In her beautiful essay “In Our Time: Photography and Black Life,” feminist critic bell h
In her beautiful essay “In Our Time: Photography and Black Life,” feminist critic bell hooks theorized the role of collecting family photos as a tactic of resistance and world-making in African American communities. “In the world before racial integration, there was a constant struggle on the part of black folks to create a counter-hegemonic world of images that would stand as visual resistance, challenging racist images,” hooks wrote. “All colonized and subjugated people who, by way of resistance, create an oppositional subculture within the framework of domination, recognize that the field of representation (how we see ourselves, how others see us) is a site of ongoing struggle.” I can’t help but think of hooks’ words when I look at the photographs of Deana Lawson, which locate domestic space as the nexus where social, personal, historical, and economic forces intersect and refract. Here we see a devastatingly sweet image of what appears to be a boy and his grandmother—her proud, restrained gaze, his serious comportment belying a tiny glimmer of a smile. The shelves are full of family photos and formal studio portraits. Lawson revels in the dual operation of photography, which at once offers the promise of permanence, memory, and a truth preserved at the same time that it renders the world and the people within it flat, both physically and psychologically. As Sontag, Barthes and others have argued, the paradox of photography lies in its utter contingency on being located within discursive systems in order to create meaning. Lawson’s portrait emanates warmth and intimacy, but in fact tells us nothing about these people beyond what it invites us to project upon them.Deana Lawson, Ring Bearer, 2016 -- source link
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