Black Photograph Research Articles

Exceptional Cameraworkers: Early Black Photographers in New Jersey

The few known African American photographers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced significant challenges, including racial prejudice and competition from white photographers for both white and the relatively few Black customers. The New Jersey photographers examined here were no exception and this may help explain why images by an artist with a long career, William M. Dutton, are so hard to find today and why others, like Isaiah Burton and Levi Bankson, worked only briefly in the medium before moving on to other, more remunerative occupations. Beginning his photographic career at the end of the 1800s, Albert Thomas Moore achieved considerable success in the first part of the twentieth century in New Brunswick and South River but less so in Atlantic City. For additional illustrations to this article, see http://saretzky.com/download/black-photographers-keynote.pdf.

TEXTURES: The History and Art of Black Hair

TEXTURES: The History and Art of Black Hair

“Africa's First Woman Press Photographer”: Mabel Cetu's Photographs in Zonk!

“Africa's First Woman Press Photographer”: Mabel Cetu's Photographs in <i>Zonk!</i>

Arresting Optics: Black Femme Witnessing in Protest Photojournalism and the Anti-Black Techniques of Police Vision

In this article, we animate the interstitial practices shared by photojournalists and police officers, and sketch some of the stakes for visual practitioners ‘bearing witness while black’. We employ visual analyses of protest images by Black photographers while tracing the specific visual techniques of oversight mobilised by law enforcement. These include police departments’ co-optation of news images to identify and criminalise racial justice protesters alongside efforts to professionalise police officers into photographers. We theorise the anti-Black intersections shared across these expansive formations – policing and photojournalism – in an effort to account for the ways in which both systems maintain and invest in damaging visualities that shape consequences ‘on the ground’ for Black and brown communities.

Capturing the South: Imagining America’s Most Documented Region by Scott L. Matthews

Reviewed by: Capturing the South: Imagining America’s Most Documented Region by Scott L. Matthews Carol Quirke Capturing the South: Imagining America’s Most Documented Region. By Scott L. Matthews. Documentary Arts and Culture. (Chapel Hill: Published by University of North Carolina Press in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, 2018. Pp. xvi, 312. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4645-9; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-4644-2.) Travel writers, poets, ethnographers and other social scientists, musicologists, folklorists, journalists, and photographers made “the American South . . . the most documented place on earth” (p. 2). Scott L. Matthews surveys this oeuvre; his history’s title conveys that he is equally interested in what the [End Page 145] region’s rich vein of documentary studies communicates about its practitioners. For Matthews, documentarians’ will to chart “appealing primitivism and appalling pathology” often overshadowed much else—hence the book explores documentarians’ motives and mythologizing (p. 239). If James Agee claimed the camera testified to “the cruel radiance of what is” (James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [Boston, 1941], p. 9), Matthews argues that documentarians’ witnessing often resulted in patronizing attempts at reform or twisted caricature that still adhere to the South. They conspired to preserve a “premodern” regionalism before “modernity wiped it away,” yet Matthews evidences how documentary subjects often rejected such representations (p. 2). The author’s well-researched case studies span the twentieth century. Beginning with social scientist Howard W. Odum’s development of the University of North Carolina’s Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, Matthews moves to New Deal–era Farm Security Administration (FSA) images of a Georgia county through Jack Delano’s eyes. For the postwar period, Capturing the South: Imagining America’s Most Documented Region explores musicologist/musician John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, who tracked down and then promoted the “high lonesome sound” of Appalachian singers (p. 113). Matthews then investigates Danny Lyon’s evocative photos of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and finishes with a deep dive into Hale County, Alabama, where Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is set. Matthews’s probing of a range of documentary materials is a strength, allowing him to identify common patterns of representation. He also delineates documentary projects’ overlapping audiences. For example, Odum’s staff introduced photographer Dorothea Lange to several southern communities. Photographers, academics, policy makers, and the general public then engaged with this imagery, a generation later embraced by folk lovers, art enthusiasts, and political activists. Another strength is Matthews’s mining of poor southerners’ reactions to their documentation. One Kentucky musician shot and killed an interviewer. Most subjects found less brutal forms of resistance. Matthews makes an important scholarly intervention in demonstrating how elites, such as Zora Neale Hurston or W. E. B. Du Bois, and common sharecroppers or churchgoers registered distaste or actively sabotaged documentarians’ efforts to pin down southern folkways. For half a century, critics and scholars have argued photographers exert an adverse power over their subjects. Matthews’s analysis provides evidence where others offer theory alone; but as each chapter shows documentarians forcing themselves upon resisting subjects, the argument becomes formulaic. Greater suppleness in limning the relations between subject and maker would persuade more. Similarly, Capturing the South flattens differences in the wide variety of practitioners who made the South their subject. Certainly, documentarians in the center (urban North) sought to preserve an “authentic” culture in the periphery (rural South). And yet what drew such diverse people as snobbish, WASPy Walker Evans; genteel, racist Odum, a southerner; or Jewish Brooklynite and antiracist Lyon to documenting the South? Lyon was held in high esteem by his subjects and his activist sponsor, SNCC. Ultimately, SNCC [End Page 146] advanced Black photographers, paralleling the movement’s radicalization to Black Power. This does not appear proof of Lyon’s “well-meaning white liberal[ism]” (pp. 187–88). A final concern is that Matthews’s southern documentarians are largely men. His discussion of Lyon’s SNCC work focuses on leaders such as Bob Moses and John Lewis. But one of Lyon’s most famous photographs portrays teenage women in the Leesburg, Georgia...

