Features: Pictures from the past

As a grad student at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, photographer Stephen Marc would take nude, multiple-image self portraits in the basement of an operational funeral home-- where he lived for his first semester in Philadelphia. The closet in his bedroom was used to store embalming fluid; his room was sometimes used for visitations.

But Marc’s semester-long stay on Broad and Dalton, where friends of his grandparents owned the Maddox Funeral Parlor, marked only the beginning of a now thirty-year career in photography, in which he has devoted his time and efforts to documenting the African-American experience.

Marc, who has spent the past seven years on a project titled “Passage on the Underground Railroad,” photographs America’s remaining Underground Railroad sites and creates digital photo montages to portray the African Diaspora— the dispersal of Africans from their native homelands. To document the phenomena, he has photographed sites in 21 states, including the Johnson and Agnew homes right here in Philadelphia.

Q & A with Marc:

Q: What inspired you to pursue the Underground Railroad as a long-term subject for your work?
A: I started really researching the Underground Railroad. As I kept reading I just kept adding [Underground Railroad sites] to the list. The whole thing really just took off. It started to have just a life of its own… In Charles Blockson’s book on the Underground Railroad he describes different railroad sites and gives you the location, and most importantly the contact information.

Q: What is it about this subject that requires multiple images to tell the story?
A: What I found was that individual photographs almost looked like real estate photographs showing the front of the house... The photographs didn’t show me the places in the way that I wanted to see them. They didn’t match up with what my experiences were like when I had visited them.

Q: Your images are very rich with both present-day, Black culture and African American history. How exactly do your montages take current African-American culture and give that culture a historical context?
A: It’s a matter of making some kind of interpretation of historic material but also trying to invest in bringing that story more forward. Some people look at history as being a long time ago and it’s over—but it’s not. There are too many things that we see on a day-to-day level that are this way because of that history. I am looking to make that history alive and accessible in a sort of complimentary but alternative way.

Q: Whom is your work meant to target?
A: I really want the work to hit a wide range in audience. I think what’s really sad is that we have an African American History Month now. It’s not as if there’s a separate history—it’s American history.

Q: Is there anything you would like to add?
A: The project I have done I could have not done without historians like Charles Blockson.