Why Should I Not Imagine it? A Conversation with Rodell Warner

Rodell Warner (b. 1986) is an Austin-based, Trinidadian-born artist working across photography and new media. He was the 2023 recipient of the Tito’s Prize, an annual award that provides an unrestricted $15,000 to a local artist and a solo exhibition in Big Medium’s gallery. We sat down over tea and talked about his practice, archives, relationship to community and place, and what’s on the horizon.

Kaila Schedeen (KS): Tell me about yourself — where did you grow up and what brought you to Austin?

Rodell Warner (RW): I grew up in Belmont, which is a town in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad. I’m in Austin because my wife, Nicole, is here doing her PhD at UT. But my work is digital. I think of myself as somebody who can work from anywhere. Nicole is also somebody who understands what I do, and cares about what I do, and who I can talk to about what I do. Us being together really is, for each of us, an ongoing conversation about our work, because I’m also interested in the work she does. It’s not an easy thing to find. 

KS: It sounds like it’s a partnership in the sense that it’s romantic, but also intellectual, and you guys have that back and forth.

RW: Absolutely. I didn’t know I needed a person who understood and could think with me about what I’m doing, and I can think about what they’re doing, but it’s one of the most important things. 

KS: When I look at your work (and this is partly because I come from a photographic focus in art history), I am thinking about photography and its development throughout the nineteenth century. Could you tell me about how you came to the medium of photography? And how you’re thinking about it in your work, both in practice and conceptually?

RW: I came to photography by accident. One of my first visual works that I made was when I was a teenager [was because] I couldn’t find any clothes that I liked, so I’d make my own. I would grab images from the internet and collage them together, print them, then cut stencils and apply them onto t-shirts. I would also buy a lot of stock photos. At one point I was like, if I had a camera, I could spend less on stock photos. I did some research and bought whatever the entry level Canon digital camera was at that time. And I absolutely fell in love with photography. I didn’t care about photos except for what I could get from them, but I fell in love with the camera. 

Then the first job that I got in advertising, they needed somebody to take pictures for this little strip ad that we had on the front page of the newspaper. It was called Moments of Peace — they just needed somebody to go out into the world and grab beautiful, peaceful images. So in contrast to all the shitty headlines and everything, there’s this thing on the bottom of the page where people’s eyes can land. That’s how I got into photography. 

My education after high school was self-directed. I got into art school, but I couldn’t pay for it. I was willing to do part time, but the school didn’t accommodate a part-time schedule, so I had to choose. I already had a job working in arts, so I was like, I’m going to do that. I’m around all of these older artists all of the sudden — they’re really experienced, and they’re older Trinidadians. They were watching globalization transform the place and they reminisce about how it used to be and what they like about it. They talked about how we can preserve things. They talk about what’s good, what we should keep and not lose, and what we should amplify. And they talked about the past. 

I’m now online looking for visual evidence of all these things that they’re talking about. In the 70s and 80s, there were cottage industries, trade protections that meant that local fashion designers had really successful fashion houses. So I’m like, can I see what that looked like? I’m looking online for it, and that sent me down a rabbit hole of historical images of Trinidad. I already loved photography — this just gave a new context. It’s not just me in love with the camera anymore, learning about lighting and things like that. It’s also enjoying and appreciating the documentary nature of photography while trying to locate myself in this place. 

I started doing this archival image process in 2014. At that time, I was really just collecting images. In 2020, looking at all these pictures from different islands, I started noticing that in a lot of these pictures, Black people are photographed from this oppressive gaze. It’s not about them, it’s about what they’re doing. How they’re made to work. They’re just machinery in so many of these pictures. I’m pretty sure my conversations with Nicole at that point had a lot to do with me realizing this. Before I had  articulated this, I would be looking for images that had a certain feeling. I was looking for pictures of Caribbean people that escaped that oppressive context, of which there aren’t many. I’m always digging through archives looking for this.

KS: When you say archives, are you physically going to archives and sifting, or are you looking through what’s online?

RW: I’m finding what’s online. So much of what I do is digital. Over the last three or four years, since I have begun articulating that I’m interested in working with archives, opportunities have come up to go to an actual archive and look through physical images. But optimally what I want is online.

KS: Could you talk more about what an archive is to you? How do you approach them and how do you think about them in your work? Specifically with the two series  in this exhibition — Augmented Archive (2019-ongoing) and Artificial Archive (2023-ongoing) — how does the archive influence them?

