with. I often will combine both my digital skills with analog to see what new images can be created from these technologies, which is also an exciting aspect of working with alternative processes. I always aim to push the limits for what a photograph can be.
Ori
“I want people to understand that they are more than what society has said they are, and to also activate their imaginations.”
When I look at your work, it feels like such a direct protest towards the history of photography in relation to African people. Do you feel like your work is countering photography’s previous history of colonization?
GRANVILLE: I do. That’s a really interesting question because when I began as an artist, those weren’t really ideas that I started with. As I continued to study photography and look at the history of it, understanding how African people and the diaspora have been misrepresented in it, expectations of Black artists within institutions and outside of them, I grew tired of the narrative that was being placed in front of us. I then realized that what I’m doing is in direct opposition to the history of photography, and also in direct opposition to the expectations that people have about Black artists and photographers specifically. I often will think of my work as a rebuttal to the European sensibility of photography. Just thinking of when photography was announced in 1839, that was in Europe. Since then, it’s always been that European or that Western world view that has been imposed on photography and how we’re supposed to look at the world through a lens, through a camera of sorts. With my process of taking these images, deconstructing them and then rebuilding them in Photoshop or even working in alternative processes, it’s me saying no, I am not going to follow your rules, because your way of seeing is not the only way of seeing. There are multiple avenues to experience the world and I want to explore that. I’m definitely working against that history to reframe a new narrative for myself and hopefully for the Black community, but then also for humanity as well to say that there’s so much more for us to look at. We don’t have to be isolated in this one perspective.
How do you see photography contributing to the evolution of Afrofuturism?
GRANVILLE: I see Afrofuturism contributing more to the evolution of photography versus the other way around. Afrofuturism dissolves expectations built within the medium of photography. It affects the evolution of photography by expanding the concept of what an image can be/represent. The history of photography is rooted in Eurocentrism, and it is taught from that same perspective. Afrofuturism, for me, is a response to decolonize the lens and therefore decolonize the way I experience the world and express selfhood. Afrofuturist photographs usually join a different style and way of making images that do not fit in the traditions of the medium. In my practice I mainly use digital technologies to create alternate realities and identities. I also employ analog technologies to explore these themes through different aesthetic approaches. It has been helpful for me to understand Afrofuturism as a model to promote and activate the imagination to dissipate mental and physical barriers designed by racial stigmas and judgements that inhibit personal growth. I combine photographs partly to leave behind the expectations of a colonized lens and worldview. The other, in part, to enact my vision upon the world and to express my freedom and sovereignty as a human being not bound to societal expectations and labels.
Photography is limited by time and indexicality. Afrofuturism is not fated to these concepts. In fact, it expands the concepts of time and reality. Therefore, I see Afrofuturism having a greater effect on the evolution of the medium more so than the medium having a direct influence on Afrofuturism. From this perspective the photographic medium acts as a container to support the imaginative and speculative nature of Afrofuturism and the psyche. Working as an Afrofuturist allows me to explore the space where reality and unreality meet, where fiction and non-fiction intersect. The one aspect that I see having an influence on the evolution of Afrofuturism is the possibilities of new photographic technologies. New technologies will manifest new ways for Afrofuturists to envision themselves, their communities, and their futures. It is exciting to imagine how Afrofuturism will continue expanding the photographic medium and how new inventions will promote new ways of creating, living, and experiencing realities and unrealities.
What do you hope people take away from your imagery?
GRANVILLE: I hope people take away the idea that we are not our bodies alone, that the world is so much bigger than us. The universe is so much bigger than us. There’s just so many ways to perceive and experience this existence. Even though we have our social constructs and things set in place, it’s okay to move beyond these expectations of yourself because you’re Black or you’re a man, or you’re a woman or you’re white, or whatever label you want to put on. I want people to understand that they are more than what society has said they are, and to also activate their imaginations. The imagination for me is so absolutely important because it provides the opportunity to create new thought, and by creating new thoughts, new ideas, new perceptions, we can actually move forward beyond the paradigm that we currently exist in. Which, you know, is not really benefiting a lot of people other than the extremely wealthy and rich. Personally, there’s that spiritual component as well to understand the self beyond the body, as this ethereal, divine being if you will, but also for people who may not connect to those ideas that using their mind to construct new realities is still possible, in whichever way you go. The self and the mind are malleable. Stagnation and tradition do not have to be the end goal. Change is possible and needed. I just hope that at the end of the day, if someone looks at one of my images, they can see themselves projected into it, that even though it’s a self-portrait of me, I’m just a stand-in for you, the human form itself, which takes many forms. I want to empower them to see beyond themselves and see beyond the world that we exist in.