Formats
Anthologies
108
Audio
305
Catalogues
353
Clothing
23
Editions
35
Ephemera
66
Literary
42
Monographs
157
Posters
257
Video
39
Zines
162

Shop > Monographs

#15046

Swimming up a Dark Tunnel

Writer
Letticia Cosbert Miller
Price
$22.00
Date
2022
Publisher
Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
Format
Monographs
Size
13 × 18 cm
Length
94 pp
Genre
Arts Writing, Environment
Description

Swimming up a Dark Tunnel features essays by writer and curator Letticia Cosbert Miller published through Gallery 44’s 2020/21 Writer-in-Residence program.

Each year, Gallery 44 invites a writer to explore concepts related to photography and image-culture as understood through their own research interests. Cosbert Miller explores the subject of water to draw in many of her interests, including Classics, and the writings of Dionne Brand and Toni Morrison to name just a few.

The essays explore water as a historical and political site. Public pools, swimwear, migration across water that is forced, willing and unwilling. The beach is an intersection for bikini clad vacationers and displaced refugees. The sea is a boundary or portal where Poseidon dwells in the depths, along with the victims of the Middle Passage. Cosbert Miller brings all these intersections together and threads personal experience as well as pop culture references throughout all four essays.

In the first essay, Swimming up a Dark Tunnel, Cosbert Miller reflects on the absence of Black bathers in archival images as well as the current dearth of Black bathers in Toronto public pools through her own experiences, as a young swimmer determined to make space for herself despite early rebuffs.The pool, in Cosbert Miller’s words is “a place of both inherited terror and self-determined refuge”.

The second essay, Tell me Where the Sea Is, features Cosbert Miller’s recollections of her time on the lido’s of Sicily where Black and brown skinned refugees from North and West Africa and South Asia seek to make a living despite restrictive laws meant to erase their presence and push them to the peripheries of tourist hubs. Voyages by water traced in the stories of the great traveller Odysseus intersect with the migration of Black and brown peoples with hopes for better lives.

Published third, All of Us Had a Taste explores the history of the bikini and the Black bikini body, traced through Halle Berry’s glamorous ascendence in the film B*A*P*S (Black American Princesses), her time as a ‘Bond Girl’ and rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s own economic and sexual liberation through the vehicle of the bikini.

Finally the fourth essay, Deep Down There reflects on the legacy of the Middle Passage and its wake. Reflecting on the two million people who were killed during the passage, Cosbert Miller recalls ancient Greek poetry to create an intentionally fragmented and poetic memorial to those who have been lost.

Also included in the publication is a conversation commissioned by Gallery 44, between curator Heather Canlas Rigg and Letticia Cosbert Miller about the residency experience and her choice of subject matter. The interview explores a wide range of topics, including working in the art world and the necessity of art criticism.

  1. G44 Book Launch
 

Related Items

  1. Nic Wilson: A Landscape Photograph in the Land of the Dead
  2.  Luis Camnitzer: One Number is Worth One Word
  3. Sylvie Fleury: Parkett # 58
  4. Jennifer Liese: Social Medium: Artists Writing 2000-2015
  5. Liz Lanner: Parkett # 28
  6. Maurizio Cattelan: Parkett # 59
  7. John Currin, Laura Owens, Michael Raedecker, and Lou Reed: Parkett # 65
  8. Parkett # 67
  9. Parkett # 71
  10. Parkett # 70
  11. Monica Bonvicini, Urs Fischer, and Richard Prince: Parkett # 72
  12. I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette
  13. Nathan Isberg: A Manifesto for Sincere Loss
  14. Hito Steyerl: The Wretched of the Screen
  15. Afterall Issue 40
  16. Afterall Issue 39
  17. Afterall Issue 41
  18. Afterall Issue 42
  19. Afterall Issue 43
  20. Afterall Issue 44
  21. Afterall Issue 45
  22. Afterall Issue 46
  23. Afterall Issue 47
  24. Afterall Issue 48
  25. Simon Fuh: For Now You Had to Be There
  26. Franco Vaccari: L’eclisse dell’arte / The eclipse of art
  27. Joseph Gabe,  Mary Jean Kenton, and Ann Chapman Scales: The Ann Scales Postcards : March 14, 1973 - March 14, 1975
  28. Hannah Black, Noa Bronstein, Eric Cazdyn, Aleesa Cohene, Allison Collins, Matthew Hyland, and Jamillah James: I Don’t Get It: The Work of Aleesa Cohene
  29. Edith Heath: Philosophies
  30. Mary Kavanagh - Daughters of Uranium
  31. Jean Gagnon: Pornography in the Urban World
  32. Peter MacCallum: Material World
  33. Dan Adler and Hanne Darboven: Hanne Darboven: Cultural History 1880-1983 (softcover)
  34. Dan Graham and Josh Thorpe: Dan Graham, Pavilions: a guide
  35. Dara Birnbaum and T.J. Demos: Dara Birnbaum: Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman
  36. Judy Chicago: To Sustain the Vision
  37. Judy Chicago: New Views