So opens Still Here: Stories after Katrina, the startlingly powerful photobook created by award-winning Latino photographer Joseph Rodríguez, and published in 2008. As the inspiration for Rodríguez's title, Langston Hughes's “Still Here,” which appeared in 1941 as a poignant elegy to black survival, provides a haunting opening to a work dedicated to a human-made no less than a natural disaster. The act and art of memorializing the unspeakable atrocities of Hurricane Katrina in photography as well as in music, literary adaptation and documentary film signify upon this event's importance not only as a touchstone for white American amnesia but also for deeply entrenched supremacist ideologies which have survived undiminished since slavery. A provocative and challenging work, his photobook exposes the overwhelming injustice that “the people that were the poorest were the people that were the ones that were forgotten about.”Footnote ² As such, Rodríguez's Still Here reflects on centuries-old national legacies of black American marginalization and annihilation as well as on histories of cultural no less than political and geographical displacement.

On the surface, Rodríguez's photobook does not appear to testify to Hughes's notion of a people “laughin',” “lovin',” and “livin'” in the face of racist persecution (Still Here 7). Starkly contrasting black and white explorations of African Americans mired in poverty and social abuse proliferate in this work as women, children and men suffer from ongoing inequalities of education and political subjugation. Hard-hitting images tackle without sentimentality the difficulties facing black families torn apart by government neglect, violence, gang culture, drug use and homelessness. As Ruben Martinez argues, Rodríguez betrayed “an eye as unflinching as it was sympathetic to the subjects he photographed.”Footnote ³ And yet, uplifting vignettes bearing witness to “some sense of hope” repeatedly interrupt scenes of desolation in Still Here.Footnote ⁴ Thus Rodríguez not only shows African Americans at work and at play, offering comfort to one another, helping to rebuild, praying together and taking the lead in community activism, but also engaged in reading and writing as well as reciting poetry. “It is important to try and show balance,” as “there's a lot more to the tragedy,” he argues.Footnote ⁵ At the same time, he celebrates the strength of the black “matriarch,” a subject that inspired Langston Hughes in poetical works such as “Mother to Son” (1922).Footnote ⁶ The mother's advice to her son in Hughes's poem is no less revealing for Rodríguez's overall photographic practice in Still Here as she fearlessly insists, “I's still goin',” despite the fact that “Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.”Footnote ⁷ Rodríguez celebrates the same bravery by urging that “We keep fighting the fight. That's what Still Here is all about. It's just to give the voiceless a voice and to make sure that at least this book has documented some part of this history.”Footnote ⁸ Bearing witness to his assumption that the camera is a “weapon,” Rodríguez's visual narrative testifies to his conviction that photography has “saved my life.”Footnote ⁹

I examine Still Here in relation to race, representation and the narrative series to get to grips with Rodríguez's use of aesthetic experimentation to galvanize political protest. As he explained in interview, those individuals within the black community most affected by the tragedy would “often tell me that people really don't … care what they're saying or who they are.”Footnote ¹⁰ Thus he became enraged by racist amnesia in mainstream cultures of forgetting. Still Here reveals tensions between black visibility and invisibility as Rodríguez confronted the difficulties of finding a visual language within which to present the lives of a “scarred,” “battered” and “scattered” people who are nonetheless “still here.” His conviction that “We all need to be seen. We have to be seen” insists on a politics of visibility that is integral to his human rights philosophy and offers a powerful challenge to audience tendencies towards voyeuristic consumptions of black culture.Footnote ¹¹ Rodríguez's experimentation with the photographic series also reflects Allan Sekula's contention: “Photographic meaning is always a hybrid construction, the outcome of the interplay of iconic, graphic, and narrative conventions.”Footnote ¹² Hybridity and interplay are distinguishing features of Rodríguez's visual storytelling as characterized by a kaleidoscope of intersecting and divergent visual and textual voices. Half-told, half-visualized vignettes act as touchstones in Still Here to inspire audiences to obtain a more incisive understanding of black experiences via a self-reflexive and imaginative engagement with his powerful imagery and textual dramatizations.

