Deana Lawson at MoMA PS1 — spellbinding images of imagined lives

An air of elaborate mystery hangs about Deana Lawson’s photographs. She fills them with character and suggestion, peppering us with clues: a sculpted torso flexed so every sinew pops, a rug with a tiger’s face, a rifle, a pile of toys in the corner. And yet this accumulation of detail makes a conundrum of each picture, because it’s impossible to distinguish what’s constructed from what’s discovered, to know whether we’re looking at a domestic scene as she found it or a diorama that springs from her imagination. Are the people she shoots in intimate poses really lovers, friends, father and son — or just strangers she’s rounded up?

A spellbinding mid-career retrospective at MoMA PS1 in New York spotlights her pictures’ totemic potency, the way she stirs together gravitas and grittiness, specificity and misdirection. Her large-scale photographs often look like overblown snapshots or felicitous portraits of a character on his or her own turf. They’re neither. Instead, she dreams up a complete drama in her mind, then proceeds to recreate it with actors, costumes and props. She has travelled widely to record the African diaspora in all its kinship and variety, but she also strips each rich tableau of data that would ground it in a specific location. There’s no way to know whether any particular room, though it brims with idiosyncrasies, is in Kingston, Los Angeles, Accra or Johannesburg.

“Sons of Cush” (2016) appears at first to be an impromptu glimpse of a black family at home. A shirtless dad enfolds a newborn in his arms and aims a beam of love and tenderness directly at the lens. But there’s offstage business, too, a counter-narrative we can barely read. A third, slightly sinister, figure tugs vaguely at our attention from the edge of the frame: a man with a tattooed chest draped in gold chains, one hand grasping an impressive wad of bills. A whiteboard hung on the wall traces a biblical series of “begats” from Eden to the east African land of Cush, while a carefully placed array of other paraphernalia — family photos, a miniature crucifix, a mint Chips Ahoy! cup, a rectangle of tinfoil taped over a window — hint at any number of backstories and denouements. This corner of a room becomes a creaky stage, but the plot is obscured.

The spontaneous-looking image is the work of years. Lawson needed a baby who would fit in the dress she’d bought, which meant finding models younger than three months. She made a version of the photograph in Flint, Michigan, but the light was stale and the vibe was wrong, so she re-shot it in LA with different sitters. You can only be grateful for the artifice, because the final picture buzzes and pops, its aura of authenticity persuasive even though it’s all made up.

We know how demanding Lawson is of herself, and how she manipulates reality to fit her vision, only because she discussed “Sons of Cush” in an interview with artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa. That kind of disclosure is rare for her. Normally she nurtures illusion by keeping the process to herself. Who and where her subjects are, how she found them, why she chose them, how she shot them and what their attributes signify — she meets all these obvious questions with deliberate evasion in the name of “believability”. Like a professional prestidigitator, she declines to reveal her tricks.

The elision of what is real with what feels real, the bleeding together of fact and perception, can be dizzying. Even after a century and a half of manipulation, from darkroom trickery to airbrushing to digital alteration, we still want to assume that what we see in a photograph actually exists (or did at some point). Lawson leverages that credulity, building and shooting a three-dimensional environment out of her own thoughts. In its size and sweep, the show at PS1 brings viewers inside her head, letting them explore the complex imagination she’s filtered through her camera and applied to the gallery walls. Wherever she roams, she finds Lawsonland and populates it with figments of her creation.

She recruits her cast of subjects, always black, during her explorations on the subway or the sidewalk, through friends of friends or in beauty shops, churches and fried-chicken joints. The men are taut and serious, with a mixture of challenge and softness in their faces. The women are fierce, larger than life, proud, sexy and majestic. In an early photo from 2005, a woman identified as “Ashanti” poses nude on a sheetless mattress in a bare room. Not all nakedness is the same: hers is glamorous, like that of an Ingres “Odalisque”, while the sparseness of her surroundings borders on the squalid. Fourteen years later, Lawson shot “Daenare”, another nude who reclines, catlike, on a set of concrete stairs, her gaze steady, her outstretched leg flaunting an ankle monitor. She may be confined, but she’s still untamed and in charge.

The question of power in these pictures is slippery. Her subjects appear defiant, but they’re also puppets, violating decorum and showing plenty of skin only because Lawson tells them to. In “Baby Sleep”, a naked woman straddles her barefoot, shirtless partner, shoving his face into her neck. An infant slumbers in a swing chair, blithely unconscious of the erotic energy sizzling nearby (or the photographer recording it from across the parquet floor).

She sets all these regal bodies against backdrops that reek of decay. Chipped paint, corroded radiators, smudged walls, peeling linoleum, unmade beds, sagging couches — this is the terrain of her far-flung interiors. Hangings and window treatments act like emblems of resilience and distress. “Paragraphs could be written on Lawson’s curtains alone,” Zadie Smith has observed: “Cheap curtains, net curtains, curtains taped up — or else hanging from shower rings — curtains torn, faded, thin, permeable.” They demarcate spaces of sanctuary, but they’re also fragile, porous and easily breached.

Lawson twists the long tradition of gleaning a person’s status or state of mind from their surroundings. In Renaissance portraiture, you know a merchant by his accounting books, a nobleman by his ermine trim. In photojournalism, a dilapidated shack stands for victimhood and misery, or perhaps the fortitude of the poor. But in these carefully downscale surroundings, Lawson’s subjects glow like angels, untouched by (and unconscious of) the drear all around.

In “Seagulls in the Kitchen”, a couple stands before crusted appliances, enacting the rites of domestic love. A man with eyes half-closed stands behind a woman and reaches his arms around her belly to her groin in a gesture at once adoring and possessive. She seems poised and content, as if this life is precisely the one she has chosen. A pair of brass seagulls, wingtips touching, flies together against a wall of sky-blue tiles. These not-birds, this pair that isn’t a couple, this dressed set that stands in for a home — all these deceptions emphasise the gulf between nobility and circumstance, the symbolic charge that turns individuals into avatars of human dignity. “People are creative, godlike beings,” Lawson has said — whether we feel like it or not.

To September 5, moma.org