I decided to illustrate Langston Hughes’ poems because it was a poem I was very interested in for years. And the fact that it’s the first photographic book to win the Coretta Scott King award made me all the more proud, not just for myself but because of all of the photographers that will come later. One of things I mentioned in my speech is about how I learned of the award and I had to think about it for a minute, because I said “well, I only have one book and it was a photographic book and they wouldn’t give it to that.”
So, it really shocked me that, you know, they gave the award the way they did. In talking to many of the people who voted for it or saw it, many of my illustrator friends said “Oh man, you knocked it out of the park on that one. So you shouldn’t be surprised.” So I was very humbled in that regard. The poem itself, it’s only 33 words in total, and a children’s picture book is 32 pages usually, so that’s basically a word per page.
So that’s the first challenge was figuring how to divide it out over 32 pages. Once I figured that out then I started seeing the phrases and then the phrases dictated how I was gonna shoot it. So that made it easy and I think in this day and age of so much white noise and so much going and so much technology and so many things bombarding you at one time, I think it’s good to just take a breath and just kind of step back and be able to look at something that really wastes no words. And allows you know the imagery to shine through it’s just simple language. So I wanted the photographs to shine through in a very simple way.
The people in the book are just my people, regular people. My kids are in there. I work out at a gym and a number of the people work out at the gym with me. The older people that are in there work out in the gym. And they have a vitality to them that I wanted to show. And it was important to me to show you know newborn skin as well wrinkled skin. Because I wanted to show the range, in between the two, I wanted to show the wisdom that’s acquired. I wanted to show the innocence in a newborn smile. I wanted to show skin dark as night. I wanted to show skin bright as honey. You know, I wanted to show the range that is in my people
That old photograph at the end of My People is my father. Mr. Charles R. Smith, Sr., the original. My father unfortunately passed back in 1999, and this was one of my favorite pictures of him because he looks so good. But he was in the Navy, it was his first or second year in the Navy, he was very proud to serve. You know, his friends and everything, so it was my editor who actually said “do you have any old photographs of any old family members that you might want to put in?” And at the time, I didn’t really have any old like quote unquote old photographs. I had regular pictures of older family members and such. But that was one of the few old photographs I had and I always loved looking at it, so I says “Let’s put dad in there. Let’s immortalize him.”
