The Erotics of Coreen Simpson

She has given us everything but her face. Which means she has given us everything and nothing. “Masked Nude, Harlem NY,” a black-and-white photograph from 1999, is as paradoxical a work as the name suggests. A Black woman lies on a couch. Her open limbs dangle all over the velvet, her pubic triangle hardly concealed. She reclines as the sitters of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Gustave Courbet reclined. But this woman would never have been their muse. She has been photographed by Coreen Simpson, a twentieth-century Black woman artist, with twentieth-century matters on the mind. Simpson—a photographer, a jewelry designer, and a writer—is, at base, a recorder of fashion. For decades, she has trawled uptown and downtown to understand who the people are by capturing how they want to look. Or not lo