Portrait, Taj Reed, Courtesy of Stòffa, FP-100C print

Contributor

Contributing Essay

Prompt 03

Biography

Taj Marquis Reed

Auto Fiction & Prose is part of the broader concept/ethic titled Exegesis.

"The Polaroid: Art, Analog Practice, and Archive"

Taj Marquis Reed (b. Trenton, NJ) is a multidisciplinary artist dedicated to the liberatory potential of visual and textual literacy. His work employs image-making, text, and assemblage to offer counter normative portrayals of social, cultural, and historical

frameworks. He holds a B.A. in art, literature, and human behavioral studies, summa cum laude, from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and is an MFA candidate in Image-Text at Cornell University. He lives and works between Harlem, New York, and Southern

Maryland.

Taj Reed (@taj reed) on Instagram

 Auto Fiction & Prose

is part of the broader concept/ethic titled Exegesis.

Sanctuary (or Mary’s sitting room), 2023 Archival pigment print 40x50 inches (101.6 x 127 cm)

Sanctuary (or Mary’s sitting room), 2023, Archival pigment print, 40x50 inches (101.6 x 127 cm)

Gist and Billy in Mary’s sitting room, circa 1980 (photographer unknown), Archival Polaroid 3.108 x 3.024 inches (7.89 x 7.68 cm)

By the time I had reconciled with my paternal family, Grandma Gist’s memory had grown faint.

So after inheriting the clear, plastic laundry bag of prints Aunt Kat pulled out from

under the sequestered closet in Grandma’s basement, the stories about the people in, or

not in, the photographs depended on slippery childhood memories.

Most faces have names, even the ones I can no longer touch in the flesh: Uncle Davie, Uncle LeRoy, Long Grandpop, Aunt Mary Anne, Rosa Lee, Bootney.

Some names slip away. Some faces I don’t recognize at all.

I imagine those faces, the curious ones, to be neighbors, members of the Eastern Stars or Trenton Club, one of my Uncle Mike’s old girlfriends, or one of the many faithful who would visit 219 Jackson like clergy on Sunday.

Or any day one needed healing and a hot plate, so help them, God.

I saw us like stars. A constellation of images adorned Grandma Gist’s house in Mill Hill.

I still see us with my eyes lost behind my eyelids.

Wandering in reverie.

A genealogical mythos born from Polaroid cameras, stacked in 1-hour photo envelopes, and delicately torn from issues of Jet magazine or the Trentonian.

I remember the tiny acrobat in my stomach whose cue to perform was a left turn from Market to Jackson Street.

I remember Mom and Pop’s Suzuki Sidekick, half-parked as my five-, six-, and seven-year-old self darted to the front door mail slot.

I remember seeing past the sitting room and into the kitchen—looking and listening for signs of life.

I remember seeing our world through that brass rectangle: Smokey’s wheezing bark, a shrunken Don Cornelius gliding through a 10-inch Technicolor dreamscape, Grandma Gist tending to a pot of black-eyed peas or cabbage, Uncle Mike ceremoniously dunking a single Oreo cookie into a fridge-cold glass of whole milk.

The Museum of Matriarchal Art.

I remember that beyond Grandma Gist’s screen door, front door, and entryway door, she displayed her curatorial focus in

salon-styled walls of gap-toothed smiles and Black iconography: melanated Jesus, Dr. J

(then Allen Iverson), Jet Beauties of the Week, Malcolm, Martin, Avery. See, to be a Gist

by name, by kin, or by faith meant to be exalted by the photograph. Images of us collaged

and collapsed into images of Black American idols. Curiously, I don’t remember the

cameras, nor do I remember a designated “family photographer.”

Ours was a devotion to printed matter, not its mechanisms.

Ink on glossy paper situated inside wooden and plastic enclosures, tacked over patterned wallpaper, tucked into gilded frames, or clung to the pages of 3-ring albums, making marvels from the quotidian and jubilant moments of a familial past. Somehow, the photographs remember it all.

Kat’s junior five graduation.

Quincy and Kale wearing matching British Knights short sets.

Uncle Davie as Vampire Lord when little Avery was Blade one Halloween.

Bert wiping the sick from Uncle LeRoy’s nose.

Junior on tour in Vietnam. And, again, on tour with Instant Funk.

Debbie’s handwriting on the backs of yearbook photos of Tee’s son.

Grandpop Gist resting.

Paul laid to rest.