An internationally acclaimed and prolific photographer, Joseph Rodríguez's Still Here: Stories after Katrina represents just one of a number of his photobooks and exhibitions including Spanish Harlem (1994), East Side Stories: Gang Life in East LA (2000), Juvenile (2004) and Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City on view as Spirit and Flesh: Mexico's Sexual Revolution in Los Angeles in 2009.Footnote ¹³ Committed to unveiling untold hardships, his photojournalism documents the lives of those who “face life at the bottom of the country's socioeconomic pyramid,” irrespective of national contexts or racial differences. He documents the lives of those forgotten and otherwise erased from history as his camera visually reinterprets the hidden stories of women, children and men variously inhabiting different racial and ethnic groups. Rodríguez adopts an international perspective to document those living in impoverished and frequently inhumane conditions in countries as far apart as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Romania, Zambia and Kurdistan.Footnote ¹⁴ “I continue to work within the social documentary practice covering the struggles of everyday life,” he observes.Footnote ¹⁵ As he explains, “Families tell me from East L.A. to East Harlem, from East Harlem to Mozambique … you have the voice, you can help us,” admitting, “I take that very seriously.”Footnote ¹⁶

“Although he didn't have a paid assignment,” Patrice Pascual writes regarding Rodríguez's decision to photograph sufferers from Hurricane Katrina, he “decamped to Denton, to bear witness as dozens of people tried to move on from the greatest losses of their lives” (Still Here 10). Rodríguez's humanitarian impulse reflects his determination not to capitulate or to compromise in a desire to maintain control over his visual narratives. His difficult relationship with censorship in editorial manipulations of his work resonates with the dilemmas which confronted formerly enslaved narrators fighting for the right to aesthetic expression in the nineteenth century. As he admits, “there's a real strong sense of compromise in my work,” on the grounds that “I have to be able to take my work and shape it into what editors want.”Footnote ¹⁷ Rodríguez's realization that “It's tough not to be able to tell the whole story, the whole truth,” lies at the heart of his aesthetics of rupture and fragmentation.Footnote ¹⁸Still Here experiments with the photographic series to indict social injustices and articulate political protest while celebrating acts and arts of resistance in the black community.

“The first titles out of the chute came too fast to be real books: rather, they were picture books, the photos alternating with snatches from news despatches.”Footnote ¹⁹ So notes Carl Lindahl regarding the early outpouring of photographic representations of Hurricane Katrina. And yet, as works such as Still Here establish, the last few years have borne witness to a wealth of self-reflexive and experimental photobooks and visual essays each offering thought-provoking explorations of Hurricane Katrina.Footnote ²⁰ Works by white photographers include Larry Towell's In the Wake of Katrina and Chris Jordan's In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster, both published in 2006; as well as Thomas Neff's Holding Out and Hanging On: Surviving Hurricane Katrina, which appeared in 2007.Footnote ²¹ Dan Burkholder's The Color of Loss: An Intimate Portrait of New Orleans after Katrina was published as recently as 2008.Footnote ²² With the possible exception of Towell's haunting work, Rodríguez's determination not to flinch from the open-ended realities of black political, historical and social struggles for survival in the wake of Katrina represents a stark departure from the approach taken by many white-authored photobooks. As bell hooks writes, “Access and mass appeal have historically made photography a powerful location for the construction of an oppositional black aesthetic,” in recognition of the fact that, “In the world before racial integration, there was a constant struggle on the part of black folks to create a counter-hegemonic world of images that would stand as visual resistance, challenging racist images.”Footnote ²³ Rodríguez's Still Here relies on an experimental use of the documentary mode both to reveal an “oppositional black aesthetic” and to dramatize his social and political no less than artistic critique of African American injustices.

Rodríguez's work betrays more similarities with photobooks and visual essays by major African American photographers including those within Kamoinge, a New York-based collective which produced a collaborative work titled “Lives Out of Context: A Hurricane of Race.”Footnote ²⁴ This project consists of visual essays by photographers Salimah Ali, Gerald Cyrus, Collete V. Fournier, Russell K. Frederick, Wayne Lawrence, John Pinderhughes, Eli Reed, Radcliffe Roye, Frank Stewart and Shawn Walker. As Richard Ings writes, they provide “a collective response to Hurricane Katrina, speaking out as well as making photographic records of devastation and survival.”Footnote ²⁵ “In photographing black subjects from the seemingly contradictory positions of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders,’” Erina Duganne astutely observes, “the members of Kamoinge transform their photographs from ‘illustrations’ of their race or as ‘evidence’ of some social problem to multi-faceted aesthetic statements that reflect conflicting experiences about African American identity.”Footnote ²⁶ Such is no less the case for Rodríguez, whose images in Still Here constitute “multi-faceted aesthetic statements” designed to capture the “conflicting” realities of a people typically stereotyped out of existence. Neither bodies of “evidence” nor mere “illustration,” his self-reflexive works push artistic boundaries to reject one-dimensional, racist constructions of black identities. Still Here establishes the moral importance of reform in a documentary ethos characterized not by a spectacular display of suffering bodies but via an imaginative engagement with autobiographical testimonies.

