In a foreword to the book Illuminated Verses, photographer Ricardo Scipio describes his decade of fashion photography in New York, Toronto and Miami.
"I was allowed so few times to photograph black women in a context of respect and sensitivity," he writes, "that I decided to quit the fashion industry forever."
He turned his attention to becoming an art photographer and New York film-maker. He travelled extensively, then moved to the Sunshine Coast in 2003. He now lives in Sandy Hook, though he works at his passion as a herbalist and healer in Vancouver.
A collaboration of two mediums is always exciting. In this case, the book Illuminated Verses has combined the work of an award winning scholar and author, the Canadian black poet George Elliott Clarke, with the fine art nude photos of Scipio. The result is stunning. Yet, this is so not a coffee table book. It is a humbly bound paperback volume with full-colour photos recently released in celebration of Black History month by Canadian Scholars' Press and priced at $34.95.
It took a long time to come to fruition, as Scipio will tell you. It took 14 years to find a publisher, in part due to the cost of printing 36 colour images, but also because of its subject matter, the nature of black beauty. Some feared that its controversial content, its negritude as Clarke describes it, would offend feminists or the staunchly conservative. Truth is, Scipio says, that in the 300-plus core images of black nudes exhibited in many gallery shows of his work, women have been nothing but positive in their appraisal."I wanted to show the women in colour," he says, "but colour often has a commercial look about it and I didn't want to have the work compared to Playboy photos."
Scipio has given the photos a soft look, a tad grainy, shot in natural light in the outdoors, on beaches and among trees. Oddly, the soft touch only makes the women seem stronger and more real.
Scipio believes that black women are the backbone of the black community and that a book such as this, that expresses that notion in the most overt terms, has really not been published before.
This is a book driven by its photos. The collaborators met in the 1980s when Scipio worked on a student publication that Clarke edited. Scipio became a fan. Clarke encouraged him as a photographer and his subsequent photos have appeared in five of Clarke's previous books.
In this case, Clarke selected 36 of Scipio's photos and wrote about them. To most white readers, the poems/raps/chants are a window into another world. The poet's work is strongest when he "talks story," when he relates the lives of characters from the edge of history, as in the poem sequence Dona Beatrice.
Though Scipio will always be a photographer, he is also interested in writing.
"I like writing stories about the Caribbean community in B.C., as small as it is," he says.
He is currently at work on a fictional feature film Finder of Lost Children.
