Ayana V. Jackson, Image #6, Mary Fields – One of the Freest Souls Ever to Draw a Breath or a Thirty-Eight, 2023. Photo credit: Olivier Rachet
She is sitting side-saddle on a horse that looks as if it stepped right out of one of Jules Marey’s chronophotographs. The ground is dusty at their feet. In the background, the horizon fades into a milky-white fog. It is this dominance of the white that African American photographer Ayana V. Jackson confronts here, depicting “Stage Coach Mary”—or Mary Fields—the first woman to work as a mail carrier in the United States. Following in the footsteps of what essayist Saidiya Hartman describes in her book *Venus in Two Acts* called “a critical fabulation”, the photographer constructs, in the words of exhibition curator Marísol Rodriguez, “ images situated within archival absence and speculative presence”. The exhibition “The Good News Is Not Proclaimed from the Mountain Tops but in the Clearings” thus restores a long-lost dignity to several Black figures forgotten by history—horsewomen, Mexican revolutionaries, descendants of slaves. In other photographs, less triumphant but just as modest, Ayana V. Jackson captures moments of rest, as if weightless, for despite the upheavals of history, life, too, is made of grace and restraint.
Ayana V. Jackson, “The Good News Is Not Proclaimed from the Mountains but in the Clearings,” Les Rencontres photographiques d’Arles, Montmajour Abbey, Arles, through October 4, 2026.