Rodríguez's images in Still Here resonate powerfully with Another Black Blues Story, a narrative series by black photographer Clarence Williams, not least for their equal determination to draw metaphorical parallels between spectacles of black suffering in New Orleans during Katrina and the iconography of the Middle Passage.Footnote ²⁷ And yet there are some fundamental differences. “‘It looked like human trash’, someone said. A body was stuffed in a black plastic trash bag along 1-10.”Footnote ²⁸ So reads the horrifying text accompanying Williams's powerful photographic representation of a black body half concealed and half revealed within a torn black plastic bag. Williams's disturbing depiction of mutilated and dead bodies whose lives remain undocumented because unknown operates in stark contrast to Rodríguez's Still Here, which contextualizes loss as experienced only within specific familial contexts. As Rodríguez suggests, “To just photograph the violence doesn't cut it for me. It misses what the story has to say.”Footnote ²⁹ Thus the only dead body he includes in Still Here belongs to Tarik Sparks, one of two brothers “gunned down in separate incidents” (Still Here, 51). In comparison to Williams's anonymous victims, Rodríguez engages with black families to explore individual histories as his photographs juxtapose scenes from Sparks's life with the emotional repercussions rather than the grisly realities of his tragic death. Rodríguez's decision to provide a “slice of everyday life” regarding the struggles of black families over a long period of time not only de-anonymizes potentially generic representations of social disfranchisement but also dignifies the lives of those typically objectified in or excluded from mainstream accounts. As he admits, “what I tried to focus on was the families.”Footnote ³⁰ He writes, “This book is dedicated to all those who have touched me with their stories and helped me make these images come to life,” and, in recognition of continuing hardships, he created this work to reach out “to all those who have lost family and home and who continue to rebuild their lives” (Still Here, 3).

“‘I don't know how I'm going to make it.” So admits Earl Slaughter, the first black subject of Rodríguez's Still Here, who “barely escaped death” by fitting “his lank frame into a large cooler” (Still Here, 12). Such an equivocal opening establishes Rodríguez's determination not to shy away from existential ambiguities or nihilistic despair. Still Here resists reformist narratives of uplift by establishing the difficulties of cathartic redemption either for his subjects or audiences as both remain implicated in his heart-breaking vignettes. He explains, “Earl Slaughter … just come to Texas and he sees this little pond where he's staying and he freaks out … All this stuff starts coming back to him.”Footnote ³¹ He continues, “the stories are … unbelievably horrific,” admitting that there were “so many that I couldn't even put in” as people were “holding on to dear life on top of a roof as the water's pouring down. They watched their brother, their sister, their mother disappear.”Footnote ³² The fact that Slaughter himself escaped death by hiding in a refrigerator represents a twenty-first-century variation on the nineteenth-century phenomenon according to which renowned fugitives such as Henry “Box” Brown posted themselves from slavery to freedom.Footnote ³³ Still suffering from modern-day oppression, Slaughter escaped one form of slavery only to be reborn into another, given that, as a displaced refugee, he suffered from “no job prospects” and was “far from family and friends” (Still Here, 12). Rodríguez's opening photograph of Earl Slaughter reflects a saying among African Americans in New Orleans: “We went from the ships in chains to the prison.”Footnote ³⁴

On the surface, Rodríguez's seemingly tranquil photograph of a man standing before a pond in a seemingly innocuous suburban, tree-lined area does little to portray such psychological turmoil. Yet delve deeper and the viewer is invited to stand behind Slaughter to inhabit his perspective in a powerful, understated technique by which she or he is encouraged to reimagine his sense of desolation. An elliptical, ambiguous photograph, this image refuses to display Slaughter's anguish for audience consumption as his subjectivity remains inviolate to prying eyes. Rodríguez's photograph instead frankly confronts the impossibility of portraying Slaughter's trauma to explore the limitations and even failures of photographic representation ever to document the enormity of a suffering which is unspeakable because it is unimaginable. Such ambiguous poetics lend force to Rodríguez's conviction that the hurricane left “a lot of work to do in terms of just bearing witness.”Footnote ³⁵

