In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Retreat from Racial Essentialism: Reading the Photographer as Text
  • Kate Sampsell-Willmann (bio)
Erina Duganne. The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography. Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2010. 236 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 (paper).
Elizabeth Abel. Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 391 pp. Illustrations, notes, select bibliography, and index. $27.95 (paper).
Leonard Freed. Black in White America. Los Angeles: J. P. Getty Museum, 2010 (in facsimile; essay first pub. 1968). 208 pages. Illustrations. $29.95 (paper).

A wave of photographic scholarship is emerging that refocuses the analytic gaze on the author of the image: the photographer. Not quite a synthesis of former humanistic approaches and ahistorical post-structuralism, this recent scholarship has returned to the source, at heart treating the photographer’s intentions as an additional text. Interestingly, three recent books (two new and one facsimile) engage a particularly sensitive question of individual intellectual perspective: visualizing African Americans, especially along the Jim Crow line. Since the concept “race” acquires its only meaning through subjectivity—it is historically and culturally constructed, specific to time and place—race and racial politics become useful vehicles to examine, carefully, how the photographer communicates intersubjectively while at the same time making an image to express lived experience.

Erina Duganne’s The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography presents a genuinely new idea and points in innovative analytical directions in a well-argued, watertight end-run around post-structuralism. Although Duganne does make ample room for subjective, culturally informed reading of images, in every instance she includes the photographer as the a priori subjective producer of images to be read. Tidy, balanced, and very, very good, The Self in Black and White simultaneously rejects essentialism and limits the impact of theory-driven reading of images while revealing [End Page 325] its author to be fearless when approaching the subject of race (or rather skin color) and photography.

From the first, in chapter one, “Beyond the ‘Negro Point of View’: The Kamoinge Workshop’s ‘Harlem’ Portfolio,’” she thoroughly demolishes a politically explosive topic, that there can be a “Negro” (or Caucasian) “Point of View” at all, while maintaining respect for important representational concerns, both historical and philosophical, that underlay such an assertion. To limit visual understanding of an ethnic group to those who share the same line of difference is to create a photographic caste: if only African Americans can portray “black” culture accurately, it follows that only European Americans can portray “white” culture accurately. Duganne sets the stage for her integrationist approach by declaring boldly that the opposite of essentialism is unabashed subjectivity—the first person. Photographs belong to the photographer who makes them, and the creator’s honesty and sincerity are far more important attributes in making and reading them than spurious objectivity.

Duganne examines intersubjective relationships—photographer/subject, photograph/viewer, photographer/society, and ultimately photographer/self—avoiding altogether the binary most fraught with difficulty, the straw man of photographic criticism: subject to viewer. Within this expandable schema, Duganne examines individual motives behind personal pictures of broad-based revolutionary movements, evaluating, in the latter three chapters, the visual impact of two separate photographic philosophies of documentary: W. Eugene Smith’s and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s schools of image-making intentionality. Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” she writes:

renders photography, in contrast to the previsualization demanded by Smith, into an instinctual act in which the eye, body, and mind of a photographer come together to intuitively recognize moments of formal and psychological consequence. Besides a subject revealing its essence to a photographer [as it did in Smith’s exhaustive research], for Cartier-Bresson the “decisive moment” also signified the moment when a photographer discovers herself or himself in a picture.

[pp. 102–3]

Thus, the photograph is as much (if not more) about the image-maker as it is about the tableau. Imagine the revolution in photo-scholarship if, to a one, historians of photography return to the source of images—the photographer—and begin their analyses there, reveling in—rather then rejecting—what motivates...

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