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July 6, 2006

rips mpozi

some bad news from Richard Prince's Journal-isms:

Indy Photog, 34, Collapses in Newsroom
July 5, 2006
Mpozi Tolbert -- Tall, Genial, Dreadlocked -- Mourned

"Mpozi Mshale Tolbert, 6 feet 6 inches tall with dreadlocks down to his waist, never blended in. You had to notice him. He stuck out -- almost always grinning, forever seeing the possibilities in life, chuckling at its foibles," Diana Penner wrote Tuesday in the Indianapolis Star.

"Monday, The Indianapolis Star photographer collapsed at work, at the photo desk where he was selecting the images to appear in today's newspaper. He was taken to Wishard Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about an hour later. An award-winning photographer who came to The Star in November 1998, Tolbert, 34, was equally at ease at news and sporting events as he was in classrooms of schoolchildren who looked up in awe and curiosity as he towered over them, an assortment of cameras and lenses around his neck."

The story listed no cause of death. Editor Dennis R. Ryerson told Journal-isms today he had not been told whether there would be an autopsy, but understood that "when there is somebody this age who dies without a known cause, the coroner does an investigation" that would include an autopsy. The story was accompanied by a photo gallery featuring Tolbert's photographs. [full obit here][full Richard Prince item here]

Back during the mid-90s Mpozi was a semi-to-irregular running buddy in Brooklyn. We were actually connected through Valerie Burger, adding another layer of bitter to his sudden, abrupt loss.

I remember Pozi (his nickname at the time; could it be he was barely 21? 22?) coming into New York from Philly (his hometown?) on more than one occasion to shoot something or another - MCs, protests, funerals, street fairs, the view outside a window. Money was tight all around so he'd often crash on Valerie and her roommate Noelle's couch. He'd play Noelle's records and I can recall sitting around with him in a pre-gentrification Fort Greene Park in the middle of the August night a few times, all of us having been driven outdoors by the heat. In my head he is a soothing yet infectiously enthusiastic presence, a kind of camera-wielding, bedreadlocked, good-vibe giant. I remember he didn't much like Rudy Guiliani, how he was fearless photographing cops in ugly situations all up and down the city, how he could defuse almost any situation, any turn down the wrong corner.

Other things, though, are lost: Was he a vegetarian? Did he drink or smoke? Did he have a preferred camera or format? Was there a girl involved? Any of it could be true, really. My memories of that era have not faded so much as the years have added an energized, altering halo, a ring-shaped wave of corrective possibility (anti-nostalgia?) that threatens to contract at any moment, to rush in and fill the incomplete places and gaps, this even when said gaps and incompletenesses are the story's primary and lasting point of interest. New York City in the 90s really was that kind of magical, colored boho utopia, Fort Greene another kind of ground zero. It felt like a narrowly defined kind of anything could happen in that part of Brooklyn; to our credit almost all of it did.

A fair number of folks I love and respect nested with me in the warm, downy parts of that bygone fantasyland and we're all still numerous and spry enough that the loss of any of one under any circumstance can be hard to process. Pozi and Valerie were barely in their 30s (both younger than me) and both are gone in what feels like a nastily short stretch. But what kind of aging fool acts like there's something unique or new about that? As black cohorts go we are the luckiest of the lucky, no supposedly's or purportedly's about it. If there are two or three of five faces in the class picture staring back so vividly - Marpessa maybe, or Joe - that we forget they are gone there is a sense in which we can count ourselves a kind of fortunate. It could be half; it could be almost all.



A self-portrait by Mpozi Tolbert

Posted by ebogjonson in memory, on July 6, 2006 2:02 PM

Comments

Posted by: Doug Karr at July 29, 2006 11:20 AM

Posted by: ebog at July 29, 2006 5:31 PM