Tag Archives: race

thinking about photographs

The Mirror in our Memory

(Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle)

(Julla Carrie Wong)

(Joe Vazquez, KPIX)

These striking photographs are from a protest against police violence that took place about a week ago in Oakland. Some of the protestors brought mirrors with them to hold up to the police, and the resulting news photographs present striking images.

“I was holding up the mirror because I wanted the police to just look at themselves. Especially if they were about to take some kind of action just so they had to acknowledge what they were doing,” protester Nichola Torbett told KPIX 5.

Demarco Robinson, also a protester, said, “We want that person to look at themselves so that they can realize they’re not a badge. They don’t have to follow the system that they don’t agree with.”

— KPIX

These mirrors are emblematic of a part of the national reaction to police conduct particularly in Ferguson, MO (but not only there): an acute sense that police are acting in a way that should be impossible for people who understand that they are visible.

Don’t they know they’re on camera? Don’t they know we see them? Can’t they see what they’re doing?

Race, Privilege, and Visibility

My first thought was to say, “we are shocked,” at the seeming obliviousness of, for example, police officers explicitly threatening violence against journalists while on camera. But that suggests that these things are universally surprising, which is not true. The degree to which “we” are surprised is on a spectrum, correlated to the degree to which each of us has to live with the reality of police violence.

For some, these things are totally shocking, and can only be interpreted by analogy to distant times and places — thus the spate of comparisons to police conduct during prior decades of civil rights struggle in the US, as well as comparisons to war-torn regions in other parts of the world today. But for others, what we are seeing is neither a revival nor alien: it is everyday lived reality.

Note: I am not referring just to shock at the extent or severity of racially based police violence against citizens, but also and more specifically to our reactions to the apparent lack of concern over its visibility.

In institutions, there is usually (or should be) a significant gap between levels of misconduct that are accepted or tolerated (or even encouraged) depending on whether or not they are subject to prominent public attention, news coverage, and perhaps future legal action. The default level of citizen cynicism expects bad behavior to be pointedly (and temporarily) suspended or made covert in the wake of a public relations crisis.

And yet, what we’ve seen recently in Ferguson is an apparent eagerness of police to repeatedly double down on illegal behavior, all while in the public eye. They seemingly believe that they can get away with almost anything while the world watches — and the gap between mainstream coverage and what twitter has surfaced, along with the appalling racial gap in public perception, show that (depressingly) they might not even be wrong.

How surprising this is (or isn’t) probably has a lot to do with how accurate an intuition you have of the relationship between white privilege, white power, institutional racism, and police authority. We aren’t talking about a certain percentage of police officers having personal racist pathologies — and we aren’t even just talking about certain police agencies having baked racism into their policies.

Privilege and power shape perception across a society. Racism, as a societal process, tends to blind those involved to its effects.1 So, for the police, racism acts as a kind of invisibility cloak, screening actions against people of color from scrutiny and exempting the police from self-reflection.

This runs counter to assumptions we tend to form in the absence of an awareness of racism. We know, bone deep, that being seen changes how we behave. This knowledge expresses itself constantly in our interactions with each other. Institutions utterly rely on it for purposes of social control. The panopticon is the sociological and philosophical specter of our time. And remember that it does not even necessarily matter whether we are actually being watched; the point of the panopticon is that just the idea of being watched influences behavior.

But racism changes what it means to see and to be seen. And power determines the meaning of observation in any (real or metaphorical) panopticon.

Racism is a Defect of the Eye

I don’t know whether holding up a mirror to a police officer in riot gear is likely to reveal anything to them.2 Racism is a defect of the eye — both the collective public eye and the individual gaze. It is not suspended just because the eye is turned back on itself. The kind of self-reflection that reshapes self-image and behavior is unlikely to be triggered by a single provocative gesture in a charged, antagonistic setting.

But it forms an eloquent gesture for the journalist’s camera, crystallizing in one physical moment a complex and for many people counter-intuitive critique.

In a sense, it is also an implicit critique of the journalist’s camera, and of its inadequacy for changing our understanding of events. The mythologies of journalism and photography want us to feel that images change minds and shape understandings. We want to believe the camera has that power — we want to believe that when a photograph shows others what we see, they will be able to see it, too.

