Tracey Rose

The shadow procession depicted in this photograph is a celebration of music and dance. It depicts a scene from a town fair. The title refers to a technique of making silhouettes that was popularized during the mid-eighteenth century. This technique originated in France, during a time when the Minister of Finance, Étienne de Silhouette, imposed austere economic measures. Using cheap materials, skilled artists would hand cut the solid outline of a person’s face from black paper and paste it onto a white background. This form of portraiture continues today through various media used in shadow puppetry, theatre, photography, film animation and graphic design.

The photograph portrays a vaudeville trio of song, dance and marionette puppetry. In the artist’s film Ciao Bella, the Silhouetta procession is animated, and the figures transform into each other in a loop. The dress and dance style are reminiscent of Josephine Baker, a Black American-French dancer who was popular in Paris during the 1920s. Her dance style was known as the ‘danse sauvage’, a modern jazz freestyle that played with white people’s fantasies of primitive African people, exoticizing her Black skin and body. Baker’s nudity and glamour on stage made her into an erotic symbol, yet she also became a spy during World War II, a civil rights activist and mother to a diverse group of adopted children.

In Silhouetta, Rose highlights the ways in which Baker’s talent and contribution to history is overshadowed by the eroticization of her image, reducing her legacy to a silhouette.