Digitally processing an image of a shoe impression in blood

Shoeprints are valuable crime scene exhibits because, given a reasonable-quality impression and a suspect shoe, the forensic investigator can correlate the impression with the shoe and pin down a suspect. In similarity to bloody fingerprints, a common practice with bloody shoeprints is that the crime scene investigator photographs the impressions at a 90° angle with a scale, develops them with amido Black, and then photographs again. In most cases, the post-development prints will feature better and more details that are usually sufficient to perform a comparison between the impression found at the crime scene and suspect's shoes. This study examined shoeprints in blood that had been collected in an apartment in northern Israel where two bodies were found. The floor tiles in the apartment had featured a colored design which in the post-development photographs of the shoeprints blended in with the blood on the floor. As a result, the shoeprint impression was partial and small details were masked. In the laboratory, we processed the pre-amido Black photograph in several steps designed to increase contrast. The result of this digital processing was a full shoeprint sufficiently clear to display randomly acquired characteristics of the sole and subsequently establish identification between the impression found at the crime scene and suspect's shoes. When chemical amplification is not sufficient, it is worth exploring other methods before proceeding with the comparison, as it is sometimes still possible to extract information from the same data using alternative methods in order to achieve a conclusive result.

Black Image Production: Moving Toward Art and Art Histories

Black Image Production: Moving Toward Art and Art Histories

Making the Familiar Strange: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Erasure Luncheon Address Given at the 29th Annual Fall Conference of the AERA SIG: Research on Women in Education

She was preparing an assignment for her graduate research course and experiencing extreme writer'sblock. It just seemed as if nothing of substance was occurring, and finally in frustration she decided toleave her cubicle and wander through the library stacks. Her steps took her to the section marked "AfricanAmerican Studies" where she began to scan the shelves. Not long after, she found herself drawn to a bookwith the title, The Contributions of Blacks to the American Military: A Retrospective.Intrigued by both the text and the promise of narratives and faded photographs, she removed the book andbegan to turn the pages. Casually moving through pages that documented black men's combatcontributions from the Revolutionary War to World War II, she found herself drawn to the accounts andfaces of "free men," stoic foot soldiers, aviators, marines, and army battalions""and, quite unexpectedlyto a picture of what appeared to be a ship's hold with thirteen black officers seated on graduated steps.Since there had been few photographs of blacks in the Navy, she stopped to look more closely at thepicture and to read the names. Suddenly, her eyes widened with astonishment as she recognized the faceof her own father. For the first time, at age 23, she was learning that he had been one of the first blackscommissioned as officers in the United States Navy. In that moment, his/story had become her/story too.

Anthony Barboza in Conversation with Bill Gaskins

Anthony Barboza’s professional career began in in 1968 after he completed a tour of duty in the United States Navy, where he worked as a photojournalist. When he became a member of the legendary Kamoinge Workshop, formed in 1963 to address the under-representation of black photographers in the art world, he worked with master artists, intellectuals, and photographers. Also in 1968, a group of black men—plus one woman— formed Essence Communications Inc. A momentous triangulation of the women’s liberation movement, the cultural nationalism of African American people in the United States, and a late-twentieth-century black-capitalist movement, Essence magazine was designed to direct print editorial and advertising content toward African American women. It also provided the most important platform for Anthony Barboza, enabling him to play an influential role in transforming how African American, Latin American, and African and Caribbean women and men were represented in fashion and advertising in the United States. In this interview, we discuss such topics as how race plays a part in the fashion industry, hair styling, and working with models.

