Seeing in the Way of Things [1]

In conversation with Kara Keeling at the liquid blackness 10th anniversary event, Music Video as Black Art: Claiming the B-Side, Stefano Harney poses the difficult and at times painful question of the separation from one’s community that results from “being sent.”[2] Harney reminds us that this is the place of the intellectual as well as the artist, and helps us reflect on “the necessity of separation to the production of politics and art."[3] Borrowing from a poem by Amiri Baraka, Harney asks: “What does it mean to step away to see something in the way of things?”[4] He continues, “Once you step away, once you are sent, can you ever get back, back to what Clyde Woods called those blues universities where you learned everything? Or, can you bring the blues university to work with you? Can the blues university ever take you back?”[5]

The attempt and labor to return, to find ways of holding on to one’s blues university and bringing it to work, was the focus of liquid blackness’s event and research project, "Opticality: Seeing in the Way of Things.” Opticality provokes us to ask how artists prepare, how they study, but also how they practice resisting this separation. Like the woodshedding jazz musician (a mode of practice we learn from cinematographer Chayse Irvin), how do artists work out their technique, find their foundation, and cultivate their phrasing so they can ultimately improvise with others?

To Not Apprehend

Implicit in these questions is that the answer will begin, or even arrive, in the image. The artist’s technique will be visible and loud enough that a signature can be stamped, and thus, analyzed, or even copied. And yet, in the work of Shawn Peters and Kya Lou, we find artists who—by choice and by necessity—do not seek to be so easily apprehended. At the same time, this difficulty in seeing—in finding—is also the point. So often the task of scholarship is apprehending—to grasp the meaning of the thing—but to grasp is also to stop, to capture, to contain. As liquid blackness contended with when studying Larry Clark’s Passing Through (1977), how do you come to study that which does not desire to be halted? Or in the context of this year’s research project on opticality, how do we come to see the artist who does not seek to be seen? 

In the work of Shawn Peters and Kya Lou, we find artists who do not seek such easy apprehension and are therefore left with the difficult yet inspiring problem of studying artists whose aspiration is to serve the image, to care for the archive, and to cultivate relationships. In their practice, we were tasked with finding new ways of studying, new ways of seeing, that sought not just the graspable imagistic reference but the emotional and communal desires of being together—together with their collaborators and together with the memories they and their archives hold.

Shawn Peters: Romantic Studies

With Peters, the work of opticality begins in finding where he is in the images he helps create. Peters actively rejects claiming a singular “style” or “aesthetic.” Too often such terms and practices become susceptible to quick appropriation of whatever cinematographic maneuver is trending. Peters, instead, works from and for the relationship and emotions of collaboration and character, of being present and listening. As djones discusses in his post later this week, Peters’ practice begins not in the external filmic reference, but in his long memory—of looking up at his mother breast feeding him as a baby or car rides with his grandparents. In his cinematography, there is a continual delicate care of the face, and while it is easy to project conceptual meaning (and maybe we should), listening to Peters, it is also as meaningful to hold the fact that, like his mother’s, this is an act of care in service of the image, its characters, and the affective flow of story. It is a letting go of the egoistic signature so you can ask far plainer yet piercing questions: What is the shape of light that best holds the life and drive of a character? How does the lens stretch and bend space to render its truths?

Peters pushes us to let go of scholarly “meaning” and hold onto the intangible and ineffable needs of emotion. He describes collaboration as a romance—an intimacy of seeing and playing together. This togetherness is with the other creatives, but also with the material, characters, and yourself. To name this a romance is to orient collaboration and art practice towards an intimate melding whereby the I and You transfigure into We: a collective, inclusive plural that does not negate the specificity of the individual pieces but labors to bring them into a mingling flow—a conversation. In Peters’ labors, we ask: what if the work of study does not begin with the image but with how the artist arrives on set or how they work together with others, the material, emotions, and memory? What if the image is merely the beautiful aftermath, rather than the site, of study?

