Lyle Ashton Harris: Where are you from? Where are your roots?
Kia LaBeija: I was born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen, right by Times Square. I grew up in Manhattan Plaza, which is the two big artist buildings that are right on 43rd Street and 9th Avenue. I’ve lived in New York for most of my life. I’m a city girl, through and through.
LAH: I was born in the Bronx, where I’ve lived most of my life. I lived in Tanzania for a couple of years as a child, and moved back to New York. Then went to Connecticut for college, and then grad school on the west coast. My father’s South African, so I spent some time in South Africa, and then I later lived and taught in Ghana. I’m grateful I had the experience of growing up in the Bronx in a lot of ways. I think I would have gotten in more trouble if I had been in the city.
KLB: So, I love looking at your work. I actually bought your self-titled monograph before this interview. I’ve known about your art for some time, but I never dove into it in a super critical way. When I knew that I was going to have the opportunity to speak with you, I went to The Strand bookstore, and bought your beautiful book. I wanted to be able to hold your work in my hands.
I feel incredibly connected to the idea of archiving and capturing that permeates your creative practice. Especially growing up without my mom and knowing there were so many things that we weren’t able to capture in photographs, I felt that void and loss.
LAH: My documentary impulse within the work goes back thirty years. In 2013, I rediscovered a series of snapshots which documented the Black and queer diaspora of life from LA to New York, London to Paris, etc. It included people such as bell hooks, Marlon Riggs, Essex Hemphill, Nan Goldin, and a lot of people in the early stages of their careers. It also documented a particular period within the second wave of AIDS activism, and the queer community in different locations. These images were never made to be art per se. But twenty years later, I used the installation format as a way to construct a narrative. The work is also, in a way, constructed like yours — drawing on notions of fantasy, play, desire, etc.
What I find so potent about your photographs, like Eleven from 2015, is how they chart the history of the representation of the subject vis-à-vis the AIDS crisis. During the early part of the crisis in the mid-eighties, images were used, like Nicholas Nixon’s photographs, of the subject on a deathbed — like an image of death. The camera itself was used to construct a dominant narrative of dying or the disease. There also emerged a counter-narrative with artists portraying people living with HIV, but who were very much sexuality active, healthy, and vibrant. I feel like Eleven is a distillation of that history with you as the central subject of the photograph, but also its author. I love the fact that you’re not only speaking for yourself, but you’re also speaking to the history of photography, the history of these kinds of representations, and the power of the image. When I see it, I see the history, but also the triumphal march of survival — not only surviving, but thriving.