Ultimately, Rodríguez's decision to juxtapose an ambiguous photograph of Earl Slaughter with a self-reflexive diary entry is telling. “Feeling anxious – this feels more like a story about race and class,” he writes (Still Here, 12). As such, Slaughter's history becomes representative of the many testimonies included in Still Here, not only to expose injustices of “race and class” but to resist overly straightforward philanthropic notions of moral uplift as Rodríguez's subjects are caught in racist cycles of suffering and abuse. A literary equivalent of Rodríguez's stark photograph of Slaughter, his diary entry accentuates black suffering yet further by seeming to reduce the multiplicity of black experiences solely to a dispassionate list. As he writes, “A 66-year-old old [sic] from the Lower Ninth Ward cries because he can't get all of his medicine” at the same time that a “mother worries about her daughter who has been sent to juvenile court” and an “ex-crack addict, struggling to stay clean, suffers from nightmares” (Still Here, 12). For Rodríguez, Slaughter's story carries the burden of representation by operating as a touchstone for elided black histories.

Such seemingly clear-cut factual summaries, a prelude to the emotionally discordant narratives included in Rodríguez's photobook, exacerbate the understated drama of his first photograph, which portrays Slaughter contemplating a seeming suburban idyll. These minimalist diary entries provide a stark outline which viewers are expected to supplement via their own imaginative engagement and empathetic understanding. Despite the fact that he attaches great significance to the “visual voice” that “can tell stories that are just as powerful as words,” many of Rodríguez's photographs remain only partially explicable without access to their written captions and/or diary entries.Footnote ³⁶ These autobiographical snippets thus play a key role in Rodríguez's photograph as they provide emotional exorcism in his ongoing search for some redemption or some escape from the suffering. As he admits, “the diary becomes the only way to stay sane” on the ground that he had to “bear witness to all this stuff alone.”Footnote ³⁷ With no graphic exploration of dead bodies or scenes of mass destruction, audiences peering over Slaughter's shoulder are denied access to his facial expression but are invited instead to use their imaginations to identify with his psychological trauma.

Similarly, Rodríguez provides no nuanced exploration of the “66-year-old,” the “mother” or the “ex-crack addict” to indict ongoing injustices via social practices of discrimination which trade in types rather than in individuals. Rodríguez's decision to illustrate his photograph with seemingly explanatory but ultimately ambiguous text encourages his audience to see the necessity of supplementing minimalist and biased reportage even to begin to reimagine traumatic cycles of loss and suffering. “I need to go back to get closure,” concludes Rodríguez's diary entry accompanying this photograph (Still Here, 12). Yet such “closure” remains as elusive and unobtainable for this photographer as it is for his subjects in Still Here. Rodríguez's fraught realization of the difficulties of any search for “closure” distinguishes his photobook from white-produced versions to establish further parallels with black-authored accounts. Ultimately, his visual techniques and narrative approach resonate with works by African American photographers in a shared determination to see these politicized images as providing a “service” to society.Footnote ³⁸

Cheryl I. Harris and Devon W. Carbado's examination of the racist captions typically accompanying photographs devoted to Hurricane Katrina in white official reportage reveals that “as the humanitarian crisis peaked with the retreating floodwaters, a debate over the role of race in the disaster emerged. The unrelenting spectacle of black suffering bodies demanded an explanation.”Footnote ³⁹ Rodríguez's powerful visual vignettes in Still Here defy such “an explanation” by refusing to provide a panoramic display of “black suffering bodies,” as typically bought and sold to satiate audiences clamouring for seemingly graphic and uncensored imagery. This work ultimately resists exhibiting black histories for white consumption according to mainstream fascinations with black bodies as spectacular display. Relying on a self-reflexive juxtaposition of image and text as well as one photograph with another, Rodríguez instead interweaves various oral histories to preserve storytelling traditions. As shown in his representation of Slaughter and many others, his photobook revels in understatement to signify on visual and literary ellipses and fragmentation. A cyclical structure works in combination with his ambiguous compositions to insist on the difficulties of remembering, representing or even reimagining black individual subjectivities as affected by trauma and loss. Rodríguez's photobook adopts an aesthetics of juxtaposition and experimentation in a determination not to “sensationalize”, sentimentalize or even explain away the black experience. As such, he shares bell hooks's view that, through photography, “we connect ourselves to a recuperative, redemptive memory that enables us to construct radical identities, images of ourselves that transcend the limits of the colonizing eye.”Footnote ⁴⁰

