CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/16/2024

Celebrate Father's Day with 'What Matters Most'

Featured image is from What Matters Most: Photographs of Black Life—a book of found vintage Polaroids documenting special and mundane moments in Black American life, primarily from the 1970s through the early 2000s. "A great many of the photographs in this collection exhibit a kind of wholesomeness of Black family life—holidays, just-born babies, family reunions, graduations, people and new cars, snapshots of everyday life," Dawn Lundy Martin writes. "A woman lies on a sofa talking into a red telephone receiver. Two middle-aged men play cards on Thanksgiving, 1985. A father gives his son his first haircut in a kitchen. A girl in a white dress sits at a white piano. Even cool cats, ya dig, sign photos 'To Dad with Love.' Like all worthwhile archives, this one refuses wholeness, but instead points us toward what’s outside of the frame and in its corners/off center, what’s missing and what’s singular. It’s in these fissures, peripheries and striking singularities where one might glimpse what I think of as a Black understanding."

PHOTO: Unknown photographer, assembled by Zun Lee, [Man holding girl, sitting in armchair (fist bump)], 1988. Instant print (Polaroid Type 600), 10.8 x 8.8 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Fade Resistance Collection, purchase, with funds donated by Martha LA McCain, 2018. Digital image: © Art Gallery of Ontario.