I wish I had a chance to respond to this when it was first posted, but work just keeps getting in the way. But I do frequent your blog and I love your work! I was born and raised in San Francisco, moved to Los Angeles for graduate school, and am currently a resident in Arlington, VA. Your photos of “The City,” your analysis and commentary, and work keeps me in touch with my home and roots. I am a graduate student with hopes of being a professor, but I am also a photographer — not a pro, but a longtime enthusiast of the medium and what it can do. My primary work and research is on questions of law and culture, but I also have secondary interests in representation, visual culture, and race, be it in film, art, or … photography! So you can imagine at my surprise when the intersection of all these interests became evident in your post about race and photography. Anyways I thought I’d share a few comments and contextualize the your topic in a different way so here it is … better late than never.

1) You’re not a racist. I don’t think you don’t need me to tell you that, but whenever subjects regarding race, it inevitably comes up. The term has very specific definitions both legally and politically and it centers around intent. Simply put, if you’re motivated to act on the basis of a bias, real or perceived, then it’s racism. It’s “subconscious racism” that generates a lot of problems that many of the posters are referring to. I never liked psychoanalysis in graduate school, and I still find “subconscious racism” problematic. Anyways …

2) It’s not about you per se, but the camera and the medium itself. Your experience with photographing in a black neighborhood is revealing on this point. One way to think about that moment is that the camera is not simply an artistic tool, but it can be a form of surveillance, not unlike videos, phone cameras, etc. It’s not about what you are taking with your camera, but what is revealed about them to others with your camera. In the context of, for example, an impoverished, minority neighborhood, the camera is one of many forms of surveillance that often is intimately linked with the police. This leads to my last point …

3) Photography is a politically powerful medium. It’s not solely about the art, but it’s inherent. I remember reading your posts regarding “public spaces” and private security in which you were harassed and chased out. Like your experience in the black neighborhood, it’s not you, but what is revealed about them through your photographs. For a public space, like a Muni bus station in downtown SF for instance, it could reveal a liability in public services, unaddressed safety hazards, etc. — something that people in charge don’t want to admit but can be powerfully revealed in your photographs. Photographs work like evidence. However, unlike a public space, the camera in a, for example, a poor black neighborhood, is different because it is so often linked with forms of policing. In this sense, and here is the awful irony that is revealed in your work … what is regarded as “public” is increasingly “privatized,” and what ought to be private (like a home and neighborhood), is increasingly “public” and open to scrutiny. This is the “flip-side” of your work on the the politics of photographing “public spaces,” but I hope you can understand that when race is involved, the medium of photography, the space itself, and the politics change as a result.

I do apologize for the lengthy post and its tardiness, but I hope this adds a different light to your work and to the discussion on the post. I also would love permission to use your thread and the subsequent discussion as research materials in the future. It’s a great post and something that is often not acknowledged enough or with the care and thoughtfulness that you wrote. Thanks!

Max

http://www.martaphoto.com

The very fact that you’re openly talking about this says that you’re not a racist. If we’re to heal our society from its terrible history, these kinds of discussions and questions must be brought to the forefront. I have no problem discussing race with my white friends–most of them are genuine, like you, and honest. It’s great–although many in the black community still see this as “fraternizing with the enemy.”

I agree with your idea of the subconscious–not a subconscious racism, but maybe a desire to photograph things/people that move you, and naturally those would be things/people that seem or remind you of yourself. Throw in societal biases and you have a pretty good recipe there. Or maybe it’s just, as the other poster said, lack of opportunity.

I noticed that your experience of blacks is based on some limited examples (ie., camera theft). Any type of crime is traumatic, but if you’d been mugged by a white guy you probably wouldn’t be judging white people by that incident. It would just be one messed-up guy that stole your camera. Why? Because your experiences with whites aren’t that limited. So if you expand your experience, you’ll have more background and more positive feelings about the “other.” Both whites AND blacks have to work on this one.

You don’t have to limit your photography of blacks to “black” areas–only some of us live there anyway. The rest of us are in the suburbs or other urban areas, and not segregated. The thing that struck me about your photos was that they are beautiful, and that the blacks in them were depicted as “people,” not, “This is a black guy I met…” or whatever. Continue doing that, because yes we’re black but more importantly, we are people and we are everywhere–eating, shopping, living… just like anyone.