“Crying through a gated window, Hilda says she fears leaving the dilapidated house for fear the burglars will take what little they have” (Still Here, 14). So reads the text accompanying Rodríguez's intimate close-up of Hilda Hendricks, a haunting portrayal of black female suffering as she appears on a white monolithic background designed to symbolize the nefarious effects of a “colonizing eye.” A graphic photograph, Hendricks's anguished physiognomy contrasts powerfully with previously understated portrayals of Slaughter's torment. Confronting her audience from behind a wire fence, tessellated yet transparent diamond shapes operate both to explicate and to obscure black female victimization. As such the fence not only signifies on a history of black captivity but also acts as a protective barrier to prevent female objectification by the audience's appropriating gaze. As Rodríguez's diary entry reports, “She cries, ‘I can't live like this; I haven't eaten since yesterday. How long can we take it?’” (Still Here, 14). Such a powerful use of rhetorical questioning establishes inextricable relationships between black hopelessness and despair on the one hand and resilience and survival on the other to dramatize the fact that these are a people suffering but “still here.”

“It means so much for you to come back here to see us. Makes us feel like we are somebody. We came so close to death. We walked, we swam, and we are still here” (Still Here, 14). Rodríguez's decision to quote directly from Hendricks's testimony effectively contrasts with his earlier minimalist narration accompanying Slaughter's photograph. In this instance, short, declarative statements testify to black female agency and resistance at the same time that they collapse moral and emotional boundaries between photographer and subject. Moreover, her poignant admission that he “makes us feel like we are somebody” suggests parallels between Rodríguez and twentieth-century African American photographer Gordon Parks, who was no less keen to counter the effects of social deprivation by giving voice to those “who staggered to their feet every morning lost in nothingness.”Footnote ⁴¹ Thus Rodríguez's similarly transgressive visual poetics ascribes agency to people “lost in nothingness” as he encourages his black subjects to “feel like we are somebody.” Repeatedly documenting the hidden lives of diverse families throughout Still Here, he defies mainstream tendencies to subject black experiences to reductive, for which read racist, definitions.

Thus Rodríguez's graphic representation of Hilda Hendricks's seeming incarceration behind a grid-like fence does not constitute the entirety of her story. Later images amplify and detract from his earlier portrayal to create multifaceted explorations not only of Hendricks but also of the untold histories of Hurricane Katrina's dispossessed in Still Here. Other images alternately document Hilda Hendricks's attempts to rebuild her home at the same time that she is overwhelmed by grief. Yet another photograph shows her in the arms of an unnamed female friend as she protectively holds her head to her chest while the woman's enigmatic expression contemplates the distant view (Still Here, 42). Yet he complicates her story further by documenting a powerful volte-face in which the former victim becomes the authority figure. Thus another photograph portrays Hendricks in an empowered role for the first time as she offers “support to 23-year-old Ashley Juse, a pregnant woman” who has become homeless (Still Here, 114). Such cycles of suffering and survival provide multidimensional and open-ended visualizations of black female identities not only to create individuals from types but to give “voice to the voiceless.”

As a way of shedding yet further light on his exploration of complex black female identities in Still Here, Rodríguez signifies on Slaughter's portrait in a later photograph by similarly providing a rear view of Hilda Hendricks, this time as she walks hand in hand with her husband. Earlier text testifying solely to her “schizophrenia” is omitted in favour of an unprecedented celebration of her role as a community photographer (Still Here, 14, 118). As Hendricks herself explains, “I used to do album covers, weddings, magazines, art shows … I would try and capture the souls of people. Psychological portraits are not being made today … It was spiritual, like a ministry” (Still Here, 118). Rodríguez's exploration of acts of commemoration self-reflexively interrogates his own role as a photographer to encourage audiences of Still Here to engage in ongoing critique and debate regarding his and other visual and literary representations of communities traumatized by Hurricane Katrina. Moreover, his decision to complicate the interpretative dynamics of his own images reveals his preference for elliptical, fragmented and multidimensional portraits. Far from a schizophrenic victim, according to this new representation Hilda Hendricks played a key role in the black community by acting as a griot responsible for preserving and commemorating family histories and social rituals. Her insistence upon the “spiritual” significance of the photographer reflects Gordon Parks's belief that “No one can decipher the trials of oppressed people with more fire and passion than a black preacher, and I tried to touch that power with my camera.”Footnote ⁴² Furthermore, Hendricks's realization of the absence of “psychological portraits” in a contemporary era sheds light on Rodríguez's own aesthetic practice as he creates symbolic photographs to rectify that gap in Still Here. As Martinez argues, “One senses a subject behind the lens as well as in front of it.”Footnote ⁴³ In this way, Rodríguez's subjectivity works not only to represent but also to illuminate the psychological complexities of the individuals represented in his photographs. Still Here foregrounds psychological complexity in the necessity of a soul-searching quest for spiritual, moral and political redemption, however illusive, via the act and art of photography. For Rodríguez such an exploration was not only political but also autobiographical as he admits in his recent confessional photobook, Juvenile: “I slowly started to learn how to redeem myself by looking deep inside.”Footnote ⁴⁴

