Race as Aesthetics?: Denise Colomb in the Caribbean

This article examines the role of blackness in the work of the French photographer Denise Colomb, who travelled to the Caribbean in 1948 as part of a failed collaboration with Aimé Césaire and Michel Leiris. Her work has been criticized for its aestheticizing treatment of black subjects and its lack of political awareness. I contend that such interpretations naturalize race by treating it as an unproblematic visual fact, and fail to interrogate the historical connections between racialization and the photographic medium. Instead of treating it as a thematic content of the image, this article approaches race as a formal device, a set of visual relationships between surface and depth, as well as exterior and interior, that constitutes skin colour and phenotypical features as sites of subjective legibility. Colomb’s visual strategies, which bring together painterly references and post-war humanist photography, destabilize this racial legibility by opening a gap between colour and identity. The analysis of her work — and of its limits — leads to a reconsideration of the political role of photography and reveals that a closer engagement with the aesthetic dimension of the medium allows for alternative connections between physical difference, subjectivity, and identity.