RW: My original intention was to find images that help me contextualize myself in the location that I was a part of, that I grew up in. Originally, the archive represented just information, memory. It felt precious in an uncomplicated way for that reason. I had conversations with Nicole, who at the time that I started this project was reading Saidiya Hartman and talking about information that is left out of archives. She was reading An Eye for the Tropics…

KS: By Krista Thompson?

RW: Right. Krista Thompson is also talking about what’s left out. As Nicole read my work and talked to me about it, she was pointing this out to me. It complicated my understanding of the archive, and I started thinking: of course, who took these pictures? What couldn’t they have seen? What does it mean that these people in the pictures weren’t the ones directing what was photographed? Thinking more about what’s left out, and what’s biased about what was captured, made me think of archives in a more complex way. This led to imagining: well, if they did have cameras, what might we have seen? What might their lives have looked like? 

When I first shared the Augmented Archive works and would talk about them, I would talk about the need to imagine more about these people’s lives. It would feel like I’m handing the audience a real limitation in the face of an actual document, actual photography. You have to use your imagination to get a fuller picture, and maybe a truer picture, of what these people’s lives were like. It sounds kind of ridiculous at first. But the more you think about it and do it, the more you realize it’s absolutely necessary, and it’s unfair for you to do otherwise. In a way, if you don’t do that, you’re accepting the limitations of that colonial gaze and you’re empowering the authority that created the images in the way they did.

For a few years, imagination was a thing that I was talking about. But when these AI text and image generating tools came up, I could then visualize what I was imagining. I started off by trying to visualize for Artificial Archive what the pictures might have looked like if the people had cameras. What does their home life look like? A lot of that doesn’t naturally exist in the actual archive. It’s important to realize that you can’t replace what wasn’t captured. But if we’re already imagining and trying to fill out our ideas of these people with fiction, then it’s also wise to be a little bit expansive. Because if you limit what you’re imagining based on what was documented, you’re still controlled by that limited gaze. 

I went to Jamaica in 2018 to be with Nicole, and somebody invited me to do a photography workshop at a high school. I get there and I teach the children about focal points, lighting, things like that, and I have them take pictures of each other. We get back to the classroom and project the pictures and talk about them. The first pictures that come up on the screen are of a light-skinned child in the class, and we have a normal conversation about the technical bits of photography. Then we move onto somebody else’s pictures; a picture of a dark-skinned child, one of the other students, comes up on the screen. There in the darkness of the room somebody shouts out “SLAVERY!” and all of them start laughing. It’s a very tight-knit group of children, they have their own humor, and I’m trying not to make too much of it. But I realized that the image of this dark-skinned child is equated, at least in one mind, to being enslaved. That is a direct result of images like those here. That’s the context in which you see dark-skinned people of the past. There is this deleterious effect that the photographic archive of the Caribbean has on the imagination of Caribbean people, and how we think of ourselves, and therefore what we’re capable of. So instead of telling the audience “Use your imagination,” I can show them how I’m using mine with AI-generated pictures.

KS: From my understanding, AI is fed with existing information — images, texts — and assuming that all this existing information is emerging from colonial structures that produced the type of imagery you’re talking about, how do you think about AI as a tool when its own framework and its source material is some of the same stuff you’re pushing back against in your work?

RW: Because that’s not all that’s in there. The model that I use is called Stable Diffusion — it’s been fed by the Laion Data Set, which I think is something like 12 million image-text pairs. That’s twelve million images that have been tagged, which is going to include all of these really biased older images, but it’s also going to include all kinds of modern images of Black people shot by themselves in other contexts. This allows for me to, in my wording of the prompt, take what I want from the old stuff and add imagery from other contexts. I can ask for imaginary things. So yes, there are limitations, but they can be easily sidestepped. 

KS: That’s a great argument for the importance of Black representation continuing into the modern age, to be able to counter pre-existing images that are more harmful. The creation and documentation of modern imagery created by and for people of color is extremely important because that feeds into not only how we think about the past and the present, but how we can imagine different futures, too. That’s interesting in your work as well, because you’re thinking about the past in the present moment, but the works are also very futuristic in a lot of ways. How do you think about the future in your work? Are you thinking about what comes after?

RW: Most importantly, I’m thinking of those children who are going to encounter my work, and how I actually have the power to influence how they see themselves from these images. I’ve already had experience with this. One of the people who was in that high school class I mentioned is here at UT Austin doing a master’s right now. When she came to the show, and I told these stories, she said it really makes her want to be a Caribbean photographer. She already is, but the way she thought about what that means, the importance of that…the hair on my arms is standing up right now, because that’s what it can do. When I think about the future, and how this work can influence it, I’m thinking about those people and the fact that they’re looking at this work and riffing off of it. 

