The Eyes Before the Camera

Published by Columbia University’s Arts & Culture Beat

He approaches his photo shoots the same way each time. He begins by writing his ideas down. He decides on a location. The location is somewhere he is familiar with or has been to at least once before. After determining where he’d like to shoot, he invites someone, often a friend, to accompany him on his shoot. He teaches the person how to use the camera or cameras he has strapped with him for that day. Then Derick Whitson becomes both the subject and the director, overseeing the shoot from the front of the camera lens.

As Whitson speaks, sitting in the photography studio provided to him as a fellow at Columbia’s Watson Hall, his eyes seem magnified behind silver-colored rimmed eyeglasses. His photography equipment rests in a corner. He takes a white-balance adjustment sheet out of a zipped pouch and shoots test photos to adjust his camera to the light. The photography that rests on a back wall of the studio, like much of his work, conveys multiple messages. The images grow out of his personal narrative and explore conflicting themes of gay, Christian, and black identity. Self-identity and understanding the physicality of one’s body are both integral to Whitson’s practice. “I want to be as close to the camera as possible,” Whitson explains. “I’ve found that one of the best ways to do [this] is to insert myself into these images.”

Whitson has an extensive repertoire for a photographer who is only 24 years old. His work has been featured in a long list of shows, events, and gallery exhibitions including the Photographic Angle Exhibition shown throughout the U.K., the Greenpoint Gallery in Brooklyn, and the Canzani Center Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. “He works more with technical photography, but it’s always beautifully made photography,” says Michael Goodson, co-curator of the Canzani Center Gallery.

He is currently working with multiple media in an attempt to provoke eroticism and religion in the same conversation. “Within my space, this is part of an installation idea I’m currently cranking out,” Whitson says. “I’m trying to work out different mediums within the same space—photo, sculptures, interactive pieces along with video and how the space can be within the same conversation of one another.”

Nonetheless, his most pressing project seems to be the re-organizing his studio, which looked very different a couple of weeks earlier. The fold-out table that used to hold his laptop and equipment is gone, replaced by a long black leather, legless futon. The once bland white walls are now a burnt orange that fills the room with both excitement and the aroma of fresh paint and suits his personality better. One thing unchanged are the bowls of different types of candy placed around the studio. Whitson loves sweets.

His manner is casual, as if he’s just going with the flow. Behind his gasses are doleful eyes that brighten when he discusses his life’s work. His hair is short, curly and naturally brown, with an orange-ish tint from apparent coloring. His smile is broad and raises both cheeks to meet his eyes, but he bashfully covers it whenever he is amused. He is wearing an orange scarf which compliments the bold highlights of his short ‘fro and goes with the walls. He’s wearing an almost feminine black coat and boots that barely manages to expose vibrant rainbow socks under calf-length pants. He’s full of energy and moves from one place to the next fixing up his studio.

Whitson likes to be active, and his activity connects to his approach to photography. At least once every two weeks, he visits the local YMCA to practice both structured and freestyle ballet. He does this as a means of understanding his own body movements and how they are perceived through the camera lens. “I keep edging towards making work that is really directly related to my own body and physical practice,” he says.

“Much of the stuff I do stems from strictly my own background and things I remember,” he says. As Whitson explained, he is particularly interested in “what happens when sex and religion are interrelated and they both become a part of the conversation and one is not a taboo for the other.”

One can find these themes explored in his 2013 series, Baptism. In this work, a series of black-and-white images, Whitson is the sole subject. In one photo, Whitson’s nude back is facing the camera. His arms are positioned to display his arched back and flexing shoulder blades. His neck is relaxed, which allows his head to dip behind him with his invisible eyes meeting the ceiling. From his head, a white substance pours down behind him as if he were “anointed” by something not as pure as water. He sits with legs broadly crossed under fabric which covers his lower half.

“I liked the contrast of the whiteness to my black body. It was more of a visual choice,” Whitson says. “Baptism is about internal questioning of one’s self and the transformation that comes about spiritually and then this transformation having an effect on these internal questions. I wanted to express the conversation between the two.”

In the photo, he is both nude and covered. “Much of the information is going to be based off who I am, essentially which stems from homosexuality, Christianity and blackness,” he says. “It’s almost inevitable for me to have those be in the work because it’s who I am, and it’s not anything I’m trying to avoid,” Whitson said. “I’m also not trying to speak for anyone else; I’m trying to speak for myself.”

Whitson was born and raised as a Baptist Christian in Mansfield, Ohio. From childhood though his high-school years, he liked to draw. He was an image-maker before he took up photography in adulthood.

His father has been absent from his life since the age of four, and his relationship with his mother is strained. “I have vague memories of him, very blurred images,” Whitson says. “I could place images which I believe a lot of my work is coming from. The body in space and what it means to only remember the black figure and nothing else,” he says.

Derick Whitson’s name first surfaced in photography circles when he introduced his project Schizophrenia in 2012, while still an undergraduate at the Columbus College of Arts & Design in Ohio. “I made a body of work that was a representation of my perspective on that disease,” Whitson says. “I was trying to explore the history of what a disease could essentially do to the mind.” His work was then published on Behance, an online network for new artistic work.

During his time at CCAD, between the years of 2012-2013, he worked with artist and then CCAD adjunct faculty member for printmaking Mariana Smith. “What set him apart for me is how he approached his work—not just as an assignment but as a very particular artist,” says Smith, who is currently an assistant professor in Printmaking at Stockton University in New Jersey. “He also has an interesting ability to work between contemporary photography and social and cultural issues. At the same time, he worked on making them both rather universal and personal. He can basically maintain a good balance.”

At Columbia now, Whitson is finding the peer environment stimulating. “Here I’m still exploring and figuring out things, but with much more commitment,” he says. “It’s just been great to have even the informal conversations I’ve had with students about harder subject matters.

His work in progress, still in its beginning stages, is a video called Shining Boy. “It’s really focused on the body and movement and the ways that some materials are affecting the body or determining the way the body moves,” he says. “I’m interested in, as a black man, taking the power back and not being victimized by any information, and that’s where the videos are really heading right now currently,” Whitson says. “I do believe that is one of the main purposes of art; it’s being able to ask questions and they don’t necessarily need answers but just to talk about them.”