Fashion and Politics in the Photographs of Barkley L. Hendricks

Hendricks had been carrying a camera around North Philadelphia since he was a teenager. However, he gained admission to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts because of his skills as a draftsman. Before attending Yale in the early 1970s, where he eventually earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Hendricks created brilliant, quasi-minimalist paintings of basketball hoops and field markings reminiscent of the work of both Josef Albers and Ad Reinhardt. But his greatest love was portraiture, an affinity that put him out of step with the intoxicating abstraction that dominated Yale’s art department at the time. This incompatibility led him to study photography, under the tutelage of Walker Evans. Evans’ influence can be seen here and there in Hendricks’ photography – a picture of a wall of clocks in an antique shop taken while Hendricks was at Yale could be an outtake from Evans – but in photography as well as in art Hendricks was guided by his own passions. Like pioneering hip-hop style sleuth Jamel Shabazz, Hendricks had a reverence for the attention-grabbing theatrics of urban street style. In a photo taken on a trip to Nigeria in 1978, a man in a spotless bright pink ensemble and a patterned hat stands with one arm jauntily crossed, before a swampy cluster of creaking shacks, a blazing figure of resistance amidst of its harsh environment. In another, from 1983, a man in a white mesh T-shirt, flared jeans, and artfully scuffed white sneakers carries a shiny boombox on a shoulder strap, expressing both his personal style and musical taste to the world . Fashion, Hendricks knew, was not just a way to live a noisy life. When he heard Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, remark that “Superman never saved black people,” he bought a Superman T-shirt and posed in it for a photographic self-portrait — without pants. The painting, which Hendricks transformed into one of his better-known paintings later that year, exudes contemptuous irony but also an undeniable pride, as if to say, “Who is Superman now?”

Like the subjects of his paintings and his street photographs, Hendricks loved to peacock for the camera. In another self-portrait, from 1980, he wears a white shirt and woven tie under a V-neck jumper whose bright red color matches his futuristic, wraparound sunglasses. The ensemble is part prep school and part P-Funk. A wistful self-portrait from the same year finds Hendricks in his home studio, dressed in a white shirt and a sassy black fedora hat, his right hand resting on his chest. Like Dürer in his Christian self-portrait, or the regal Velázquez in ‘Las Meninas’, Hendricks here is both the self-confident master and the dandy who fondly recalls the time when his sister remarked, ‘You think you’re slick, just wait, one day a woman will set you straight. (A painted riposte titled “Slick (Self Portrait)” suggests he wore the label as a badge of honor.)