KS: Something that I think about a lot is the ways that the art world segments artists into groups based off of labels that are either racial, gender-based, geographic, etc. In this sense, you have been labeled and have self-labeled as Trinidadian and as Caribbean. I’m curious how you feel that type of labeling affects the ways that people react to your work, or read it?

RW: I started off actively avoiding any kind of label. I used to draw and stencil and thought of myself as kind of a graffiti person, or someone who was into illustration. Those are the makers I found kinship in. When people started labeling me a photographer, they also started feeling that they had license to tell me what I should photograph, how the history of photography should dictate what I do — which was really them saying what they would like me to do. I actively went in another direction. Making things online, people are less interested in labels at that point, and less able to label you, because everybody is kind of anonymous. It’s really about the form of the thing. And that was a way to get rid of labels.

But what I realized eventually is that my focus on evading labels also made me illegible in ways that I did not appreciate. Even if I was trying to talk about something without overtly saying that’s what I’m making work about, I realized it is possible that this could get lost on somebody. Or it is possible that when people are talking about work that addresses the Caribbean, they don’t include mine because it hasn’t been articulated. When I started making work and exhibiting, there was so much focus on letting the work speak for itself. My first versions of my website would present images with no text. That was all about evading labels. But I realized that it’s more important to equip the audience to find ways to enter the work, to create conversation. 

KS: How do you feel about the potential label of “Texas artist,” or even “American artist” more broadly? 

RW: I worry about what it’s going to look like to my friends at home! [Laughing]

KS: There are definitely assumptions that come with that, but there are also assumptions that come with the label “Caribbean artist.”

RW: I think I’m more willing to be subjected to what those are, and break them, or fall into them, than to get caught up with the expectations of a Texas artist, or American artist, when I don’t even know what those are really. I’m actively always trying to assess what I’m loyal to, where I came from; I’m always suspicious of a national label on what I do. But it does matter to children in the place that I’m from. Next year I’m going to have my first solo show in a museum, and if they see an article about that, and they know that this person is from where they’re from, that makes a difference. That means something. For that reason, I do want that information to be transferred with my work.

KS: I want to ask you about color, because it is really striking to me how colorful some of these images are. From a photo history perspective, color didn’t become widely used until the twentieth century. What was your thought process in including color in these reimaginations of historic archival images?

RW: Around 2014 I started including these 3D-animated objects that I would generate and use in archival photos. I then started colorizing black and white photos in 2020 because an AI colorization tool became available online. When I started doing that, I really wanted the animated object to fit into the limited palate of the colorized images, so I would sample colors from the colorized image. When I show these works to people, they talk so much about color and how the vibrancy is impacting them. People talk about these animated objects representing to them the souls of the people, or sometimes they talk about chakras, halos, or other kinds of visualizations of the spiritual self. For them, and for the advancement of that part of the conversation, I have been trying more to include color. But people have such a huge reaction to the color in these that when I don’t use it, I actually feel like I’m taking something away from the audience. Even though sometimes to me it feels more fitting to use the monochrome ones.  

KS: There often comes an assumption with monochromatic photography that it is somewhat nostalgic, or it belongs to the past rather than to the present. I think people have an easier time relating to photographs in color, or approximating life from them, rather than black and white photographs, which are less lifelike in that sense.

RW: Absolutely. You can imagine more about these people if you see them in color — it’s easier to imagine that they’re like us, or that they have lives like us, because they don’t automatically get relegated to the past. That’s the other thing I realized: when I think about the Caribbean in the 1800s, I automatically think of these types of pictures, not paintings or drawings. It’s obvious to me the power of photography in unconsciously determining the limits of my imagination. And I want my photographs to be added to the range of what you can imagine.    

KS: What’s next for you and your practice after this exhibition? 

RW: I just got into the Film/Video MFA Program at Bard College. 

KS: Congratulations!

RW: Thank you. It’s a low-residency MFA, so I need to be there for eight weeks in the summer this year, next year, and the year after that. The rest will be remote. This was a pipe dream — I didn’t know how I was ever going to get into a master’s program. But Nicole found it. I asked, “how did you find out about this?” She said “I looked!”

KS: The benefits of being married to a researcher! [Laughing]

RW: Right? I am also in conversations with two museums next year about exhibitions. Both are instances where I am going to be well-resourced to create new works. And the photographer Will Wilson just taught me how to make tintypes, so I’m excited to do more of that now that I have all the information. I’m going to spend more time making actual tintypes.