Ron
Tarver

An Overdue Conversation With My Father

Throughout the last 30 years, my photography has explored many facets of the African-American community. My current work is an extension of and expansion on this trajectory, adding to the collected journal of the African American experience in this country. It involves the appropriation of photographs my father, Richard Tarver, produced in the 1940s and 50s to construct contemporary images that comment on the pervasive legacy of racial strife in this country. The more than 300 photographs and over 1000 African American and white negatives he produced of the African American residents in the small Oklahoma town of Fort Gibson represent a time when Jim Crow laws were still in place. While those laws have since been abolished, their legacy lives on. These reimagined images engage a troubling past with an equally problematic present.My current work is an extension of and expansion on this trajectory, adding to the collected journal of the African American experience in this country. It involves the appropriation of photographs my father, Richard Tarver, produced in the 1940s and 50s to construct contemporary images that comment on the pervasive legacy of racial strife in this country. The more than 300 photographs and over 1000 African American and white negatives he produced of the African American residents in the small Oklahoma town of Fort Gibson represent a time when Jim Crow laws were still in place. While those laws have since been abolished, their legacy lives on. These reimagined images engage a troubling past with an equally problematic present.