What's different about Alice is that she has the most incisive way of telling the truth, 2017

Ekow Eshun: I'm Ekow Eshun. I'm a writer and a curator.

In this work, there's a couple of things going on. We have this figure who, let's call her Alice on the basis of the title of this painting. She's gazing out at us, but she's got this camera.

And I want to think about the camera for a moment, because, historically, the photographic image is, apparently, an objective image, but by situating it within this painting, Amy Sherald suggests that everything is in play, everything is subjective. This is not a photograph. This is the painting of a woman holding a camera. She's not looking through the lens of the camera. She's looking at us. There's a double gaze in process. Arguably, there's a triple gaze in process as well, because we are looking at Alice. 

So, here, we have a subjective take on an apparently objective image. She's inviting us to think subjectively about this figure. The title gives a clue to that. 

This painting, I suggest, is an invitation, not simply to look at a Black figure, but to look with and from the perspective of a Black figure, to think not just of what we see on the surface, but what we might imagine as the depths and richness of imagining and being that exist within this figure.