Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul

I Will Keep My Soul is a beautiful book that explores New Orleans' complex histories of race, art, and politics through a combination of photography, historical documents, poetry, and interviews. It was created by UK-based artist Helen Cammock, who weaves together her observations and encounters with correspondence and photographs from the Amistad Research Center to illustrate the city's invisible histories and the struggle for civil rights.

Format: Hardback
Length: 188 pages
Publication date: 14 February 2023
Publisher: Siglio Press

From the acclaimed Turner Prize winner, Convening polyphonous voices from past and present, I Will Keep My Soul is an orchestral layering of photography, historical documents, poetry, and interviews, rooted in the history, geography, and community of New Orleans. In this tactile artist's book, UK-based artist Helen Cammock (born 1970) traverses the city, rendering her observations and encounters into texts and images that reveal its invisible histories. These sequences are woven with correspondence and photographs from the Amistad Research Center that evoke artist Elizabeth Catlett's struggle for agency and support during her 1976 commission to create a bronze monument to Louis Armstrong in Congo Square—a place laden with histories of both oppression and celebration. Cammock interlaces more archival materials—newspaper clippings, instructions for activists, a 19th-century book on Creole slave songs—to articulate the long struggle for civil rights. I Will Keep My Soul is a uniquely American story of art and activism, culture and capital, being and belonging.

From the acclaimed Turner Prize winner, Convening polyphonous voices from past and present, I Will Keep My Soul is an orchestral layering of photography, historical documents, poetry, and interviews, rooted in the history, geography, and community of New Orleans. In this tactile artist's book, UK-based artist Helen Cammock (born 1970) traverses the city, rendering her observations and encounters into texts and images that reveal its invisible histories. These sequences are woven with correspondence and photographs from the Amistad Research Center that evoke artist Elizabeth Catlett's struggle for agency and support during her 1976 commission to create a bronze monument to Louis Armstrong in Congo Square—a place laden with histories of both oppression and celebration. Cammock interlaces more archival materials—newspaper clippings, instructions for activists, a 19th-century book on Creole slave songs—to articulate the long struggle for civil rights. I Will Keep My Soul is a uniquely American story of art and activism, culture and capital, being and belonging.

Dimension: 197 x 273 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781938221330