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Jamie Harmon’s “Quarantine Portrait” Series

CREDIT: Jamie Harmon

Photographer Jamie Harmon beats the empty streets of a quarantined Memphis — keeping, of course, a good ten feet between himself and anyone he does happen to come across. On March 23rd, Mayor Jim Strickland announced the Safer at Home Initiative in response to the exponential spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, making official the soft quarantine many Memphians had already adopted.

Jamie Harmon

Phil Darius Wallace and family

In the Bluff City, where gatherings are a way of life, taken for granted, Harmon, camera in hand, sets out to document the new normal. With his “Quarantine Portrait” series, he’s — with permission — peeking through windows, into Memphians’ lives, and capturing a slice of what life looks like under lockdown. The series is understandably somber at times, but the images resonate with an undeniable sense of hope. Perhaps paradoxically, there is something inherently community-minded in these photographs of isolated individuals. Many of these photos were taken before Mayor Strickland’s Safer at Home order went into effect, and long before Tennessee Governor Bill Lee or President Donald Trump even suggested that the current health crisis might, indeed, be more serious than originally forecasted. As such, the “Quarantine Portrait” showcases Memphians self-isolating in an act of solidarity — stepping up to fill the void of leadership with individual sacrifice.

Jamie Harmon

Jamie Harmon

By day, Harmon is the owner/operator of Amurica Photo and the shared art manager at Crosstown Arts in Crosstown Concourse, the newly repurposed and remodeled Sears building.

“Because I was working 40 hours a week inside of a building, I was not as mobile as I wanted to be. I adapted something I could do where I was,” Harmon says of his “Complementary Objects” series, in which he juxtaposes, 1980s-style, a seemingly incongruous object floating ghost-like next to the smiling face of some Memphis personage. The series is lighthearted, goofy even, and Harmon’s 180-degree pivot to his series of self-isolated individuals speaks to his wide range as an artist.

“Luckily my kids are older. One thing I’m seeing is there are so many people stuck at home with younger kids or people with disabilities that had a routine. Now their routines are broken, and routines are pretty important to a lot of people. My routines have always been pretty adaptable or chaotic or whatever you want to call it. The routine of chaos is fine with me,” Harmon says.

The photographer hopes his brief visits to people’s homes can help break the oppressive monotony of a seemingly endless day, stretching on without distractions from the outside world. “The people who are sitting at home wondering what to do and maybe have little kids, this breaks that day up,” Harmon adds.

Jamie Harmon

Karen Mulford, Oz, Alex da Ponte

“It’s hard to explain to a two-year-old ‘why’ and the concept of ‘temporary,’” says notable Memphis singer/songwriter Alex da Ponte, admitting that her son Oz’s struggles to comprehend the quarantine can be challenging. “He doesn’t understand why we suddenly can’t go to the zoo or go see his grandparents or play at the park,” da Ponte says. “It’s a big part of his world that is suddenly off limits. We bought a couple bags of sand and made him a sandbox with his kiddie pool in the backyard. Little things like that have helped.”

Doubtless, Harmon’s visit was a welcome distraction; Oz, who will turn three in June, can be seen hamming it up with a big smile in some photos in the series. In others, he is either dutifully ignoring the thin, bearded stranger with a mobile light setup and a telephoto lens, or is digging into the role of studious toddler, coached by his mothers, staring at an open coloring book.

Jamie Harmon

Michael Weinberg, Robbie Johnson Weinberg, and kids

“We were empty nesters. We had two college kids come home and we’re living in a way we never thought we would again,” says Robbie Johnson Weinberg, the owner, creator, and longtime manager of Eclectic Eye. “We’re just living in this weird, unknown space.”

Weinberg says that, with uncertainties mounting — about her business and their employees, about her kids’ education and careers — the family has had to adapt. They’ve been creative, though, and have introduced a safe word into the family lexicon. Now, when talk of the nebulous future gets too dire, anyone can, with a shout of “cactus,” compel the family to change the subject and find a way out of prickly territory.

Jamie Harmon

Georgene Boksich-Cachola, Sal Cachola

For Harmon, one of the most exciting aspects of the series has been the ideas his quarantined subjects bring to the venture. “In the past it’s like ‘No, you can’t get on the roof,’ and now, ‘If we’re ever going to get on the roof, this is the perfect time for it.’”

Indeed, the series documents people posing with their pets, clambering onto the roof, thrusting their arms through screen doors like zombies in a Romero movie.
Jamie Harmon

Tamera and Ty Boyland

“It allows people to get out of that shell,” Harmon says. “It’s kind of nice that everybody feels like they gave something to it.”

