'Whiteness cannot be identified, fixed and embodied definitively by photography.'
The Image of Whiteness: a conversation from the archives with writer Daniel C. Blight.
Today, I am sharing an extract of my archived conversation with Daniel C Blight, editor of The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization who argues that the invention and continuance of the ‘white race’ is not just a political, social, and legal phenomenon – it is also visual. Our conversation aired in March 2020.
Blight is a writer, poet, artist and teacher based in London and author of the forthcoming Photography’s White Racial Frame (Bloomsbury Philosophy).
From the advent of early colonial photography in the 19th century to the contemporary white savior images that we see on social media, photography continues to play an integral role in the maintenance of white sovereignty. The technology of the camera is not innocent and nor are the images that it produces. The Image of Whiteness seeks to introduce its readers to some important extracts from the troubling story of whiteness, to describe its falsehoods, its paradoxes, and its oppressive nature, and to highlight some of the crucial work photographic artists have done to subvert and critique its image. I hope that you enjoy this extract from our conversation.
Daniel
In very simple terms it is a photo book, essentially. It brings together the work of 18 photographic artists from various places around the world, largely in what we might call the West, so America, Britain, Australia, some other European countries. And the idea with the book is to extend what one might call critical whiteness studies, which is a kind of academic discipline that critically engages whiteness to extend this into the history of photography. That's the kind of general idea. Now, obviously it's very difficult to do that in a single book. So the book has a focus, which is to demonstrate how contemporary photographic art in various guises, as I described in the intro essay, can work sort of metaphorically to visualise whiteness. And then there's an introductory essay, as I said, that kind of underpins the images and explains, I hope in quite accessible terms, what whiteness is and what it does socially, politically, and of course, visually.
Lou
There are always going to be detractors of the work, I just wondered how much consideration you put into that, in terms of you know, you have to protect yourself and your life.
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