“Men have a tendency to take whatever's hard and stick it way down deep and never let it surface, because you're not supposed to. I wanted to take those tough experiences and do something positive with them,” Rodríguez explains.Footnote ⁴⁵ Ambiguous portrayals of black masculinity in Still Here reflect his autobiographical relationship with the act and art of photography. As he admits, “I know what it's like to feel completely lost inside a tomb.” Such a notion of a living death clearly encapsulates Rodríguez's exploration of African American masculinity in Still Here, particularly in his upsetting photographs of the struggles afflicting Joseph Lawrence. Signifying yet again on his earlier use of composition which relied on rear views of Slaughter, Hendricks and others, an early photograph similarly conceals Lawrence's face by depicting him from behind. However, rather than contemplating a lake with his hands in his pockets, as does Slaughter, Lawrence holds a work-worn hand to the back of his neck as he stands before a darkened window and brick wall, both inescapable symbols of an imprisoning sense of futility and lack of free will. The accompanying caption is no less haunting: “Joseph Lawrence … says smoking crack helps him numb the trauma of his desperate situation. Since the hurricane, drug use in the city has increased dramatically” (Still Here, 20). As such, Lawrence's story becomes a touchstone for widespread suffering in the black community as drug abuse remains a symptom not a cause of black disfranchisement. According to Rodríguez's vision, Lawrence's method of self-medication in the face of numbness annihilates one “trauma” only to perpetuate further conditions of emotional and physical enslavement.

Yet Rodríguez complicates such seemingly straightforward representations of black male desolation in Still Here. Thus he juxtaposes this image of black male abandonment with a photograph on the facing page providing only a close-up of a book suspended in dirt and debris while the title reads, “EBONY PICTORIAL HISTORY OF BLACK AMERICA AFRICAN PAST TO CIVIL WAR Volume One” (Still Here, 18) Rodríguez's purpose in contrasting an African American man's unknown life with the representative official history of a race works to heighten black epic struggles by accentuating the bathetic realities of specific lives. These starkly differing images not only document a shocking slippage between official and unofficial testimonies but also suggest that black struggles for existence are far from over, regardless of the testimony provided in official uplift narratives. The fact that this “Pictorial History of Black America” is included so early on also suggests to Rodríguez's viewer that he has created Still Here as his own substitute for an official “pictorial” and textual “history” of black experiences during and after Hurricane Katrina.

A later photograph reveals Lawrence's face for the first time to capture the poignant reality that he is barely able to function. As shown pressing his head against the brick wall, he looks upwards in a fixed gaze which seems to locate itself on nothingness while the bare text reports, “Joseph Lawrence in his friend's garage” (Still Here, 42). An even more hard-hitting photograph reveals his drug addiction. Rodríguez accompanies Lawrence's meditation upon white wisps of smoke as they curl upwards against an otherwise black background solely with the statement, “Joseph Lawrence smokes crack” (Still Here, 66). This cycle of images resonates with the existential limitations imposed upon the protagonist of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as he similarly occupies a subterranean space suggestive of the fallacies of transcendent histories of “BLACK AMERICA.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Rodríguez's Still Here betrays a revisionist ethos by contextualizing contemporary black struggles within a long history of racist injustices. For example, he documents the horrific case of Earl Truvia, who was incarcerated for decades for “a murder he did not commit.” An early photograph shows not only Truvia at a prayer meeting but also Leo Jackson, another African American man wrongfully imprisoned for an “alleged distribution of heroin.” As the caption explains, “Both men were proven innocent and released in 2003” (Still Here, 26). Signifying on the slippery relationship between later photographs, Rodríguez then juxtaposes an image showing a black woman counselling two black men to encourage them to “break the bleak pattern of heading to prison or the cemetery” with another in which Truvia holds up the “mugshot taken when he was arrested for murder” (Still Here, 54, 58). He contrasts black philanthropic activism for collective redemption in a contemporary era with untold histories of white racist persecutions of African Americans. For Rodríguez, the decision to juxtapose positive and negative experiences is liberating, given that it is “sometimes hard to stay in one story and just be overwhelmed by it all.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Rodríguez's Still Here tackles a history by which black masculinity has no less been on display in the criminal courts than on the auction block, the minstrel stage and the lynching tree. Thus he includes a photograph juxtaposing the elder Truvia's hands with the young Truvia's physiognomy as he holds a placard of the “mugshot” taken when he was wrongfully arrested decades before. As an anatomized black physiognomy available for cataloguing in full frontal and profile view, the young Truvia nonetheless maintained agency in this criminal photograph by staring not at the viewer but into the far distance. As such, his enigmatic gaze denied white attempts to reduce black identities to a numerical identification as the board around his neck reads: “POLICE DEPARTMENT NEW ORLEANS, LA. 186799 11 15 75” (Still Here, 59). Rodríguez exploits the fact that this is a photograph within a photograph as he hides the face of Truvia the older man from his viewer. In this way, both this image and the next in the series restore subjectivity to a man who has otherwise been subjected to invasive physical display. Thus the following photograph relies on Rodríguez's signature rear view of his subjects as Truvia clutches a wire fence and contemplates the “housing projects where he was wrongfully arrested for murder” (Still Here, 60). He is clothed in a dark shirt; his uplifted hands holding the wire fence signify on earlier portrayals of disfranchised African Americans such as Hilda Hendricks and Earl Slaughter. Typically, Rodríguez's black subjects remain only partially on view as he repeatedly conceals their physiognomies to counter white perpetuations of racist fictions regarding black identities. As such, he contests acceptable boundaries of authenticity to create a new visual language characterized by a slippery ambiguity and testifying to unknowable histories. Just as slave narrators of the nineteenth century fought for their freedom from white dictates by refusing to tell, Rodríguez's photobook engages in arts of juxtaposition and experimentation to thwart the anatomizing, objectifying agenda of the “colonizing gaze.”

