Before long travel, August 23, 1972
Rachel Monosov
2017
- Medium
- Inkjet print
- Dimensions
- Image, sight: 29 × 43.6 cm (11 7/16 × 17 3/16 in.); Frame: 41.1 × 54.2 × 3.3 cm (16 3/16 × 21 3/8 × 1 5/16 in.)
- Genre
- portrait
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago
Styles
Tags
self-portraitsportraits: African subjectphotographic materials21st Centuryphotographyblack-and-white photographyfemaleportraitafricanphotographic printphotographink jet printingphotographic imagescontemporaryMalephotographic processportraitsinkjet print
About
This photograph shows an intimate moment between artists Admire Kamudzengerere and Rachel Monosov. The couple met by chance in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 2015, and married two years later. Unable to find photographs documenting interracial marriages like theirs in Zimbabwe’s National Archives, in 2017 they fictionalized their own romance, casting themselves as characters named A. and R. in a multipart photographic drama, from which this photo derives. The series is set in 1972, when interracial marriage was taboo in the colonial context of Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then known), but the artists deliberately picture such a union as unremarkable. A typewritten caption adds further credibility to their fictional conceit.
