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Donna Pinckley: ‘I asked them about any negative comments made to them, or that they’d overheard, or that people had told them about.’ All photographs by Donna Pinckley
‘I asked them to share any negative comments they’d overheard about themselves.’ All photographs by Donna Pinckley Photograph: Donna Pinckley
‘I asked them to share any negative comments they’d overheard about themselves.’ All photographs by Donna Pinckley Photograph: Donna Pinckley

Love and hate: interracial couples speak out about the racism they've faced

This article is more than 8 years old

Donna Pinckley’s Sticks and Stones project lets couples who have been victims of racial abuse turn their taunts into art

A couple stand by a flower bed. Her arm is wrapped about his waist like a rose climbing a tree. He rests his cheek on the top of her head. They stare down the lens, their bodies pressed together from thigh to neck in the late afternoon sun. “They are disgusting”, reads a handwritten caption below the image – as jarring as a rock to a toe.

This shot is one of US photographer Donna Pinckley’s ongoing series Sticks and Stones, which pairs interracial couples with the abuse they’ve received, sometimes directly, sometimes overheard. A southern girl at heart (she tells me that she could never move further north than Little Rock, Arkansas, where she lives), Pinckley works in black and white and the couples she depicts include a wide range of ethnicities and sexualities.

‘Wouldn’t you rather date someone your own race.’

“I started out photographing Hispanic families,” she explains, her southern accent as lilting as a guitar. “When I moved to Little Rock, 20 years ago, I would take my camera and just photograph people within walking distance. I’ve photographed these kids over two decades, as they’ve grown up.” It was the abuse one of these local children got on Facebook for being in an interracial relationship that got Pinckley thinking.

“It reminded me of a couple I photographed back in 1988, an African American man and an albino white woman,” she says. “I remember them saying that Albuquerque in New Mexico was the least racist town they could live in. That started me thinking.”

Two weeks after the Facebook incident, she happened to be shooting another interracial couple: “I asked them about any negative comments made to them, or that they’d overheard, or that people had told them about,” she says. “They turned out to be the ‘They are disgusting’ couple – that was said directly to them.”

Other comments from Sticks and Stones include “Don’t you like American women?”, “Bitches like that are the reason we can’t get a good black man”, “White men have taken everything, including our women”, “I’ll bet your parents are really proud of you”, “You’ll never be able to give what a white man could” and “If she can’t use your comb, don’t bring her home”.

‘I told you a black woman lived with a white man in that house.’

Pinckley tends to find her subjects through word of mouth – wanting to avoid “the nuts” of Craigslist. But now, people from all over the US, as well as Britain and Canada, write to her, wanting to take part in her project. “Everyone thinks it’s just the deep south that has this racism,” she says, “but I’ve been contacted by people all over the States, all over the world, wanting to tell me their stories. It’s not unique to the south. But I wanted to take a different approach; I didn’t want to throw it in your face, I just wanted to start a conversation.”

Pinckley says she isn’t a political person – nor is she in an interracial relationship – and yet Sticks and Stones is undeniably political. “I’d be stupid if it didn’t cross my mind,” she says, “but I have chosen to focus on the people first.” Instead of having the comments in thick, standard black type below each image – fighting against the photo – Pinckley asks the couple themselves to write down the abuse by hand. “It’s their handwriting because I want them to have some part in it ... it’s a collaboration,” she says. “Also, I want the viewer to look to the people first and see that they’re a loving couple, or a family. Only then will they see the writing and say, ‘Oh wow.’”

‘Look at you taking another one of our good black men.’

There is another “oh wow” moment in the project – a couple standing by the steps up to their front door, her in a tie-front shirt and shorts, he in a large Nike T-shirt, when you suddenly realise that the huge speckled line at her throat is, in fact, a snake. “When I shoot a couple without kids, I ask them if they have any object that’s special to them,” says Pinckley, who has also photographed children with their most prized objects for another series called Soul Objects. “With this couple, I went in their house and saw those two snakes and asked, ‘Would you like to hold those?’ That’s what I got. Later, I held the snake and my daughter held the snake too – that big one weighed 30lbs!”

‘I’ll bet your parents are real proud of you.’

Pinckley shoots on a Graflex 4x5 Speed Crown Graphic camera, an almost ludicrously old-fashioned bit of kit that’s barely on sale in any photography shops. “I like it because it slows me down,” she explains. “When I look through that camera, the couple are upside down and backwards so I really have to look. After the shot’s set up I’m looking at their expression ... it’s hard to make a relaxed grin, so I don’t have them smile. Some people say they look mad, but they’re just relaxed. There is something so intimate about looking at a couple, outside their home, not grinning, not posing, just standing: a physical proclamation of love above a handwritten expression of hate, of racism, of prejudice.”

Despite her tendency to shoot in the golden time of day she calls the twilight hour, the images are haunting. There is something truly awful about such apple-pie American scenes being invaded by the spiteful, hateful comments of strangers.

It seems almost too obvious a question, but I have to ask: why shoot Sticks and Stones in black and white? She laughs. “Black and white has always been my love,” she explains. “I have always looked to Diane Arbus and Mary Ellen Mark – black and white has more of a haunting look to it. But in terms of the project, I wanted it to be neutral. I wanted you to look at the people and not be distracted by colours.”

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