A “black box” — variously a flight data recorder, theater, and camera — is essentially a repository for different modes of memory. Many are in close conversation in American photographer Dona Ann McAdams’s moving new autobiography, aptly titled Black Box. Just as her images are emphatically her own, so too is the form of this book that charts her four decades as a photographer, activist, and witness to history. Two expressive strands, one a retrospective of her strongest visual work and the other a series of flash memoirs, join to produce an object that is greater than the sum of its parts — a singular fusion of literary and photographic art.
Born in 1954 in Ronkonkoma, Long Island, McAdams posits that as a baby, her most present parent was the television set whose “way of seeing” primed her for a life behind the lens. Indeed, one of the most arresting images in the book shows baby Dona propped, hauntingly alone, in front of an overexposed screen that glows like an unearthly robot overlord. Most children of the mid-century can relate, though we may not have proven the astute student of its visual lessons that McAdams did.
The next childhood memory she offers is that of seeing her first horse, a Shetland pony. Its primacy in these pages indicates the transformative role of horses in her life and work. Her photographs of people and events, taken with a beloved Leica M2 over the course of a decades-long career, situate her squarely in the tradition of 20th-century documentary and street photography, including the work of Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Helen Levitt. But her horses (and also goats) belong visually to another world, their beauty rendered almost abstract, their obdurate mystery intact.
Black Box is not an illustrated life but a pictured one — by which I mean deliberately composed as an artwork in a class of its own. Growing up with working parents, her relationship to Catholicism, her realization of her attraction to women in every sense, and other details of McAdams’s personal history are entwined with accounts illuminating the development of her practice, from her first camera — a talismanic Polaroid Swinger whose instant film proved too expensive for much use — to the image she displayed for critique at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1974 although she was not formally enrolled. Winogrand, then a guest instructor, singled out the picture with encouraging praise: “This is a really good photograph.” It is, as well as unmistakably influenced by the eminent photographer. So are several others, particularly those that envision the type of American landscape in which signage eclipses the humans it is meant for.
A sense of the uncanny pervades both photographs and texts throughout Black Box. 1980s and ’90s New York City, where McAdams was charged with capturing the seminal performance artists of the time as house photographer at Performance Space 122, was a busy intersection with a broken stoplight: Major social-cultural movements collided continuously. Yet McAdams had an eerie ability to encounter the influential movers and events of the day no matter where she was, from San Francisco to Australia to Central America. It is her generous openness to the moment that magnetized pivotal personalities and incidents. A memorial to these moments made of poetry and light, Dona Ann McAdams’s book of remembering is not easily forgotten.
Black Box: A Photographic Memoir (2024) by Dona Ann McAdams is published by Saint Lucy Books and is available online and through independent booksellers. The companion exhibition Dona Ann McAdams: Black Box will be on view at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery (144 West 14th Street, West Village, Manhattan) from April 18 through June 7.