The photograph is supposed be “the mirror with a memory,” and in the hands of journalists, it is supposed to be able to induce personal and societal reflection. But if the mirror with a memory had that power, would people have to be in the streets holding literal mirrors up to the helmets of riot cops?

As John Edwin Mason recently pointed out in two great posts on iconic photographs (Part 1, Part 2), our mythology of photojournalism’s purpose and power is far from the reality. The meaning and significance of even the most powerful, disturbing photographs depends on what viewers are willing and able to see in them.

Time had to catch up with the photographs. More correctly, attitudes had to change, and change they did. But they didn’t change without struggle.

The civil rights movement, the American anti-apartheid movement, and, of course, South Africans, at home and in exile, created movements that convinced the vast majority of Americans that segregation and apartheid were wrong. The anti-Vietnam War movement (and the utter futility of the war itself) led a majority of Americans to support its end.

The photos of King and those of Phan Thị Kim Phúc became icons retrospectively. They don’t reflect the past, they reflect what we now think about the past.

The photos that I posted here are unlikely to become iconic in any case, because (despite the national character of the struggle over police brutality, of which Oakland owns a huge part), these particular photos are at the edge of what’s happening in this historical moment. But there are photos that have come out of Ferguson that should be and hopefully will be iconic — if they can come to stand for a change in how America sees what is happening now.

  1. Think of it as meme, in the original Dawkins sense. More like an idea parasite than an outdated view. (IMPORTANT NOTE: Even though memes are a useful idea, Dawkins is still an asshole whom you should always ignore.) ↩
  2. And of course, this protest happened in Oakland, not in Ferguson. OPD doesn’t exactly have a spotless record, but they tend to get treated as a proxy for cops at large, much as Oakland’s residents do. ↩
Black Americana
photo series

Black Americana

Gallery

Creative Producer, Brandon Littlejohn, and Photographer, Rod Gailes OBC, are collaborating to create a brilliant four-part photography series that showcases classic American settings through an Afro-Elite lens. The “Black Americana” series encourages African Americans to challenge societal messages about Blackness, while aspiring to higher levels of art and education on their own terms.

—Taylor N. Lewis

Black Americana

Black Americana

Black Americana

Black Americana

Black Americana

Black Americana

Black Americana

Black Americana

Black Americana

When we weren’t marching, dodging fire hoses, and police dogs biting at our brown skin—when we weren’t singing songs of freedom, and training how to peacefully resist in southern sit-ins, we were doing what other Americans did—we went to the beach. “Island in the Sun”, a first installment in the ground-breaking series “Black Americana” re-introduces, and reclaims the image—the representation of free Black women and men living their lives openly and beautifully. The series seeks to offer a broader lens of Black American life not often seen—a restoration of Black bodies on a summer day in 1950’s America.

—Geneva S. Thomas

This came across tumblr with a link to an Indiegogo campaign from 2012. That campaign appears to have failed mightily. Which is kind of depressing since our retrofetish nature* NEEDS images like these. So much of our romantic view of the 1950’s ignores how divided society was at the time.** To that end, these photos serve two purposes.

*It may be interesting to read to my post on Cars. And its followup.

**For example. How many non-blacks know about the Green Books?

 

First, they force us to confront how much we expect these kinds of images to be only white people.* The photos read retro. And affluent. And black. And all of a sudden we’re in uncharted territory and questioning our assumptions. This is almost always a good place to be.

*Something Kerry James Marshall does a lot.

Second, we then get to think about what kind of retro images we expect to see black people in. My guess is that it’s probably very much like every single Hollywood biopic where the character grows up impoverished in the South. While it was obviously much more difficult to be Black in the 1950s than it was to be White,  picturing an entire group of people in such a limited way is dangerous territory.

I’m sad that the rest of this series didn’t get made. There are more images on the Tumblr but it’s been two years since the last update.

cp2
history, photo series

Bons baisers des colonies

Image

Ici, les femmes n’ont pas de nom, elles ne sont que des «types». Le corps est une marchandise comme une autre, soumise à une exigence d’exotisme.

[Here, women do not have names, they are only “types.” The body is a commodity like any other, subject to the requirement of exoticism.]

—Safia Belmenouar

Sure enough, colonial postcards were often a kind of soft core porn.

