In The Box: Rodney Evans Persistence of Vision

Jennifer Lange
Curator, Film/Video Studio Program 

“The mind is the essence of your sight. It’s really the mind that sees.”—John Dugdale

In 1993, photographer John Dugdale (b. 1960) suffered a life-changing stroke that left him blind, save for a sliver of sight in one eye. He was enjoying a successful career producing commercial photographs for the New York Times, Martha Stewart, Bergdorf Goodman, and other brands. But despite his sudden impairment, Dugdale continued making photographs and turned what most would see as the end of a career into the beginning of one. Changing course from commercial photography, Dugdale began using 19th-century photographic processes to create artistic albumen, cyanotype, and gelatin silver prints. Embracing the slow pace and inward focus of these archaic technologies over the past 15 years, Dugdale has become internationally renowned for quietly beautiful images that evoke a time past.

Persistence of Vision offers a brief window into Dugdale’s story and forms the basis for a chapter in filmmaker Rodney Evans’s newest feature documentary, Vision Portraits. The film, in the final stages of postproduction in the Wexner Center’s Film/Video Studio this month, profiles four artists who have lost their sight but not their artistic visions. Evans brings his own experience with a degenerative eye condition to bear on Vision Portraits and its interest in the possibility of transcending one’s physical limitation through art.

Evans is also the writer, director, and producer of the feature film Brother to Brother (2004), which screens at the Wex on August 23 as part of the Columbus Black International Film Festival and will be introduced by Evans himself. Brother to Brother, made with the support of a Film/Video Studio equipment loan, is a fictional look back on the Harlem Renaissance through the eyes of real-life poet Bruce Nugent. Starring Anthony Mackie (Avengers: Infinity War, The Hurt Locker) as a gay black art student who befriends Nugent, the film depicts the poet’s own experiences as a black and openly gay man navigating the racism and homophobia of the 1920s partly through his friendships with Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. The film premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and won a Special Jury Prize before having its European premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival and earning four Independent Spirit Award nominations: Best First Film, Best First Screenplay, Best Supporting Male (Roger Robinson), and Best Debut Performance (Anthony Mackie).

Rodney Evans (b. 1971) holds an MFA in Film Production from the California Institute of Art (CalArts). He is the recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and has garnered funding from Creative Capital, the Independent Television Service (ITVS), and the National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC), among others. His second narrative feature, The Happy Sad (2013), premiered at the San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival and went on to play at over 30 other festivals around the world. In addition to Vision Portraits, Evans is developing his third narrative feature, Daydream, which follows jazz composer Billy Strayhorn on a quest to learn more about the life of cornetist Buddy Bolden. Evans lives in New York City and teaches in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College.