Untitled (New York Times Pre-Election Self Portrait Commission), 2000

Bronx-born photographer Lyle Ashton Harris, implements personal experience and a fascination with documentation to explore ideas of gender, sexuality, belonging, and various cultural narrative. The present lot, Untitled (New York Times Pre-Election Self Portrait Commission), 2000 touches on Harris’s interest in the historical objectification of the Black figure in Western culture at a time when mass incarceration was continuing to rise at an alarming rate. Harris’s work is intensely personal as evidenced in the Aperture text Lyle Ashton Harris: Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs, a collection of images and portraits alongside journal entries and recollections from the 1980s and 1990s, a time of emerging multiculturalism, shifts in the art world and nascent globalization. Another print of this image resides in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.