“I think it’s truly just a gift in these weird times,” Weinberg says. “To have someone like Jamie come and remind us that we’re a family first is beyond lovely. There’s good stuff here, just in being together. The fear of isolation is almost paralyzing until you realize there’s some gift in the middle of it.”

Jamie Harmon

Catrina Guttery, Patrick Francis

“My mom was worried from the get go about being quarantined and not able to work, and I really thought she was just being paranoid. And now here we are,” says Alex da Ponte. “As of yesterday, I haven’t left the house for two weeks.” Da Ponte is hardly an outlier; to many, the new self-isolation precautions did seem like paranoia. Even as news from Italy and China drove home the severity of the problem, as the World Health Organization classified the coronavirus as a bona fide pandemic, America’s national, state, and local governments adopted different, often contradictory stances. For many, the uncertainty alone is enough to spark a spiral of worry and fear. No one seems sure when this will end — or what the world will look like when we emerge from our homes.

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“The rules have changed. You can’t go to restaurants. You can’t go to clubs or big parties, even outdoor festivals. All that’s off the table. So everyone’s walking around their neighborhoods,” Harmon says of the change he’s seen. “We walk around the neighborhood and we all talk to each other on our porches. It’s that funny ideal of America as how it used to be. Now, granted, how it used to be for people who had privilege. At times like this, there are probably people who are worried about losing their homes, not so worried about having a picture made.”

Jamie Harmon

Maritza Dávila-Irizarry, Jon W. Sparks

“No matter what we do, this is a collective experience,” Weinberg says, articulating the truth made apparent by this health crisis and Harmon’s series. COVID-19, coming in the wake of one of the most divisive moments in recent memory, and attacking without regard to age, party affiliation, or other arbitrary qualifiers, highlights simple truths: A community is only as strong as its most vulnerable members; the lines we draw to divide us often do far more harm than good. Harmon’s series makes that plain — the houses, duplexes, and apartment buildings represented are from various neighborhoods and income brackets. Harmon’s lens captures esteemed members of the community (Congressman Steve Cohen and Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer, for starters) alongside now-out-of-work service industry folk. Straight, LGBTQ, black, white, Latinx, young, and old — all members of the Memphis community, all willing to sacrifice their own desires for mobility for the greater good.

Jamie Harmon

Chris McCoy, Laura Jean Hocking

“People taking this seriously is absolutely a form of solidarity in our society. A lot of people who are staying home are doing so not because they think their bodies can’t handle the virus but because they are recognizing that it’s not about that,” da Ponte continues, admitting that she worries about her son’s grandparents staying safe. “I’m not worried about us, but we’re the carriers, and we have to watch out for our parents and our grandparents and our compromised friends,” Harmon says.

Jamie Harmon

Billie Worley, Pat Mitchell

“Everyone’s adapting in their own way,” Harmon says. Da Ponte’s wife, Karen Mulford, adds, “I wonder if people will view social interactions in a new light. Will we hug and handshake with new appreciation? Or will we shy away from it, a lingering scar from this pandemic? I imagine people could go either way.”

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Perhaps this pandemic and our response to it will, like a fever burning off infection, help a nation infatuated with the ideal of rugged individualism accept that the world is interconnected, and only growing more so. After the cloud of coronavirus passes, whether we return with gusto to hugs and handshakes, or grasp a new greeting, there is hope that, however we greet each other, it will be with the warmth of family.


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Music Music Blog

Video Pairs Amurica’s Indelible Local Portraits With Gifted Teen Singer

CREDIT: Jamie Harmon

Jamie Harmon

From Amurica’s portraits of Memphians under quarantine.

As it has for so many of us, the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted some long-anticipated events in the life of teenager Skyy Jordan. A budding singer, the local ninth-grader was looking forward to performing the national anthem this Saturday at a Peabody Hotel event honoring The Salvation Army of Memphis & The Mid-South, featuring special guest Tony Dungy.  But the fundraiser and the NFL celebrity’s visit were postponed to a future date (to be announced) due to the current need for social distancing.

While most of us have come to recognize how the hardships of isolation have affected musicians in particular, this may be doubly so for teens. Just as their talents are blossoming, they must curtail all group activities and often even their lessons. Postponing a high-profile event can have a huge impact on a young person who’s invested many hopes and dreams in such a moment.

Skyy Jordan

This is especially so for Jordan, who was born with a rare and relatively unknown condition called septo optic dysplasia, leaving her completely blind. Despite such a setback, Jordan has doggedly pursued her love of singing and is already making a name for herself in the region. The support of her mother, Bridgett Jordan, has been no small part of this, and that led her to make something of her daughter’s vocal talents in an imaginative way.