Zanele Muholi's Elements of Survival

South African Zanele Muholi’s photographs directly address resistance and tension between individual and community. Specifically, Muholi refers to the lives and loves of people who are black and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI), aiming her project toward establishing and preserving “black queer visibility.” In the process, Muholi produces photographic images that refer to—and critically reconsider— longstanding visual traditions, while at the same time responding to acts of violence and dehumanization. The result is an expanding archive that visualizes various complexities of community and nation. One precedent for Muholi’s use of photography in relation to black community appeared over a century ago. Deborah Willis (2003) notes that W.E.B. DuBois, then a sociology professor at Atlanta University, had a fascination with photography. For DuBois, photography played a critical role in reconstructing and shaping American visual culture at the turn of the 20th century. When assembling materials for the “American Negro” exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, DuBois turned to black photographers to mount challenges to blatantly racist and stereotypical images that pictured people of color as inferior, unattractive, and unintelligent. Collected several years prior to DuBois’s famous postulation of black racial identity as “double consciousness,” the photographs displayed in Paris were meant to serve as an archive of visual evidence that would prove black people were as multifaceted as everyone else. Unlike other exoticized collections and displays of the time, DuBois’s archive of images expresses possibility through visual self-presentation. Black photographers and their black subjects defined themselves and their beauty through photography, believing it was a significant step in the fight against violently negative imagery (Harris 2003). In a time when the deliberate distortion of black images in popular culture was common, DuBois’s archive offered a different view of the global black subject against a sociopolitical backdrop that made violent efforts to classify and control. Dubois’s exhibit ran counter to popular de-humanizing displays by visualizing black folk as an inextricable part of the fabric of society; it was a successful effort to overturn many common ideas about black life (Willis 2003:52). These photographs of a diverse range of black people played a role in shaping ideas about identity and a sense of self. Dubois’s collection of images motivated black folks, but they also informed the broader American social consciousness. Beyond racial concerns, black photographers were interested in locating and reproducing the beauty and fragility of people close to them, the humor of everyday life, and the dreams of a people (Enwezor 2006, Firstenberg 2001). The visualization of educated, working, and dreaming black people formed a visual archive that documented a diverse nation of dignified, proud, successful, and beautiful humans. The pictures were radical because, through them, the African American community was presented as a group of spiritually, socially, and economically diverse individuals. The insistence on defining one’s own identity and beauty is what Willis has termed “subversive resistance.” Subversive resistance is a metaphor for strategies that produce visual images to counter dominant meanings or stereotypes (Willis 2003). It operates by offering alternative views, and its force often comes through nuanced presentation of one’s self and community. Contemporary photographs may also enable the viewer to imagine how people connect with, and belong to, their communities and nations. I use DuBois’s show as a point of departure for this essay on South African artist Zanele Muholi because in the course of my research I happened upon a reproduction of a striking archiGender and South African Art

Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body by Harvey Young (review)

