Steve Locke

Family Pictures

“Technologies have begun to bring the state sponsored violence meted out to black people to a larger consciousness. This violence has been long known to black and poor people, but it is now present to the dominant culture. Today, you can show black people being shot to death on television.

The dominant culture experiences this phenomenon as something “New.” They refuse to believe that what they are experiencing is the exact way things have always been done. They want to believe that it is an anomaly. This requires the dominant culture to deny that the basis of America’s relationship to black people is violence. It has always been violence placed in the service of a domestic identity. I chose to make work that marries contemporary and historical violence to the domestic impulse.

Publicly created and shared photographs of violence against black people now inhabit contemporary frames. Using frames designed for keepsakes or familial milestones, siting these on a 1960s era Andre Bus coffee table against various hues, the work reconciles a violent history with the contemporary spectacle of state violence within a domestic sphere. These are the Family Pictures we have long pretended do not exist.” -Steve Locke