Inspired to pair a recording of her daughter’s singing with the recent work of photographer Jamie Harmon, Bridgett ended up with an especially moving homemade video. As the mastermind behind the roving Amurica studio, and a well known professional in the field (whose work is familiar to most readers of this blog), Harmon has taken a unique approach to the current straits we’re living in. A quick visit to the @amuricaworld account on Instagram reveals his latest project: a photographic series documenting people stuck at home.

Photographer Jamie Harmon of Amurica

Such a description doesn’t do the work justice, given the charged meaning of such non-activity these days. And now, paired with the purity of Skyy’s voice, intoning a song that cuts to the soul of many a fellow citizen, those images come to life as never before.

While we don’t often make a great show of patriotism here at the music blog, this is a time and a place where the shared community of such music cuts through all jingoism and cant. Here, in stark images and heartfelt music, is the “imagined community” of a nation of which author Benedict Anderson wrote. In the end, we are left with a pure Memphis moment, both intimate and moving in its unadorned simplicity. Take a few minutes to watch and listen to this video, a true labor of love from just one family among many that are trying to make the best of these all-too-interesting times.

Video Pairs Amurica’s Indelible Local Portraits With Gifted Teen Singer

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Music Music Blog

The Anti-Group: U.S. Premiere of Electro Pioneers

Adi Newton

The historical moment that gave us punk rock was actually a series of minor aesthetic explosions that produced any number of unpredictable musical adventures. In bringing the group X__X to town, Gonerfest 14 just celebrated one such explosion that occurred around Cleveland in the late ’70s. Meanwhile, in Sheffield, England around the same time, another take on revolution was fomenting. Clock DVA was part of a movement that included Cabaret Voltaire and Heaven 17, but never achieved the commercial heights of those groups, probably because of their more industrial sound. Ultimately, Clock DVA co-founder Adi Newton, who approached his electronic experiments as “research,” struck out on his own with a more open-ended, collaborative project known as The Anti-Group. Making music consisting primarily of layered electronic noise and haunting tonalities over bass pulses, not necessarily underpinned with drum machine rhythms, The Anti-Group, aka The Anti-Group Communications (TAGC), played out more like studies in psycho-acoustics than pop entertainment.

All the more remarkable, then, that TAGC, not unlike X__X, continues to have legs. Though electronic music permeates nearly every corner of life now, it tends to fall into the same over-worn dance patterns. The search for the uncanny, which flourished when the genre was in its infancy, has dwindled as the sounds themselves become more pedestrian. Not so with the Anti-Group. The collective presents it’s expeditions into the territories of noise and tone with carefully thought-out dynamics that suggest classical compositions.

Given the renaissance of electronic weirdness that the Mid-South is experiencing these days, perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Memphians will have the chance to hear the Anti-Group in real time tomorrow at the Amurica gallery space, as they begin their first American tour. Luís Seixas, who curates the electronic music label Thisco, based in his hometown of Lisbon, has seized the moment of Newton’s recent spate of touring to bring the pioneer to Memphis. While this would be remarkable in New York, Paris, London, or Munich, it is doubly so in what many call “the largest small town in America.” While our city has long been considered the home of independent-minded musical pioneers, we can only hope that such a sense of adventure brings out fans of truly cutting-edge sonic explorations this Tuesday.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Me & Leah

Slow down for Music Video Monday.

Jeff Hulett, familiar to Memphis music audiences from Snowglobe and his solo appearances, and Leah Keys, organizer of the ultimate audience participation storytelling show, Spillit, have been strumming partners for a minute. With Hulett on the guitar and Keys on the banjo, the duo frequently pop up for shows in Midtown. Now they have completed their first album and are ready to unveil it this Friday with a party at Amurica.  

Hulett produced their first video, “Moving So Fast”, by cutting together 8 mm film of his family’s home movies. The place is upstate New York, the year is 1948, and the kid is Hulett’s father, age 4.

Music Video Monday: Me & Leah

If you would like to see your music video appear on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

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“The Future Is Female” at Amurica

The Step Ahead Foundation provides the women of Memphis and Shelby County with free long-acting, reversible birth control. The foundation was created by retired judge Claudia Haltom, who saw from the bench women having families before they were physically, emotionally, and financially prepared. Providing birth control gives these women control of their lives.

“The Future Is Female,” this Thursday at Amurica, is in that same spirit. Step Ahead’s five interns — Nicole Quinones, Jasmine Murphy, Abigail Gardiner, Dekitra Durant, and Latrice McClorn — were given full responsibility for planning the event, from the decorations and budget to the space and food.