Reviewed by: Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body by Harvey Young Koritha Mitchell Harvey Young . Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010. 259 pp. $80 cloth/$29.95 paper. Black studies has always been an interdisciplinary enterprise, and in recent decades, black performance theory has flourished within it. Gaining momentum as a respected set of methodologies, black performance theory attends to the meaning-making power not only of words, but also of social practices and rituals as well as gestures, tones of voice, and so forth. Employing tools from performance studies, theater historiography, and literary criticism, it accounts for the influence of "blackness" throughout modernity. Harvey Young's Embodying Black Experience contributes to black performance theory in ways that demonstrate the continued interpretive value of biography and autobiography. Young begins, in chapter one, by identifying connections between his experiences and those of Frantz Fanon, whose presence inspired "Look, a Negro!" from a frightened child. Fanon famously explained the implications of his being hailed in this way, with racial difference treated as his most meaningful feature. Similarly, Young recalls taking a walk only to be assaulted with the label "Nigger." This experience resonated with the events of a year earlier, when Young was jailed for "Driving while Black" (2). Fanon's understanding of his experiences in Martinique and Young's discussion of racial profiling in the U. S. illustrate "phenomenal blackness" (2). In Western societies, the black body carries tremendous signifying power; it is often allowed to stand in for individuals, thus overshadowing the actual person. As Young puts it, "projections of the black body across recognizable African American bodies create similar embodied experiences" (15). [End Page 263] In other words, blacks can land in strikingly similar situations, even when they have little in common and are separated by decades or centuries, miles or oceans. Chapter two of Young's book substantiates this insight by focusing on the concept of "standing still." In this process, Young complicates "conceptualizations of the Black Diaspora as pure movement" (27-28). He emphasizes that before captives were loaded onto ships, they were held for months. Aboard the ships, their movement was restricted. Then, in the New World, they often stood still on auction blocks. These experiences, Young insists, set the stage for future performances of stillness, such as when Joseph Zealy's now famous daguerreotypes captured the likenesses of slaves in the 1850s. Young suggests that because cultural memory resides in black bodies, it helped these men and women perform stillness for a full minute, as required by daguerreotype technology (43). Young then discusses the work of a black photographer, Richard Samuel Roberts, whose subjects performed stillness in the 1920s. The chapter closely reads a number of images, including two that are not reproduced. Ultimately, the black subjects in these images do not simply sit or stand; they return the gaze and perform an ideal image of themselves (50-63). For Young, then, the representation of their bodies must be read anew, and recognized as a source of individual biography. Young's biographical investment continues in chapter three, "Between the Ropes," which examines the lives of black professional boxers Tom Molineaux, Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali. Young demonstrates that the sport's popularity on slave plantations shaped blacks' participation in it for generations. Nevertheless, he uncovers moments when his subjects resist being "the black body exhibited for others" and instead become "a black body that has chosen to perform itself as an exhibit for itself " (91). Jack Johnson succeeded at precisely this for a time; then, federal authorities used the seldom-enforced Mann Act to criminalize him. Once inside the "justice system," he "consented" to prison exhibition matches that were filmed for others' profit (99-100). Johnson's life story (and much of Young's study) shows that U. S. law is geared toward black confinement, not justice, but Young's wording also contradicts this insight when he identifies Johnson's "stereotypical excesses" to be "gold teeth, white women, lawbreaking, and so on" (103; emphasis added). Still, the chapter's momentum derives from its emphasis on Muhammad Ali's...

Priming Media Stereotypes Reduces Support for Social Welfare Policies: The Mediating Role of Empathy

Two experiments involving White participants tested the influence of media-based priming of Black stereotypes on support for government policy that assisted Black versus White persons-in-need. Experiment 1 showed that priming the "Black criminal" stereotype through exposure to photographs of Blacks looting after Hurricane Katrina reduced policy support for Black evacuees-in-need but did not influence support responses toward White evacuees-in-need. Experiment 2 showed that priming the "promiscuous Black female" stereotype through exposure to sexual rap music reduced policy support for a Black pregnant woman-in-need but did not influence support responses toward a White pregnant woman-in-need. Further tests of mediated moderation demonstrated that in both experiments, the interactive influence of priming Black stereotypes and race of persons-in-need on policy support was mediated by empathic responding.

Support for harmful treatment and reduction of empathy toward blacks: “Remnants” of stereotype activation involving Hurricane Katrina and “Lil’ Kim”

Two experiments involving White participants tested the influence of media-based Black stereotypes on subsequent responses to Black and White persons-in-need. Experiment 1 showed that priming the “Black criminal” stereotype through exposure to photographs of Blacks looting after Hurricane Katrina produced greater application of the criminal stereotype and support for harmful treatment toward Black evacuees-in-need (i.e., police firing gun shots directly over evacuees’ heads) relative to control conditions. Experiment 2 showed that priming the “promiscuous Black female” stereotype through exposure to sexual rap music elicited greater application of the promiscuity stereotype and reduced empathy for a Black pregnant woman-in-need relative to control conditions. The influence of priming Black stereotypes through media exposure on support for harmful treatment and empathic responses was mediated by stereotypical attributions.

(Close) distance makes the heart grow fonder: Improving implicit racial attitudes and interracial interactions through approach behaviors.

In 4 studies, the authors examined the effect of approaching Blacks on implicit racial attitudes and immediacy behaviors. In Studies 1-3, participants were trained to pull a joystick toward themselves or to push it away from themselves when presented with photographs of Blacks, Whites, or Asians before completing an Implicit Association Test to measure racial bias. In Study 4, the effect of this training procedure on nonverbal behavior in an interracial contact situation was investigated. Results from the studies demonstrated that approaching Blacks decreased participants' implicit racial prejudice and increased immediacy when interacting with a Black confederate. The implications of these findings for current theories on approach, avoidance, and intergroup relations are discussed.