—John Edwin Mason

CP1

cp2

CP3

An exhibition of colonial postcards. It’s a shame more of these aren’t online (the featured image seems to change though) but even the three I’ve seen posted serve to remind us of the kind of baggage that comes with the colonial gaze.

It’s very clear what kind of appeal is being sold here. And what it means to be “exotic” and female. And why images of a mixed-race future when centered around whiteness makes a lot of non-white people uncomfortable. And why appropriation of native clothing for fashion photoshoots or sexy photoshoots perpetuates more than just the male gaze.

Carlos Javier Ortiz
photo series

North Lawndale

Image

And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000.

—Ta-Nehisi Coates

Carlos Javier Ortiz

Carlos Javier Ortiz

Carlos Javier Ortiz

Carlos Javier Ortiz

As much as I enjoyed Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Case for Reparations, I found myself really thinking about and appreciating Carlos Javier Ortiz’s photos of North Lawndale which accompanied the article.

Ortiz’s website suggests that he’s more into social justice photojournalism—lots of people and getting into the thick of things in proper Robert Capa fashion—but these aren’t that kind of photo. Nor are they mining the textures of poverty and decay for superficial appeal and authenticity.

These photos illustrate how different Black America is from White America even today but do it in a way that references a lot of the photos I associate with White America—especially the way the New Topographics looks at the built environment. They also point out a glaring blind spot in Looking at the Land and the concept of what we mean by 21st-century American views.*

*Note: I love both the New Topographics and Looking at the Land.

Patrick Willocq. Asongwaka Takes Off.
photo series

This is my Africa

Gallery
Malick Sidibé. Fans de Jimmy Hendrix
Malick Sidibé. Fans de Jimmy Hendrix

More than any other continent, Africa’s development has been dictated and perverted by foreign greed, and likewise its image has been defined by the foreign lens. That is the cage of stereotype which the best African photographers have fought to escape for the past 60 years: often rejecting the Western obsession with traditional ceremony and costume, rejecting similarly the associations with violence, poverty and mayhem, sometimes rejecting even the notion of Africa itself—insisting instead on the vast array of identities that have germinated in the continent’s soil.

—Peter Popham

Photography invites and facilitates the process of appropriation and re-appropriation of identity, in a continent where post-colonial or post-apartheid identity are major themes for artists. It naturally engages with social and political issues that compel many artists; telling stories that need to be told.

—Ed Cross

Justin Dingwall. Three Marys.
Justin Dingwall. Three Marys.
Justin Dingwall. Three Marys.
Justin Dingwall. Three Marys.
Justin Dingwall. Three Marys.
Justin Dingwall. Three Marys.
Mario Macilau. Taking a Shower.
Mario Macilau. Taking a Shower.
Patrick Willocq. Asongwaka Takes Off.
Patrick Willocq. Asongwaka Takes Off.
Jumoke Sanwo. The Silence.
Jumoke Sanwo. The Silence.
Adolphus Opara. Okobaba I.
Adolphus Opara. Okobaba I.
Cyrus Kabiro. Mugabe.
Cyrus Kabiro. Mugabe.
Gideon Mendel. Joseph and Endurance Edem, With Teir Children Godfreedom and Josephine.
Gideon Mendel. Joseph and Endurance Edem, With Their Children Godfreedom and Josephine.
Namsa Leuba. Statuette Sorsone Oumou, Guinee.
Namsa Leuba. Statuette Sorsone Oumou, Guinee.
Karl Ohiri. Patchwork.
Karl Ohiri. Patchwork.

I’m such a sucker for self-representation. Definitely, definitely click through and read about everything on the auction site.

And I don’t have much more to add to this except to quote from something I wrote earlier this year.

As much as the “Africa is a country” thing is an annoying Western ignorant viewpoint, I found that it worked in this case. The commonality of having to deal with resolving cultures after Europe messed with things in the continent makes sense to me. The presentation wasn’t about how all Africa was the same but rather how different African artists dealt with the cultural whiplash of being unleashed from colonialism and set loose in the global economy.

This auction/collection totally fits in with this idea of reappropriating culture in the midst of a post-colonial world. It’s why I fall into the creation side of the “what democratized photography” debate.