Yet by far the most haunting photographs in Rodríguez's Still Here are those dramatizing the wounded and wounding lives of the mother, Katrina Robinson, and her sons, Louis and Charles. His powerful portrait of the significantly named Katrina Robinson reveals her scarred and tearstained physiognomy to suggest her importance as a visual embodiment of a people who have been “scarred and battered” but who are “still here” (Still Here, 23). Sorrowful yet resilient, her expression bears witness to Rodríguez's conviction that “the trauma is always in the eyes.”Footnote ⁴⁸ As the text partly reads, she was “the victim of a vicious beating and robbery that left her with a prosthetic eye” (Still Here, 22). In a stark departure from his general practice in Still Here, Rodríguez's photograph does not fragment or obscure this portrait as he seemingly provides unmediated access to Katrina Robinson's scarification in the black line formed across her forehead while a tear falls down her right eye to join another scar on her right cheek. Hers is a face which does not flinch from the viewer as she bears witness to psychological complexity in the ambiguities of her gaze. Such a graphic tactic differs from his usual practice of partial obfuscation to indicate his refusal to complicate hard-hitting portrayals of the black female body as a site of conflict, destruction and violation. While she has been the “victim of a vicious beating,” Katrina Robinson is nonetheless “still here” as she stands before the viewer with her narrative written but not revealed in the trauma of her gaze. As a heroic figure, she retains agency via the power of her gaze, which communicates a psychological interiority capable of hauntingly overshadowing the potentially reductive exhibition of the physicality of her scars. As contextualized within Rodríguez's narrative series, which remains self-reflexively resistant to spectacular exhibition, the seemingly graphic display of Robinson's suffering becomes more elliptical, thought-provoking and ambiguous.

Rodríguez's Still Here repeatedly returns to Katrina Robinson's story to expose the realities of suffering years after the hurricane and despite political and cultural attempts through community activism and protest to resist ongoing oppression. For example, a later group photograph shows Katrina Robinson standing proudly and protectively between her two sons, Louis and Charles, who have been wounded and disabled from injuries caused by shootings (Still Here, 36). As such, Katrina Robinson's story ultimately reflects upon Rodríguez's conviction that, “one of the most important figures in the family is the matriarch,” on the grounds that “you can go back in centuries with that … as we brought slaves over from east Africa you can feel that and that's what keeps this hope alive.”Footnote ⁴⁹ While the frail form of Katrina Robinson is no Della Williams standing strong and empowered, she no less testifies to the power of the matriarch in surviving inhumane suffering (Still Here, 89). Still Here reinforces Martinez's more general conviction that the “idea of family is at the center of many of Joe's photographs.”Footnote ⁵⁰ As Rodríguez explains, he encourages audiences to empathize with his images by insisting that the possession of a “real sensitivity and humility” is essential not only “to be able to tell some of these stories,” but also even to begin “to feel what those families are feeling.”Footnote ⁵¹