Quinones helps with research, following up with patients. She says the event is aimed at “anyone with a uterus.” They’re having an OBGYN speak, and there will be a Q&A. She says guests can eat and mingle before the talks starts. There will be icebreakers, such as the interns’ take on the headband game during which participants will have a sticker on their back with a different form of birth control and others have to guess the method.

Step Ahead marks its fifth anniversary this year. The choice of Amurica for venue, says Belinda Simpson, the organization’s community outreach director, is fitting, as Step Ahead will be moving into Crosstown Concourse.

Simpson says she’s already seen Step Ahead’s impact, that women are waiting longer to start their families. Quinones, too, sees the bigger picture. She says that birth control is only one part of the answer; the other is education. “Teaching women to plan their lives is empowering,” she says.

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Art Art Feature

Talking Punk, Politics, and Pirate Radio with Joshua Short

This past June, San Francisco-bred artist Joshua Short came to Memphis to build a pirate radio station, a task that he describes as combining his two favorite things, “self-defense/reliance” and “sticking it to the man.” Short built the radio station — a mix between a mock-up bomb shelter and truck topper — in the back of Crosstown’s Amurica photo studio. When he wasn’t living inside the station (“I was this kind of weird hobo living in this weird sculpture”), he welcomed local bands in for interviews and concerts.

This month, Short was back in town to complete a mural, also at Amurica. We sat down to talk about his past work, which includes fake plane crashes, off-the-wall installation work, and an ongoing fixation with cars, dinosaurs, and Cold War ephemera. Short, a tall man in his early 40s, had just finished pasting some final pieces of cut paper (“garbage”) to a radial wall of quilted colors. We talked about gender, punk, politics, and Memphis.

Flyer: Do you consider your art to be political?

Joshua Short: I used to be more overtly political. San Francisco has always been kind of a political town, especially for artists. In the early 2000s, street art and doing things in the service of anti-gentrification, and, at the time, anti-war was a huge part of the conversation that artists were having. You’d associate with the movements you aligned yourself with — whether it was being queer or a part of an anti-war movement or a pro-Chicano movement. That’s the school I came from, but at some point, I sort of hit my end with being that overt.

Why?

My art was really reactionary for a long time, and then I kind of got to a point where I was like “I don’t know why I am doing this, actually. Why do I care about this? Is this my fight?” During grad school, I sort of unravelled a lot of that.

I’m a Cold-War kid. I came from this fear. This fear-mongering about there being a great enemy out there. Destruction was imminent. Nuclear war was gonna happen. The other thing was that I had a rough upbringing. I was abused. My mom was abused, and I was raised by a single mom. I had a slew of men in my life, and none of them were good father figures. So I gravitated toward martial arts growing up. There were a couple things that led to that. One was this fear I had, like “Oh, fuck, I gotta learn how to take care of myself. I’ve gotta defend myself.” The other side of that was trying to find a masculine identity that worked for me.

Do you see similarities in your martial arts practice and your art practice?

It is definitely there. I think being a good artist is about discipline, but it is also about endurance. There is a quote that I really enjoy that talks about misery and malcontent and suffering on all human beings, you know? Is this the world we live in? Endurance. The fact that you can endure and you can survive is a true expression of what it means to be human. Being able to get up and take care of yourself and not be dependent on other people or let yourself become dependent on other people.

What about your more recent installation work, your 3-D drawing with string and assembled parts.

I started off drawing, because those were my influences. My friends were all super drawers. We were interested in comics and horror movies and junk like that; underground culture. I do draw a lot, and it is a tool in my tool box. Maybe sometimes things need to be drawings straight up, and sometimes they don’t. I am more interested in making art that does something, that has a life beyond its objectness.

What brought you to Memphis?

I’ve been in San Francisco too long. I get all mad when I am there and I don’t even know why anymore. Coming to Memphis has been really great, because I’ve just felt so loved here. I’m in this place in my life where I want to build a little bat cave. Memphis feels like the kind of place where you can do that.

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Music Music Blog

Bomb Shelter Radio at Amurica

CREDIT: Amurica.com

Amurica.com

Joshua Short and his Bomb Shelter Radio.

San Francisco artist Joshua Short will activate a pirate radio station in Memphis, Tennessee tonight at Amurica. Short built a make-shift van topper out of found materials and cardboard to house his “radio station,” and local bands that are set to perform include Small Fires, Grave Pioneer, ManControl, Quintron, Richard James, and Jessie Davis. “Bomb Shelter Radio: Memphis” is the third incarnation of an ongoing project for Short, and the station will be active until June 12th. Check out a video from one of Short’s other projects below, and be sure to stop by Amurica at least once over the next week. 

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Bomb Shelter Radio at Amurica