-[Hank] This is nice.
-[Rujeko] Mm-hm.
So are these negatives all your grandfather's photographs?
-Yeah, and I haven't seen them, actually.
It's kind of awesome just to, like,
open up a box and...
find these things.
These...
This is one of the first shoots I was ever on.
-[Rujeko] Oh, wow.
-[Hank] These are photographs from my mom's archive.
This is a picture I've used a lot in my work.
-[Rujeko]Mm-hm.
-[Hank] They're being baptized in the pool.
-You see the horns here and...
-[Rujeko] Mm-hm.
-[Hank] This woman here.
Look, this is so powerful.
-[Rujeko] Mm-hm.
-The two things that I remember people saying to me as early as
three or four years old are "You ask too many questions"
and "You're not supposed to stare at people."
♪playful oscillating synths♪
[chuckling] Most of my work is some combination of the two.
Photography was a reason to stare.
All of my work is about framing and context,
and about how, depending on where you're standing,
it really shapes your perspective of the truth,
of reality, and what's important.
♪♪♪
Along with photography, I have to work in different mediums.
♪♪♪
I have to try different ways to look at something that we might
think that we've already looked at a thousand times.
♪arpeggiated synth music♪
I was reading Roland Barthes' book 'Camera Lucida,'
where he talks about the punctum.
His perspective of the punctum is the thing that pierces you,
the thing that sticks with you in the photograph.
When I look at this photograph of a Harlem Globetrotter
standing in front of the Statue of Liberty,
the punctum for me was this arm.
♪♪♪
I like to balance the spectacle element of sports
with the context of history and politics.
During my research, I was reading Ernest Cole's landmark book
'House of Bondage.'
He, as a black photographer, traveled all over South Africa
documenting the horrors of apartheid,
and then smuggled these images out of the country.
♪♪♪
The specific image of a lineup of nude miners with their arms
up being strip-searched really struck me.
I had seen it many times before, but I recognized,
with a critical eye, that I felt often guilty looking at this
picture because I was always gawking at their bodies.
My looking at it was reinforcing the oppression.
♪♪♪
I wanted to remake that image as a sculpture,
so I titled it Raise Up.
I want to give viewers a chance to walk around and look up and
look over,
to just try to look at these men with dignity.
♪♪♪
Just about six months after I made that sculpture,
halfway across the world in Ferguson, Missouri,
the phrase "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" became popular
after the murder of Mike Brown.
-[crowd] [chanting] Hands up, don't shoot!
-[Hank VO] When I finally exhibited this work in the
United States,
people called it "the Hands Up, Don't Shoot piece."
♪♪♪
I see everything as connected, so if I'm making work about
coal miners or Ferguson
or basketball,
frankly, a lot of the bodies are connected through this history
of oppression.
-[Hank] Zoom in, and then you can just cycle through the
pages.
Mm-hm.
I'm so glad that we chose the 3D-scan real hands for this
instead of digitally-made hands.
-[Sam Giarratani] I wanna show you the finger.
They take the 3D print, and then they coat it with this wax,
so that it can stick to the ceramic.
And that level of texture is gonna come across in the bronze.
-[Rujeko] Yes, that is crazy.
-[Sam] Yeah.
-[Rujeko] They look good.
-And so, do you know what that piece is?
-[Sam] No, this is actually just a sample.
-[Rujeko] Sample for, like, the patina?
-[Sam] Yeah.
-[Hank] This is so nuts imagining how they broke the
sculpture into 650 pieces...
-[Sam] Mm-hm.
-[Will] Mm-hm.
-[Hank] And how many people are working on this one.
-[Sam] Yeah, it's all hands on deck.
-The whole foundry.
-[Rujeko] Great.
-Yeah, we break ground on Coretta Scott King's birthday,
and then...
it debuts on MLK Day.
-[Rujeko] Mm-hm.
-And so the eight months in between,
everything's gotta get done.
♪sparse ethereal music♪
-[Hank VO] A few years ago, I was invited to submit a proposal
for the Boston Common –
an installation in memorial to Coretta Scott King
and Martin Luther King.