Kya Lou: Practicing Detachments

Kya Lou, in turn, offers a different set of tensions and responses to the apprehending gaze. Starting her career as a colorist, Lou’s work is meant to become one with the image. Colorists almost exclusively arrive at the end of the production process; their job is to take what has already been conceived, shot, and edited and finalize the image. Colorists’ work can profoundly reshape the film and guide its emotional and affective registers—heightening contrast, deepening reds or yellows, caring for the topographies of the face and the vitality of skin. And yet, Lou’s intervention, her distinct touch, requires becoming one with the image and the vision of other creatives. As Lou said of being a colorist, her role is to take care of the “baby” of another. But at the core of this key and yet background role is the reality of an industrial churn whereby artists have little say on their labors, projects can be taken away after months of work, or projects have to be left behind because the demands and requirements become detrimental to the work, the body, and the soul. And so, part of Lou’s practice requires a delicate negotiation of the “spiritual metadata”—an emotional openness and memory-driven practice, not dissimilar to what Peters narrates—and a necessary protective labor of “detachment,” so that one can give fully of one’s self while also being able to let go of all that emotional and bodily labor.

In Lou’s transition into directing—with her two astounding co-directed video installations (Nightsong [2025] and Edges of Ailey [2024, co-directed with Josh Begley])—her voice and hand are far more visible, and yet, those impulses of care, memory, and safety remain despite the shift in control. With Edges of Ailey, Lou was given access to two hundred tapes of rehearsals, performances, and backstage intimacies from the Alvin Ailey dance company archive. As she described, despite his name being front and center, Alvin Ailey, as a body and visible presence, remains purposefully sparse in the archive. Like Lou’s practices of detachment, Ailey chose not to be highly present in the image. His vision shapes the world of the tapes and the movements of bodies, but his voice, flowing limbs, and personality remain to the side. His choice to not be centered in the record—in the literal image of the tapes—pushes Lou to contend with how one may come to find and hold him. How do you pull on the invisible and yet orienting thread of Ailey? How do you shape a film through him without being afforded the possibility of relying on imaging him? How do you come to care for him, to celebrate him, when he so purposefully avoided the apprehending gaze that Lou and Peters also sidestep? A series of questions that we, as students, must also come to hold. How do we exercise the same care for artists like Lou and Peters that engages the richness of their work while still attending to the negotiations with visibility?

Opticality

So often the task of the artist is to step away, to see from a distance. Their relationship to the world they image, including the worlds they come from, requires separation so that they can see—the distance between camera and world but also the distancing separation of “having a vision.” Artists are sent—sent away to learn, sent away to see elsewhere, sent away to escape. In Peters and Lou, we are tasked with studying how artists then arrive back, how they shrink the distance of “being sent” while still holding onto the meaningful life and choices of those labors.

 “Opticality” and “seeing in the way of things” expresses the labor of return we both share, to find a way back—back to the traditions that orient, to memories that propel and energize, and to material labors that foster collaborations of care and mutual intimacy. liquid blackness has sought to study how artists come to vitalize new and old ways of seeing, how they come to be with another, through their specific and lived practice, but also crucially, as Lou and Peters have shown us, how artists find themselves, how they protect the romance and the metadata, and how they come to take care of their own bodies and souls. This is not an auteurist celebration of style and singularity, but a loving embrace of all that helps us gather.

And to gather is no small thing; it may be the only thing that matters. We gather with each other so that we can feel and live together in a material practice of community, as Peters reminds us. But in that romance, one also gathers with the labor of the other creatives, the memories held in the archive, the emotional energy that light and color provide, the clarity of shared goals and visions of the image and the world, the desires to survive in systems that see all as consumed by capital, and the shared desire to create something new.

In this spirit of gathering, of studying, of being with, members of the liquid blackness research group and our community will engage the rich and generous work and ideas that Shawn Peters and Kya Lou offered during our Spring 2026 event. These posts are not an attempt to summarize or nail down these artists or all that was said and expressed. Instead, following what we learned in studying opticality, each writer comes to hold those moments that spoke to them, that are still vibrating within them, and allow those feelings, provocations, and material practices to propel their own new ways of seeing through, in, and with the world.

Video

Coltrane, John. “A Love Supreme, Pt. I – Acknowledgement.” Directed by A.G. Rojas, 2026. Cinematography by Shawn Peters.

Notes

[1] This introduction to this IMR week is built, in part, from the liquid blackness research groups months long research project—Opticality: Seeing in the Way of Things. To read more about this research project and event, visit our research page.

[2] Stefano Harney, “Black Study as Aesthetic Practice,” liquid blackness, Vimeo, January 26, 2024. https://vimeo.com/906887773 

[3] Stefano Harney, “Sent to See,” In Media Res (October 31, 2023). https://mediacommons.org/imr/content/sent-see 

[4] Harney, “Sent to See.”

[5] Harney, “Sent to See.”