UK Arts Project Claims Photography Used For ‘Power & Subjugation’
People board an underground “Tube” train at Oxford Circus underground station in London. (File)
From long-deceased artists and their iconic much-loved historical fiction works, to language initiatives set up, for example, in Stanford University to ostensibly weed out from the school’s websites and computer code words deemed “racist, violent, and biased,” the so-called ‘cancel culture’ continues to expand its list of targets.“Woke” cancel culture appears to have the visual art of photography in its crosshairs now, accusing it of “racism.”Photography has been used “as a technology of power, control, and subjugation,” the first lecture of a new online course that is part of the Transport for London (TfL) art scheme is to tell its audience.Art on the Underground is a contemporary public art programme that commissions both permanent and temporary artworks for the London Underground. Now, it is also offering a four- week lecture course in January, entitled “Uncommon Observations: Photography, Image-making, and the Black Diaspora.” It is set to probe “the relationship between photography, Blackness, and diaspora from the photograph’s invention in the 19th century to contemporary Black photography and image-making,” states the project website.Curated by Black Blossoms School of Art & Culture, the course is to be taught by academic Nydia A. Swaby, a black feminist historian and ethnographer. The course overview says:“Rooted in colonial notions of Blackness as otherness, photography – as a tool of surveillance and documentation – has influenced cultural meanings of Blackness, historically to the present day. In response, Black artists have used the camera to the unsettle photography’s colonial legacies and to create their own conceptions of Blackness, diasporic identity, and culture.”© Photo : TwitterScreenshot of Twitter account of the Black Blossoms School of Art & Culture.
Screenshot of Twitter account of the Black Blossoms School of Art & Culture.Swaby will “consider how colonial documentation of the Black experience in Africa and the diaspora was framed through a white gaze, informed by white supremacy, anti-blackness, and structural racism.” Another upcoming lecture will focus on the “social and political significance of Black portraiture as a practice of refusal, that is, resisting the gaze by taking control of how one is captured.”The Black Blossoms group earlier stated that it was seeking to “expand critical and diverse thought that will decolonise and disrupt euro-centric art and creative education.”
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