What does it mean to document a city that the state has already marked for disposability? For Afro-Puerto Rican, Chicago-based artist Carlos Javier Ortiz, this question is not abstract. It is the condition from which three of his films, A Thousand Midnights (2015), I’m Here (2017), and We All We Got (2014), emerge.
Working across documentary photography and film, Ortiz constructs images of communities shaped by structural violence, racial capitalism, and the persistent will to survive. These works do not simply represent Black life in the American city, they constitute a visual language through which that life asserts its own terms. Rooted in social realism yet reaching beyond its conventions, his practice operates as what this essay calls a diasporic archive: a body of work that holds migration, racial violence, and everyday endurance as layered, coexisting temporalities. Through black-and-white cinematography, he transforms the city into a site of memory that speaks not only to African American urban experience, but offers a relational framework through which Afro-Puerto Rican and broader diasporic identities can be understood without collapsing their distinct histories. His films do not conclude with redemption, nor do they ask for pity. They offer something rarer: a sustained act of witnessing that documents with precision, care, and the formal rigor of an artist who understands that how you look is inseparable from what you are claiming the right to see.
Migration and Historical Continuity
Stuart Hall (1989) argues that cultural identity can be understood as something shared and unchanging, a collective self that people with a common history carry beneath the surface differences of everyday life, rooted in experiences and codes of meaning that remain stable across time, anchoring communities to a continuous sense of who they are. For Black and Caribbean diasporic communities, this identity represents an essential core, something that can be uncovered, expressed, and made visible (Hall 1989, 222–223). It is precisely this sense of identity that A Thousand Midnights brings to the screen.
A Thousand Midnights returns to the Great Migration, the mass movement that forged the modern American city, not as settled history but as unfinished business. Through carefully crafted images, it holds two realities in the same frame; the hope that once propelled millions northward, and the conditions that greet their descendants today. The distance between those two moments is where the film lives.
Structured around its central movement, South to North, the film’s first half builds a poetic portrait of the rural South through an Afro-descendant narrator recounting his birthplace and community. Extreme contrast defines every frame. Luminous whites and dense blacks surround figures and landscapes with an almost spiritual aura, transforming the everyday into something contemplative. The Southern landscape becomes a territory of memory and belonging. The second half opens with a memorial to Emmett Till, and the film shifts entirely. The urban North emerges fractured, collective trauma replacing spiritual contemplation. Yet devastation does not have the final word. A house is demolished while a group dances in the rain. Violence and joy share the frame, holding together the film’s unanswered question: what does it mean to belong to a place that was never fully yours? The journey from South to North reveals not liberation but displacement in a new form, a world in which the promise of freedom keeps arriving just out of reach.
The City as Soundscape and Body
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman (2019) describes the Black urban neighborhood not as the site of pathology that reformers and sociologists photographed but as something far more complex: a space of endurance, improvisation, and collective life unfolding just beyond the reach of those who came to document it. Simultaneously it is a place of extreme deprivation and radical possibility, where people experiment with freedom and make bare need into an arena of elaboration, even as the city withholds almost every opportunity it promises (Hartman 2019, 15–22).
It is this same tension that We All We Got inhabits. Ortiz does not arrive as an outsider with a camera and a caption. He moves through the neighborhood the way Hartman’s subjects move through theirs, attuned to what the official record consistently misses: the texture of a block, the sound of a street, the ways communities sustain themselves in the absence of institutional support. He renders the city as a living organism where bodies move through space in equal measure vulnerable and enduring, never explained, only experienced.
The film opens with an aerial view before descending into the crisis. A community member explains what has been lost, why they are protesting. The camera lingers at the scene of the crime letting grief unfold without mediation, then follows the survivors, the families left behind. It closes with the State’s response: police encircling the neighborhood as an enclosing force, imposing an official version of events, juxtaposed against the community finding joy and moving freely in the same streets. The film ends looking up toward the sky, a reversal of its opening downward gaze and the clearest expression of Ortiz’s visual grammar: the same aerial motif, the same juxtaposition of violence and endurance, tracing the arc of a diaspora still searching for the promise it was given.
Housing, Presence, and Fragility
Christina Sharpe (2016) writes that to live in the wake of slavery is to inhabit a condition of ongoing dispossession where the structures that were supposed to have ended with emancipation persist, quietly and violently, in the textures of everyday Black life: in skewed life chances, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. Housing, who has it, who loses it, who is made to feel that their presence in it is conditional, is one of the most immediate sites where this dispossession becomes visible (Sharpe 2016, 10–23).
Produced in 2017 as part of Atlanta Legal Aid’s housing campaign, I’m Here enters the lives of families facing eviction and displacement. Ortiz does not make a legal argument, he makes a human one. Through black-and-white cinematography, its stillness and attention to faces and interiors, the film transforms a housing crisis into something more elemental: the fragile, insistent assertion that these people are here. Like We All We Got, the film opens and closes with an aerial shot grounding the viewer in the neighborhood before descending into the lives it contains. Whites intensely bright, blacks deeply dense, shadows sharply drawn, the same extreme contrast creates an atmosphere approaching noir, within which two Black women tell their stories directly, navigating the housing system, enduring public housing, and what it has finally meant to have a place to call their own. The contrast between displacement and belonging is where the film finds its emotional center.
True to Ortiz’s broader practice, the film does not end on hardship. Before the final aerial shot returns us to the Atlanta skyline, we see one of the women in her church surrounded by her community, in a moment of collective joy. Through the deliberate framing of interiors, faces, and stillness, Ortiz turns the film’s title into a quiet but insistent assertion of existence against erasure.
Black-and-White as Aesthetic Strategy
Across A Thousand Midnights, We All We Got, and I’m Here, black-and-white is never merely a stylistic choice. It is a political and historical one. By stripping color from the image, Ortiz removes spectacle and redirects attention toward what remains: texture, light, contrast, and the weight of faces that refuse to be abstracted. This decision collapses time, holding the Great Migration and the present in the same visual register, refusing to treat history as settled or distant. The past in Ortiz’s cinema is always already here.
His black-and-white cinematography operates as elegy, a form of mourning that does not resolve but repeats, cycles, and accumulates. It aligns his work with the documentary traditions that shaped the visual grammar of the Civil Rights photography that insisted on witness, the social realism that refused to look away, and the Third Cinema that turned the camera into an instrument of resistance. Ortiz inherits all of these traditions and extends them into the contemporary city.
Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011) argues that the opposite of the right to look is not censorship but visuality, the authority that tells us to move on, that there is nothing to see here. Ortiz’s cinema is a direct answer to that logic. He plants the camera in the spaces authority would prefer to leave undocumented, the grieving community, the precarious home, the neighborhood marked for disposability, and insists there is, in fact, everything to see here. His black-and-white does not aestheticize poverty or spectacularize suffering. It makes visible what systems of racial capitalism require to remain unseen with the precision and care of an artist who understands that how you look is inseparable from what you are claiming the right to see. Ortiz’s cinema is not an invitation to consume suffering. It is an invitation to witness, and in doing so, to claim what Mirzoeff calls the right to the real.
References
- Hall, S. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by J. Rutherford. Lawrence & Wishart.
- Hartman, S. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. W. W. Norton & Company.
- Mirzoeff, N. 2011. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke University Press.
- Sharpe, C. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press.