In 1976-77, historian and writer, Dorothy Mallory Jones, embarked on a project that soon became a mission. She drove the back roads of middle and south Georgia over the course of several months. Armed with a tape recorder and a photographer, she interviewed ordinary Black folks – on the porches of their homes or in the fields as they worked – documenting their cares, their ambitions, their lives. This field work culminated in a program for Public Television, THE TROUBLE I’VE SEEN.
From that experience, she was inspired to write a series of poems. At the time the unpublished poems were titled BASIC BLACK – her reflection on the universal Black experience in America.
Twenty years later, her son, digital artist and scholar, Philip Mallory Jones, combined the poetry with photographs and other media to form beautifully distinctive image compositions. And now, forty years after the original inspiration, Alchemy Media Publishing has published their collaboration as a coffee-table portfolio, LISSEN HERE!.
“This collaboration has been germinating for three decades, and longer. It comes out of, and marks, the paths we have travelled, my mother and I, from those early of her teaching and me learning, to mature artists who respect each other’s work. We ha become full circle, in a way, able converse through our art, with a shared language, about the lore and legends of our family, and our extended Family.
The images are derived from our family archive, the work of friends, and many moments resurrected from the dustbins of generational amnesia.
I have taken liberties with these images, associating images and text based on narrative, aesthetic and emotional interpretation. No commentary on the actual persons depicted is intended.”
Philip Mallory Jones
“This book began life as a meld of black history and a celebration of black womanhood. It is factual, anecdotal, autobiographical. It is born of remembered snatches of my own , and anybody else’s family lore; of provocative family nicknames; of knotted, worked-out hands of my grandmother’ folded so patiently in her lap. It is the fruit of a lifetime of standing back and watching the relentless energies of a race of stricken people, steadily galvanizing toward liberation. It is listening, always listening, to the cadence, the flow, the pungent getting-to-the-heart of it, that is our speech.”
Dorothy Mallory Jones
About the Authors
Philip Mallory Jones has worked with video, film, photography and writing for art-making since 1969, and has incorporated digital media since 1990. His work has been presented in international exhibitions in North America, the Caribbean, south America, Europe, Africa, India, Fiji, Japan, Singapore and Australia.
He was co-founder and Director of Ithaca Video Projects (1971-1984) and the Annual Ithaca Video Festival (1975-1984). In 1999, he curated Icono Negro: The Black Aesthetic in Video Art.
His work has been supported by the American Film Institute, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation. the Whitney Museum of American Art, and others.
Mr. Jones’ academic credentials include the MFA in Creative Writing, from Cornell University, and the BA from Beloit College. He has served on the faculties of Ithaca College, Howard University, and S.U.N.Y. at Fredonia. He was the Batza Distinguished Scholar in Art and Art History at Colgate University. He also served multi-year appointments as Resident Artist at the Institute for Studies in the Arts at Arizona State University, and the Aesthetic Technologies Lab at Ohio University.
He is currently based in Atlanta, Georgia.
Dorothy Mallory Jones received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Psychology from Northwestern University, and went on to study for the doctorate in Clinical Psychology at Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and the University of Tennessee at Memphis, TN. She has worked as Assistant Editor at Johnson Publishing Company, in Chicago; as Coordinator of Fund Raising and Development at George Williams College, in Downers Grove, IL, and in the public school systems of Cook County, IL, and Memphis, TN, as Psychologist, in their Departments of Psychological Services.
From 1976 to 1977, she created, researched, and directed an independent project in oral Black History, an enterprise which required travel throughout South Georgia, and culminated in a program of Public Television, The Trouble I’ve Seen.
Most recently she has worked in the Department of Continuing Education at Spelman College as a Lecturer in courses on Creative Writing, and African American Literature: A Comparative Study.
She has written in the area of, and about, black historical fiction and poetry. Her book reviews have been published in Negro History Bulletin, and her engaging adaptations of African folktales were published in the Lore and Legend of Africa for Children.
Dorothy Mallory Jones 1920 – 2019
