‘I don’t fit that stereotype’: participant photography and the visual (re)positioning of Black men

Abstract

This paper examines how Black men use a participant photography project as a tool for meaning making during the current political and social context of anti-Black racism, Black activism, and intersectional politics. Using a critical visual methodology in the analysis of the images, this paper will examine how Black men make meaning of current social issues through the types of images they produced, how they make meaning of the types of audiences they are speaking to through the project, and how these meanings are reflected through their repositioning practices in the visual project. Specific attention is paid to how they used the project to visually reposition themselves against raced-gendered hegemonic ontologies of Black masculinities by producing images and narratives that were intended to educate and disrupt dominant discourses on Black men. For this reason, I argue that the visual project is a type of repositioning event, which was a way for Black men to resist racial hegemony through the participant photography project.