AKQA Portland
Through commissioning, photo-editing, curating, and even photographic technology itself, photography has underrepresented the Black experience. In the 2022 D&AD Awards, Google’s Real Tone picked up a Black Pencil for the advancements it made in the design of the lens of the Pixel 6 camera and Google Photos, which more accurately represented darker skin tones. But the story of representation of race in photography is much wider than lenses and cameras alone. Professor Mark Sealy’s work is dedicated to exploring it. He is interested in the relationships between photography and social change, identity politics, race, and human rights. He has been director of London-based photographic arts institution Autograph ABP since 1991. And he is also currently a Professor of Photography Rights and Representation at the University of the Arts London – London College of Communication, affiliated with the Photography Archive and Research Centre.
Sealy has produced numerous artist publications, curated exhibitions, and commissioned photographers and filmmakers worldwide. He has written for many international photography publications, including Foam Magazine, Aperture and the Independent Newspaper in London. In addition, he has written numerous essays for academic publications and artist monographs. His recent books, Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time and Photography: Race, Rights and Representation, were published in 2019 & 2022, respectively, by Lawrence and Wishart. His PhD, Durham University England, focused on Photography and Cultural Violence. Here, in order to unpack some of the wider context of race and representation in photography, we present an adapted excerpt from Sealy’s recent book Photography: Race, Rights and Representation.
Photography is omnipresent, sensorial, multidirectional, a layered, fluid, sonic creative process that permeates and resonates across our planet. The radicality of recognising the sensory or disruptive jazz-like experience of photography frees the viewer from the confines of a purely Eurocentric aesthetic desire to contain frame, chart, collect and own all the meanings an image might produce both aesthetically and legally. Instead, working towards a more improvised and receptive way of thinking through photography opens space for sensing, feeling and perceiving the work that a photograph generates across different individual, temporal and cultural experiences. Here repressed knowledge(s) is free and alive, shared and embraced, and nothing is history as everything that has passed is active with us in the present, moulding and reworking our sense of humanity, reminding us of the duty we have to embrace and produce acts of restorative de-colonial care as a core function of our daily life. Otherwise, as Baldwin reminds us, ‘in the end, it is the threat of universal extinction hanging over all the world today that changes, totally and forever, the nature of reality…We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement’, this is the situation we have to address, reverse and undo with urgency until all the ghosts trapped in the violence of history have been seen, recognised and heard.
When repressed knowledge is allowed a voice, expressed, and then embraced, it critically functions to help us understand that nothing in the past is over and that time and history, when considered through photography, can and will be reworked. Photography, in essence, is our judgement, our jury, and we stand on trial before its all-seeing eye, trapped, framed, and caught awaiting times sentence.
“When repressed knowledge is allowed a voice, expressed, and then embraced, it critically functions to help us understand that nothing in the past is over and that time and history, when considered through photography, can and will be reworked”
Photographs remind us that our histories, traumatic or pleasurable memories and events stay deep within the wells of our souls, where they wait for different triggers to release them, enabling what was locked away or looked away from to surface goosebumps like back into our consciousness. Memories (witnessed moments) buried within photographs function as internal notes, some pleasant, many unpleasant whether we are present or not, photographs always echo. Photographs then are hot molecule like agitators at work in the cool dark corners of our minds. When we are caught off guard by the work a photograph does on our interior selves, it can be overwhelming, even if not immediate, because images linger and hang around like thieves in the night. Overexposure to the violence of an image in this regard is not a possibility. It is a northern hemispheric and colonising privilege. Ignoring the violence of an image only makes its capacity to haunt more intense.
Time has shown us that photographs can signpost the escape routes from essentialising Western visual regimes. Different eyes prioritise different points of reference, and in a radical curatorial pluriverse, a photograph’s meanings are encouraged to trans-mutate and shift in time; here, they operate as historical tricksters, awkward floating signifiers that avoid the essentialising gaze.
Photographs, especially those designated as unimportant, get buried under the weight of time and wait for release from the fossil-like chambers and the violent cultural spaces that house them make real what has passed. However, the work photographs do, especially those that knead on colonial meanings and those that churn or disturb our sense of humanity by reminding us of the pains people have endured and gains people have made, assist us in acknowledging that we must hold precious all the worlds’ memories.
“In this type of cultural care work, the many ‘Others’ of the world, especially those subjected to and silenced by myriad forms of Western violence, may be seen and heard in our present and also, if cared for correctly, be allowed to rest, but more importantly, have a voice in times to come.”
The Photographs that I am most intrigued by are the ones that help us understand our dark pasts and aid the conditions where restorative representational acts of care can be felt as well as seen. In this type of cultural care work, the many ‘Others’ of the world, especially those subjected to and silenced by myriad forms of Western violence, may be seen and heard in our present and also, if cared for correctly, be allowed to rest, but more importantly, have a voice in times to come. This curatorial praxis that I would encourage operates as a form of resistance work that, word by word and image by image, aims to dismantle the brutal and universalising modernist mindset. It contributes to and builds on transdisciplinary education and knowledge production needed to heal from the expanse of Western visual regimes.
Photography’s history, especially that which concerns or focuses on the ‘Other’, is full of missing chapters, black chronicles, lost scores, and colonial affairs. Sometimes photographs may simply be at rest, waiting for their moment of articulation to arrive, but they are often trapped between the official histories of photography and time. Once the images and the photographers who made them are allowed into visibility, they eerily call back into existence difficult times that may have been buried or locked out of discourse or abandoned to a space of non-caring. Photographers from different cultural backgrounds have, across the history of the medium, been curatorially absented, dodged and burnt out of photography’s decisive historical moments.
Images age us. They will always do this work. They remind us of who and how we are. They will always remind us of our failings and our losses. They are articulations of joy and pain, culturally and politically. They expose us and excite us and increasingly, we are now answering to them as forms of inward and outward complex, contemplative, confessional carriers of our human nature.
Copyright Mark Sealy/Lawrence Wishart, 2022