“There is a feeling of déjà vu as I return home and begin to process all these stories,” Rodríguez explains in his final diary entry (Still Here, 140). There can be little doubt that his realization of the difficulties of providing any sense of ending in an empowering vision of cathartic uplift undergirds his experimentation with photographic and textual fragments to dramatize the cyclical nature of racist injustices. Enigmatic photographs repeatedly refuse to tell as he inspires audiences to engage with the challenges involved in revisualizing, re-experiencing and, above all else, reimagining hidden histories of black suffering and survival. Rather than presenting the illusion of a panoramic completeness, Rodríguez provides only brief insights into individual lives to draw his viewer's attention to lacunae of knowledge regarding hidden black histories in the United States. As he freely admits, “One of the things you realize is that you are always are [sic] missing something; you can't photograph everything.”Footnote ⁵² For Rodríguez, such a confession represents no admission of defeat. By insisting that the photographer is always “missing something,” he places the onus upon the viewer not to presume to see but to reimagine lost histories from his experimental visual fragments.

An aesthetics of disjuncture and rupture holds the greatest possibilities in Still Here as a way to articulate elided emotional realities as well as to challenge exaggerated reinterpretations of black struggle. Rodríguez dispenses with a sensational portrayal of mutilated bodies to create ambiguous vignettes dramatizing the hidden complexities of individual life stories. As his aesthetic practice demonstrates, a recognition of that which cannot be photographed remains integral to the process of empowering the otherwise appropriated or silenced stories of the dispossessed. Ultimately, his is a vision of hope in the face of struggle. It is telling that Rodríguez's cover image includes only the bold black letters – STILL HERE – on a grey background as he relies on a poetic fragment rather than a photographic exposé to dignify black survival rather than document suffering. Perhaps audiences familiar with the spectacular display of black bodies are not yet ready for such a self-reflexive exploration of multifaceted black lives given that, as he admits, Still Here “hasn't really sold, it's been a real flop.”Footnote ⁵³

“I've never lost my fierce grudge against poverty”Footnote ⁵⁴ – Gordon Parks's powerful observation resonates with Rodríguez's unequivocal assertion that “I find myself working from that anger, from my outrage at how America seems to let families continue to fall apart” (Still Here, 86). Rodríguez's admission regarding “anger” and “outrage” lies at the heart of the dramatic intensity of Still Here, where an improvisational use of narrative coincides with his experimental juxtapositioning of interior and exterior perspectives to destabilize audience assumptions. He admits that “if I didn't do this work, I'd be in prison right now because I'd be so angry.”Footnote ⁵⁵ It is vital, therefore, that “that anger turns into this book which needs to be at least put into the Library of Congress here as a historical document.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Deliberately blurring the boundaries between insider and outsider, he generates a heightened sense of empathy via imaginative engagement with a pictorial aesthetic determined to annihilate boundaries of difference. “I continue to tell stories that have had an affect on my life so that we can diminish this distance and develop a better understanding,” he admits.Footnote ⁵⁷ As Rubén Martinez argues, Rodríguez “isn't just a simple documentarian: he is a participant-observer.”Footnote ⁵⁸

“It's easy for people to see images and just continue to think within stereotypes,” and yet, as he observes, “lives are complex.”Footnote ⁵⁹ A determination to dramatize no less than document the ambiguities and psychological complexities of his individual black subjects who have repeatedly suffered from demeaning stereotyping and racist objectification by white mainstream culture lies at the heart of Rodríguez's photography. His self-reflexive use of the photobook relies on a series of photographs to provide multifaceted histories of black struggle and create an array of three-dimensional portraits. No scientific specimens othered by the appropriating gaze of a racist authority, the psychological ambiguities and internal histories of his subjects remain protected from prying eyes. He operates not under the conviction that racist injustices and acts of discrimination are over, but that “we have a sense of struggle and we're going to see more struggle.”Footnote ⁶⁰ As such, he reflects bell hooks's view that the “field of representation” remains “a site of ongoing struggle.”Footnote ⁶¹ For Rodríguez, the photobook is integral to the act and art of memorialization as a “still image” becomes a “powerful, creative platform” for social, political and other change in the face of ongoing brutality, disfranchisement and loss.Footnote ⁶² As a haunting line of the poem “Lord, What Do I Do?” by Rudolph Williams Jr. included in Joseph Rodríguez's Still Here reads, “2006 – I can't believe that I am still waking up in fear” (Still Here, 62).