Kerry Stuart Coppin has used his photography as a means to explore the African American cultural identity and communal experience. In recent years he has extended his photographic research to include people of African heritage both in the New World and on the African Continent, traveling and photographing in Barbados, Brazil, the British Virgin Islands, Cuba, Egypt, and Senegal . . .   

In researching and photographing African communities around the world, Kerry Stuart Coppin creates for us a portfolio of images that examine not only his own personal roots but also a greater global cultural identity. Photographing in a documentary style, Mr. Coppin candidly captures both the people and their environments he encounters on his travels. His black and white images focus on the essence of humanity, forcing both him and us, all as outside viewers, to realize the commonality that lies among us all as a global community. Despite their international nature, Coppin’s images are not exotic. They illustrate neighborhoods, families, workers, and day-to-day activities. Coppin states, “My visual research is a means of bridging international borders to construct a portrait of Africans born in the Western World . . .”  

 

 

"Your pictures are amazing... It is remarkable that you want to let the world see Africa the way it really is. Kudos . . ."  - Lucy Kamau, Nairobi, Kenya, 2004 

 

 

 

On the Work of Kerry Stuart Coppin and Materia Oscura / Dark Matter

For the past several years, a genre of art has arisen in American Fine Arts and in photography in particular, which explores personal and group identity production, travel, and the search for personal roots. I believe that is due, at least in part, as a collective socio-psychological response to the uncertainty of the new millennium and the increasing pace of globalization, a disquieting threat to the very fundamentals of our singularity and uniqueness. On the far right, we find a global social movement of fundamental conservatives whose agenda is to stop or slow the pace of this global process.  On the other, an intellectual left that embraces change and looks forward to its challenges and shifting cultures.

Within this complex discourse, Kerry Coppin urges us to consider the possibilities to come, and the changes that have already over taken us. Without any of the sentimentality that often accompanies these considerations, the work of Coppin, a unique blend of social documentary and fine art, pushes beyond the popular frameworks by situating his visual thesis with the emerging constructs of trans-nationalism.  Refined and elegant, we are pressed to consider the formation of a trans-Atlantic Black African identity, encompassing North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa. Within superior style and imaging, we are hard pressed to identify the location of any subject, but rather recognize the non-specific and eerie similarity of visual prompts.  It is a moment in time and space, frozen and captured for us to ponder its banality on the one hand and the deep metaphorical meaning and its prophetic riddle on the other.

Like the stunning image of a van with painted dragon visually intersected by a steel girder, we are left to consider that our once discreet and culturally separate spaces are merging to a single human global creation where parallel or separate realities no longer exist. Entitled “In the Sacred Valley of the Nile The Last Dragon Battles the Forces of Evil Empires”, we are struck with the incredible painted image of flying saucers attacking the age old image of the dragon, a symbol of power. We are left here to ponder, perhaps, the attack of our spirituality by the forces of technology and the enormous inhumanity heaped on us by the impersonal monster of our own creation. For all its dazzling brilliance, technology has created disasters unknown to our grandparents, and has provided few answers to the mysteries that have plagued us for millennia.  Manipulated in the secrecy of our ever increasing individuality, technology has become the new magic and superstition we hoped to rise above. It is a sad irony indeed. Alas, our machinery and technology has eliminated our interdependence and the values that bind us together.

Kerry Coppin avoids riding the tides of fast pace travel, integrated economies, technology and instantaneous responses, and urges us to consider the basic facts, our common bonds, the similarity of our experiences… and most of all, our humanity.

- Craig G. Centrie, Ph.D. / Assistant Professor of Latino Studies / State University of New York at Buffalo / Director and Curator / El Museo Francisco Oller y Diego Rivera / Buffalo, New York