Uncovering the Past: RaMell Ross on Nickel Boys

In 2016, five years after it was closed down, an investigative report was issued on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a reform school in Florida that had operated since the turn of the 20th Century. The report disclosed the remains of almost 100 former students found in 55 unmarked graves (27 other graves would be discovered three years later), many having suffered blunt force trauma or gunshot wounds. Three times as many Black students as white students were found. 

The horrifying events of the Dozier School were also the subject of a 2010 non-fiction book, The Boys of the Dark; this, along with the Dozier Report, became the inspiration behind Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys, which reimagines this particular legacy of the Jim Crow South through the eyes of Turner and Elwood, two Black boys in the 1960s who are sent to the fictional Nickel Academy in Florida’s panhandle. This chain of transmission – this trickle down of seeing and registering and speaking back to historic violence – culminates, for now, with photographer and documentarian RaMell Ross’ first narrative feature Nickel Boys, an adaptation that literalises the subjectivity of Whitehead’s novel by showing us events entirely through Elwood and Turner’s eyes. 

“It came to mind immediately,” Ross says of his film’s innovative subjective approach, in which cameras strapped to the two actors or remotely operated mimic the movement of the boys’ eyes and their ways of perceiving their world. “We've only thought about historical figures – not that Elwood and Turner are historical figures in a traditional sense – but we've only thought about historical figures as the Other. But why is it that art and writing or whatever haven't truly given subjectivity to them unless they gave it to themselves?” 

Cinema and photography have long been the art forms of the gaze, concerned with the politics of how we look and are looked at, and how images are formed and informed through these acts. In Nickel Boys, Ross reorients the gaze of the camera away from his audience and back to his subjects, so that with each shift of the boys’ eyes, each turn of their heads, a new piece of their environment – both physical and political – slides into view. 

“We're very interested, as makers in general, in recreating history through the eyes of how we look back on it,” Ross says, “and not through the eyes of the people who were living in the moment. And in that sense, it has more to do with the way we feel now than it does with the way that [they feel] in the past.” In Nickel Boys, it is impossible to escape how Turner and Elwood might have felt, and how they might have seen the world. Footage of Martin Luther King Jr appears on a television screen, not as political message or historical residue, but as a quotidian context glimpsed by a Black teenager crossing the street. A beating at the school, meanwhile, is seen only through the blank wall the victim is facing as it happens. The past is experienced not as a constructed artefact, but as a living, beating thing – and we, the audience, are placed directly within it. 

There is a documentarian’s sensibility to this understanding of the innate authorship of both image and history, although Ross is quick to stress that he does not consider Nickel Boys – despite its basis in historic fact and use of archival material – to have documentary elements. Yet his previous work, and in particular his 2019 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening – which chronicles the daily lives of Black people in Alabama through a non-linear, impressionistic lens – became a touchstone for interrogating the ability of the camera to author images of Black lives that are elusive in their subjectivity. 

“One of the original principles that [co-writer] Joslyn [Barnes] and I used to write was, ‘What if Elwood and Turner had their own cameras to make a Hale County of their lives?’” Ross says. “Obviously an impossibility, but what does their vision look like? And if their vision was anything like mine, how interesting would it be to see that time period poetically, [when] images from and of Black people that are poetic don't even exist. What are the consequences of that not existing? So then, if you do that, can you retroactively alter today's quotidian?”

For Ross, there is a politics to this poetics: it resists the certainty and simplicity through which Black people have been read throughout history. All through Nickel Boys, images from various archives – photography from the Florida Memory project, newsreels and old documentary footage, clips from Stanley Kramer’s 1958 film The Defiant Ones – both interrogate various ongoing relationships between the camera and the production of Blackness, and also allow for a form of representation that refuses the determinism that has historically categorised photography.

“I genuinely question photography at all times,” Ross says. “I [always] say that photography and film are the technology of racism, in that you need an idea and can then prove it with the image. That determinism of the image is something I'm constantly fighting.” The way Ross fights this fight – seen in Nickel Boys, seen in Hale County This Morning, This Evening, seen in his photography – is to “account for [photography’s] problems” by bringing into relief a photographic language that is lucid yet elliptical, that refuses the simple meaning-making that has long been ascribed to it. 

“When you look specifically at the way in which Black people have been depicted [in photography], they're easily read,” Ross continues. “How do you make ambiguous images of Black people in which the narrative is literally plural, and you have to account for what you think the image is? You're not allowed to just be like, ‘Oh, a Black person on a porch’. It's a Black person on a porch doing something that has multiple meanings. And so you're complicit, you're part of the meaning of the image. You complete it.”

In this way, Ross is – in his own words – working to “rescue people from the archive”, whether the literal people contained in these spaces or the fictional representations that draw on how these real-life people have been historicised. This liberation is rooted in Ross’s ongoing preoccupation with subjectivity, and the ways in which hierarchies of power between artists and their subjects can shift and change. “The power dynamics of most Black folks being in front of the camera were not always great,” Ross says. “People are in those archives involuntarily or voluntarily in some ways, but not as themselves. [They’re] visual statistics of Blackness. And so to find these interstitial moments inside the archive, and then bring them to this new archive was to save them.”

It is, in some ways, the same kind of work Whitehead set out to do in his novel: to rescue individual subjectivities from the flattening and numbing effect of historical statistics. Were these affinities between Whitehead’s work and his own what made Ross want to adapt the book? “No,” he says, and then hesitates. “But maybe… this is a huge general statement, but a lot of Black art is responsive, right? It's trying to reclaim, or do justice, or react to the problem of everyone else telling us who we are and who we've been and what we can be. And [whether] it's abstract and trying to resist doing representational stuff, or it's political, I connect with all of those because they're all trying to accomplish the same thing, which is some sort of transcendence outside of the social construct of race.”

How might this transcendence beyond the social construction of race translate to everyday life? In some ways, art making is perfectly placed to intervene in the social and cultural production of power, because it is very often art and image making – as Ross argues – that are the key tools of this production. Yet it is ultimately not only the artist’s role to deconstruct these systems, Ross stresses, as appealing an idea as that might be. 

“I think it’s the role of everyone, you know,” he says. “I feel it’s maybe culturally convenient to think that it’s the role of the artist, but like, why is it not the role of the mailman, or the lifeguard? We have this selective desire for people to do things according to our relationship to [them].” He pauses, thoughtful and deliberate as ever. “But I don't think it's the role of anyone to do anything, and I think it's the role of everyone to do everything.”

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Nickel Boys is released 3 Jan by Curzon