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  • The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography
  • Melissa Rachleff
The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography. By Erina Duganne. Lebanon, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press and University Press of New England. 2010.

Interest in socially concerned photography has never waned despite doubts expressed about its efficacy in the 1980s by critics Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and others. New scholarship is more generous and has opened up the discussion about photography's non-neutrality, resituating the medium in a cultural position that informs racial identities, including concepts of "whiteness." Art historian Erina Duganne's The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography is an important contribution to this revisionist discussion. Duganne is primarily interested in photographs where African Americans are the subjects, including news photography and artistic projects. Duganne argues that beyond expressing social concern, the photographs were part of a self-making process in which they operated as an exchange among photographer, subject, and viewer.

The book's title suggests a broad overview, but in fact Duganne only discusses photographers who resided in New York City. This means the photographs discussed are either New York City street scenes or follow the burgeoning of the Civil Rights Movement, mainly in the South. Further, Duganne reveals how poverty and African American representation became intertwined during the Johnson era. Of her five loosely chronological chapters, three feature Bruce Davidson; thus her analysis of his work is the most sustained discussion in the text. Duganne begins with Davidson's 1961-1965 series published under the title "The Negro American" in 1966, and ends the book by examining his portrait series taken in Spanish Harlem, "East 100th Street" (1966-1970). Using these two series as prime examples of photography's shifting meanings, Duganne considers the very different contexts in which Davidson's work appeared—news or fine art photography. Her analysis reveals how Davidson's practice is simultaneously socially engaged and part of the modernist canon, whereas critics have granted less flexibility to African American photographers.

A significant historical contribution of Duganne's study is in her second chapter, "Bruce Davidson's 'American Negro' Photographs in Context," where she resurrects the 1965 Smithsonian Institution exhibition project "Profile of Poverty," produced by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), in which a number of Davidson's photographs were included. Duganne uncovers how important photography was to the antipoverty programs of the 1960s (President Johnson even assembled a panel of advisors as the "White House Photography Program," headed by MoMA's John Szarkowski, a subject deserving further study). Duganne's point is how Davidson's [End Page 174] "The Negro American" project was used to illustrate the exhibit's goal—to humanize the poor and demonstrate the urgency of government action—supplemented by didactic labels that furthered the exhibit's thesis (and omitted photographer statements).

Davidson's project is examined again in Duganne's third chapter, "Getting Down to the Feeling: Bruce Davidson, Roy DeCarava, and the Civil Rights Movement." This time the point of Davidson's work was not to humanize or even consider conditions of poverty. Rather, as part of a news story, his photographs served to mitigate the radicalism of the civil rights movement in the New York Times' coverage of the Freedom Rides. Duganne discusses (but does not show) how Davidson's "Negro American" project became something else in yet a third context: an exemplar of personal photography, underscoring the principles of photographic modernism, in his 1963 one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

In her most insightful chapter, "Beyond the 'Negro Point of View': The Kamoinge Workshop's 'Harlem Portfolio,'" Duganne revisits unproblematized claims of "authenticity" African American photographers' work was accorded. By assuming a privileged view based upon race, most criticism crowds out other readings (even when the subject of the image is not African American). Moreover, Duganne shows how the literature has continually rendered African American photographers as outside postwar photographic discourse; their work is seen as influenced by, rather than a part, extension, or critique of (white) modernism.

Some readers might find the structure of Duganne...

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