-Seven Days
A photographic memoir documents the Vermonter's 50-year career of taking pictures of everything from gay activists to goats.
As a social documentarian, Dona Ann McAdams illuminates the particularity of place and the innate humanity of the people she photographs. Working with old-school aesthetics, the Sandgate resident shoots with a small Leica camera and prints black-and-white images in an analog darkroom. She never stages photographs, preferring to capture tableaux vivants of the communities she inhabits.
McAdams' latest book, Black Box: A Photographic Memoir, reproduces 107 pictures alongside elucidating backstories from her 50-year career. She is launching her memoir with a companion exhibition at the Vermont Center for Photography in Brattleboro, on view through December 29.
McAdams studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1970s. She writes about running out of film and stopping at the Castro Camera store, where owner Harvey Milk urged her to merge politics and aesthetics into social action. McAdams' images of the burgeoning gay pride movement, sex workers at the Hookers Ball, activist Angela Davis and photographer Hilton Braithwaite are testament to Milk's advice. After Milk's election as the first openly gay city supervisor in 1977 and his assassination in 1978, McAdams left San Francisco and moved back east.
In New York, McAdams found herself amid an avant-garde community of artists. She was the house photographer at Performance Space 122 for 23 years, capturing compelling images there and at other downtown venues. Her stories in the book enliven striking portraits of Eileen Myles, Meredith Monk, Karen Finley, and David Wojnarowicz — a body of work that won her Obie and Bessie Awards.
The book also includes a single hand-colored image from McAdams' 13 years running an arts workshop on Coney Island for people living with mental illness. One day, a participant began coloring on her black-and-white pictures and was soon joined by others.
"Sometimes they took them back to their group home at the Garden of Eden or traded them for cigarettes," McAdams writes. "The staff at the facility would hang them in their offices. People started trading them like baseball cards."
McAdams' agitprop sensibilities are conveyed in adroitly captured shots of queer liberation, ACT UP, and antinuclear and pro-choice protests from the 1980s and '90s. She comes across not as a detached journalist but as an engaged social agitator. Here is her description of shooting an indelible image of performer-poet Assotto Saint holding up a cardboard coffin during an AIDS protest:
I needed perspective. I needed height. I needed to look down on the protest coffins. I shimmied up a lamppost, the way we did in high school gym with the rope, legs wrapped tight around the pole. A man in the crowd with a makeshift coffin looked up at me and said, Be careful. He stared at me from the street then through the years from the photo.
McAdams and her husband, writer Brad Kessler, moved to Vermont in 1998 and started raising American Nubian goats. In a shift from New York City's art and protest scenes, she focused her camera on neighboring farmers and their work animals. At the Saratoga RaceTrack, McAdams became certified as a hot-walker — someone who walks horses to cool them down. There, she has recorded workers, human and equine, on the backstretch for the past two decades.
The stories from her childhood that McAdams includes add poignancy and humor to the book, placed next to family snapshots as well as her later work. She pairs a photograph of a docent lecturing beside a Degas sculpture at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris with an anecdote about one of her high school teachers who wouldn't let her write a paper on Diane Arbus because, he said, "Photography is not art."