I didn't really know at the time that two of the most prominent
civil rights leaders from the South actually met and fell in
love in Boston.
The fact that their love would actually ripple out
in so many ways from that first meeting was really profound
for me.
I wanted to make a sculpture that was inspired by their
intimacy that's larger than life.
I found a picture of them at the award ceremony
for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The punctum of the photograph --
the part that I was struck by --
was the way that their arms were wrapped around each other.
His weight was resting on her.
The fact that we speak so much about Martin Luther King without
acknowledging or celebrating Coretta Scott King was something
that was important to me, as well as everyone involved.
There was tension, you know, in me and also my collaborators
about what does it mean to not include their faces and other
body parts?
But really, when I think about Martin Luther King and
Coretta Scott King, I have a feeling.
It's not the pictures I've seen, it's a sense in my heart.
There is a poetry in these interlocking arms and this
sculpture that people will go inside of
and replicate that gesture.
We wanted the sculpture to actually get to the heart of it.
-[Dr. Deborah Willis]:We always talk about the hidden
archive of Black history that's
not hidden but it's there, and it's really the...
the researcher who has to reimagine the archive.
When I think about, you know, Aunt Cora's quilts...
-[Hank] I wonder if that's part of the inspiration for me --
just a lot of the work that I do is always very much in
conversation subconsciously with the work you're doing.
-[Deb VO] I'm Deb Willis.
I'm a photographer, a professor.
I teach at New York University Tisch School of the Arts,
chair of the photography program there.
♪ethereal synth music♪
I'm a writer about photography.
♪♪♪
As a child, Hank was fascinated with photographs.
He would go into the photographic album,
ask my mother, "Why is this photograph in color?
And why is this in black and white?"
And he would change the pages to tell his own story.
At that time, I worked for the Schomburg Center of Research in
Black Culture as a photo specialist/archivist.
After school,
I would pick him up during my break,
take him to work with me.
He always wanted to know,
"Why do you have photographs of people we don't know...
[laughs] in our house?"
And I said, "Because we need to know the stories
of the people in the image."
-[Hank VO] As a child, with my mother's work,
I didn't really understand what she was doing.
Now, I understand that her work, along with many others',
was really critical in building and expanding the field of
photography, and especially Black photography.
Looking at the way that Hank grew up in a professional
archive of a library but also in the family archive
made him curious about how to create a narrative about Black life.
♪erratic synth music♪
What I took from photography was incredible
knowledge and experience of how to look critically at the world,
at myself.
Because I've always been reaching to the past and trying
to connect with it,
sometimes the closest I could get to history
is the photographic document.
♪ethereal synth music♪
There's something really just beautiful about actually
beginning to see the scale now that there is over 500 pieces
welded together.
It's like, it's happening!
I would estimate that there are at least a thousand people
who've had to work on it in some way, shape, or form.
♪♪♪
Engineers, architects, and the community boards...
and then getting it shipped across the country.
♪sparse synth music♪
The sculpture is about the Kings,
but it also is really imbued with
the care, consideration, passion, and talent of so many
other people.
-[Roberto Morales VO] We're working on something historic.
Martin Luther King, he talked for the people like me.
♪uplifting synth music♪
-[Sam] We wanted to make sure that we were really thinking
about all different kinds of people
coming into the sculpture.
We wanted to make sure wheelchairs can go inside.
We want people to come up and touch,
so the patina lends itself to being touched.
-[Jonathan] The story of Martin and Coretta was inspirational,
and also looking at the other 65 heroes of the local
Boston Civil Rights Movement,
honoring those names in the plaza,
and pushing forward a new narrative of what it means to be
in the city of Boston.
-[crowd] Ten, nine, eight, seven,
six, five, four, three,
two, one!
[cheers and applause]
♪tender synth music♪
-[Hank VO] There are so many monuments to heroes of war,
and there are not very many to heroes of nonviolence.
I'd like to believe that this is just the beginning of a new way
of thinking about how public space can be viewed,
and how we reflect on the past with care and concern for the future.
I want to make work that really gives people a sense of pride
and connection, that's going to mean something to people beyond
my circle, beyond my world, and beyond this lifetime.
♪ ethereal ambient music ♪