Tony Bingham

Honeymoon Barbershop

Bingham’s photography work is research-based; through conversations and fieldwork, the artist weaves back and forth between people and places, churches and cemeteries, barbershops and farmers markets, juke joints and junkyards, museums and academic institutions.

The artist describes this work as “immersive sténopés,” which includes sound (see QR code below) and translated directly means “pinhole.”

Honeymoon Barbershop, uses a process called pinhole photography. Bingham constructs simple, artist-made cameras without lenses (usually a common ice chest). Light passes through the aperture or hole and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box (or ice chest or wall, etc.). This is known as the camera obscura effect.

Bingham uses photosensitive paper that he exposes, develops, then scans the paper negative for large scale reproduction. Honeymoon Barbershop includes sound recorded in the Honeymoon Barbershop located in North Birmingham, Alabama.

Nigg Defined

In this work, Bingham explores “how is the word ‘Nig’ defined in the dictionary,” through the exercise of speaking and writing its uses from “niggerhead-to-niggeration.”

For the artists this physical and metaphorical matter – these bad words, their meaning, rubber, iron – exercise and exorcise histories of enslaved folks’ usurped labor and working material. Bingham states, “They hold that shared trauma.”

On a recent trip to get source materials for artworks, he drove in “on Confederate Parkway […] that is the continuation practice. I see myself as voice, articulating – one of many people expressing and giving voice to those sites.” Nigg Defined: for Sherman includes a QR code link to audio/sound recorded in the Miles College Dining Hall.

With a Green Book as My Only Guide, stop motion animation film with found audio, 2017- 18, 13 min. A collage inspired technique was used to explore the joys and pitfalls for Negro travels through the 1950’s American landscape. (open the QR code link to Google Drive to view the film).