Black Visualities

In 1861 Frederick Douglass, a black American, wrote an essay entitled Images and Progress. Born enslaved but having managed to escape, he became a voice – in texts and conferences – in favour of the abolition and of the humanization of the millions of African Americans who, in the mid-19^th century, lived between oppression and achievement of citizenship status. Douglass wrote about the transformative potential of photography to produce social and political change in the new nation that emerged after the civil war. He lived, according to him, in a century in which images had become more important than words and he had himself photographed in studio portraits that contrasted with the many photographs of enslaved or colonised peoples taken in the same period in various parts of the world.

In the same period, also in the US, Sojourner Truth, a woman born enslaved, used photographic self-representation to promote the dignity of black American women and men. Under her portrait, which she sold to support the abolitionist cause and gender equality, she added an iconic phrase: «I sell the shadow to promote the substance». The «shadow» of photography at the service of «substance» – a more humane and egalitarian future where racial discrimination was something from the past. This future proved to be a “constant struggle”, as Angela Davies wrote more than a hundred years later, but the potential of images as empowerment and not just as dehumanization was already enunciated.

These two cases serve as counter-narratives to a dominant visual culture in which images of black people emerged in situations of slavery or colonialism or, yesterday as today, as victims of racism and violence or, in the case of women’s bodies, also sexual violence. Racial and gender discrimination legitimized by genealogies of powers in which some bodies were/are worth more than others.

Each national context has its historical specificity. If the US visual historical archives are inseparable from 19^th century slavery or 1950s segregation, the images of black people in the Portuguese archives, as in the French, British or Germans ones, are inseparable from a recent history in which the chronology of colonialism coincided with that of photography in its multiple forms of reproduction – postcards, books, newspapers and leaflets.

In recent years there have been many academics, artists, curators and collectors – many of them black, African or from the vast African diaspora – critically addressing the relationship between visuality and blackness, between images and racism, between the many ethical implications in dealing, today, with violent visual legacies of the past and the right to representation in the public sphere as a mode of racial and social justice. In this cycle we will be listening to some of these voices. – Filipa Lowndes Vicente

This conference series has the support of the Luso-American Development Foundation.