Framing News Stories: The Role of Visual Imagery in Priming Racial Stereotypes

Two thematic news reports on the three-strikes law and school vouchers were differentially illustrated with photographs. Online news stories were either illustrated with no images, with 2 photographs of Blacks, with 2 photographs of Whites, or with 2 photographs, 1 of a Black and the other of a White person (mixed condition). In none of the four conditions did the text make any reference to the ethnic/racial identity of the subjects in the photographs juxtaposed with the text. White respondents assessed the extent to which each ethnic/racial group was affected by the social problem or issue discussed in the news stories. Differential pictorial illustration of ethnic groups fostered differentiation association of ethnic groups with the social problem. Implicit racial images of Blacks helped prime racial stereotypes about blacks and led to stronger association of Blacks with social problems addressed in the stories. The concept of implicit visual propositioning is discussed as a discursive form through which racial stereotypes of Blacks are subtly activated and maintained in society.

Reflections in black: a history of black photographers

Reflections in black: a history of black photographers

Reflections in black: a history of black photographers

Reflections in black: a history of black photographers

Reflections in Black: a history of Black photographers, 1840 to the present

Reflections in Black, the first comprehensive history of black photographers, is a groundbreaking pictorial collection of African American life. Featuring the work of undisputed masters such as James VanDerZee, Gordon Parks, and Carrie Mae Weems among dozens of others, this book is a refutation of the gross caricature of black life that many mainstream photographers have manifested by continually emphasizing poverty over family, despair over hope. Nearly 600 images offer rich, moving glimpses of everyday black life, from slavery to the Great Migration to contemporary suburban life, including rare antebellum daguerrotypes, photojournalism of the civil rights era, and multimedia portraits of middle-class families. A work so significant that it has the power to reconfigure our conception of American history itself, Reflections in Black demands to be included in every American family's library as an essential part of our heritage. A Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2000, and a Good Morning, America best gift book of 2000.

Cecil J. Williams, Freedom &amp; Justice: Four Decades of the Civil Rights Struggle as Seen by a Black Photographer of the Deep South. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1995. 256 pp. Cloth, $39.95.

Cecil J. Williams, <i>Freedom &amp; Justice: Four Decades of the Civil Rights Struggle as Seen by a Black Photographer of the Deep South</i>. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1995. 256 pp. Cloth, $39.95.

Freedom &amp; justice: four decades of the Civil Rights struggle as seen by a black photographer of the Deep South

This collection of essays by eight historians -- along with an epilogue by noted scholar Donald G. Mathews -- not only expands historical investigation of race and ethnicity in the South in fresh directions, but also dissects more thoroughly some traditional aspects of the topic. Addressing subjects from the 1830s to the 1990s, all of the essays underscore the constant struggle to define and redefine ethnic boundaries and etiquettes to match changing historical circumstances. Two essays use the history of military activity in the South to offer insights about evolving relationships between whites and Indians. Samuel J. Watson investigates the Seminole War in Florida while Clayton E. Jewett looks at battles between white Texans and Indians during the early period of the Civil War.James Wilson and David McGee contribute to historians' deepening understanding of the redefinition of racial and ethnic relations during Reconstruction. Wilson analyzes the postbellum implications of Louisiana's three-tiered antebellum racial structure, while McGee delves into the differing fortunes of urban and rural blacks in Wake County, North Carolina, following Emancipation.Angela Boswell and Stephen Brown ensure that other ethnic identities in the South are not forgotten. Boswell addresses domestic violence in nineteenth-century Colorado County, Texas, and includes Germans, as well as blacks and other whites, in her pathbreaking study. Brown offers a subtle reinterpretation of the Leo Frank lunching by examining Frank's Jewish identity within the context of southern honor and whiteness.Nancy Lopez and Jeff Roche subject more recent events to close study. Lopez tells the story of the childmurders in Atlanta in the late 1970s and early 1980s and relates them to the racial tensions remaining in the city despite the civil rights movement. Roche presents the equally fascinating story of Asa/Forrest Carter, a white supremacist from Alabama who cunningly adopted an Indian identity as the author of the much-loved autobiographical The Education of Little Tree. These emerging scholars contribute to the study of legal, military, cultural, and women's history, while demonstrating that race and ethnicity are woven deeply into all those aspects of the South's past.