Ayana V. Jackson: “As a child, I felt ashamed of being Black”

Ayana V. Jackson (East Orange, New Jersey, 48) takes photographs for the five-year-old Ayana V. Jackson , who felt ashamed of her Black body. To heal this pain, the American sociologist and photographer immerses herself in photographic archives from Africa, Latin America, and North America, then “turns them inside out” with self-portraits that challenge the image of colonized and enslaved bodies . She has repeated this operation over the past 20 years, resulting in series that have caught the attention of the international artistic community, such as Archival Impulse , inspired by photographer Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin’s archive of African indigenous people, orYou Forgot to See Me Coming , which portrays the Mexican Revolution with brave and strong Afro-descendant women riding horses and wielding weapons.

V. Jackson has arrived in Madrid with his exhibitionNosce Te Ipsum: Membrum Fantasma at the National Museum of Anthropology, as the main project of the PHotoEspaña 2025 photography festival. This is the first time he has exhibited in a European institution, and he does so with an exhibition that combines a bit of what his life has been like: the search to heal the pain caused by colonialism and slavery, his fascination with Afro-descendants in Mexico, and the uncomfortable questions he asks himself about his work.

Question: What does the title of the exhibition mean?

Answer. I chose Nosce Te Ipsum [“Know Thyself,” in Latin] because I saw the phrase at the entrance to the National Museum of Anthropology and it seemed like an interesting provocation. The museum is in the process of decolonizing itself, and that is an act [of Spain] of knowing itself as a country. And Membrum Fantasma comes from phantom limb syndrome , the neurological condition that occurs when someone has had an amputation and has sensations, even pain, in that limb that is no longer there. And all of this is linked to my desire to understand and explain why, as an African-American woman, I talk about Black people in Mexico , for example.

Q. What does the concept of the phantom limb have to do with your work on the representation of Black people in photography and art?

A. As a person of African descent, I feel like I'm part of the subject. But at the same time, I feel like an outsider. As an artist, I needed to do something to communicate that discomfort, and the concept of phantom limbs was the way to do it. I think many people of African descent are phantom limbs of the main body, which is Africa, and, at the same time, we're phantom limbs of each other. There's something that happens when we see each other... At least in my case, seeing others heals that phantom limb pain.

Q. How do you heal it?

A. There's mirror therapy, which is used for people with amputees. They position the mirror so that you and your brain, for example, see both legs. Then, the doctors massage that leg, and the person feels relief. That's what I did in the video, Mirror Therapy , which is in the exhibition.

I think many people of African descent are phantom limbs of the main body, which is Africa, and, at the same time, we are phantom limbs of others. There's something that happens when we see each other...

Q. Why have you been so interested in Mexico among all the Latin American countries with Afro-descendant populations?

A. I studied sociology, and my thesis was on race relations in Latin America and the Caribbean. I did fieldwork in the Dominican Republic and Argentina, but I felt I should also study it in Central and North America. Mexico came to mind because I had seen photographer Tony Gleaton's work there. In 2002, I went with writer Marco Villalobos to the Costa Chica region, which has one of the largest Afro-descendant populations in Mexico, and to Veracruz. I took portraits, and he wrote incredible pieces based on interviews, and we published African by Legacy , Mexican by Birth . Then I won an artist residency with the Alturas Foundation and went to Coahuila because I was interested in the history of Afro-mestizaje on the Texas-Mexico border.

Q. Why do you have this fascination with archives?

A. When I studied at the Berlin University of the Arts and presented the portraits I'd made of Afro-Mexicans, a German classmate asked me why it was okay, from a representational standpoint, for me to photograph people just because they were Black. After all, I'm privileged, I'm American, and the only thing I share with them is living in a Black body in this post-colonial, post-slavery era. That question made me understand that I did all this because I had a problem with the way my Black body had been represented. I realized it wasn't about them, but about my own Blackness and how we were connected. Over time, I began to take photographs from a more informed point of view. And to understand the fundamentals of photography, you have to look at the archive, understand points of view.

Q. And what did you understand from looking at the files?

A. I want to turn the archive on its head. Photographic archives didn't dignify the colonized body, the African body, the enslaved body. Now, my work as an artist is to ask the public to revisit the archive with me and have that conversation about dignity.

When I was a child, I felt ashamed of being black.

Q. Do you think photography was a means of perpetuating colonialism?

A. It definitely was. Photography is powerful, and if you want, you can dehumanize people. Photography emerged in the mid-19th century, around the same time as rampant colonialism, and it shortened the time it took to bring information. It took a painter in the 18th century a lot longer to travel, make caste paintings , and bring them to Europe. Now, I don't know if photographers back then necessarily wanted to be racist, or to contextualize what happened that way. It's just that the images went through so many hands in the editing process... I think bodies from the Global South and non-Western bodies have been framed, literally and figuratively, by the history of photography.

Q. Why do you reinterpret these archives with new photographs in which you are the one posing?

A. When I was a child, I felt ashamed of being Black. In school, I began to see that I was different from other girls. And when we were learning geography, the others would say, 'Where are you from? Africa? Oh, you were a slave.' All my work is for that child. I have this desire to see my reflection with dignity.