Durham E-Theses Decolonizing the Camera: Photography in Racial Time SEALY, MARK,ANTHONY How to cite: SEALY, MARK,ANTHONY (2016) Decolonizing the Camera: Photography in Racial Time , Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/11794/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk Thesis Title: Decolonizing the Camera: Photography in Racial Time Acknowledgements Page (1) Abstract Page (2) Introduction Pages (3) – (16) Chapter 1: The Congo Atrocities, A Lecture To Accompany a Series of 60 Photographic Slides for the Optical Lantern. By W.R. (Revised by Mr E.D. Morel and Rev. J.H. Harris.) Price 6d. Pages (17) - (60) Chapter 2: Race Denial and Imaging Atrocity Pages (61) - (97) Chapter 3: Violence of the Image Pages (98) - (143) Chapter 4: Decolonial Frames Pages (144) - (164) Chapter 5: Wayne Miller – ‘Black Metropolis’ Pages (165) - (186) Chapter 6: Rights and Recognition Pages (187) - (217) Photographic Archives Consulted Page (218) Bibliography Pages (219) - (236) Photographs Caption Sheet PowerPoint Presentation Mark Sealy Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time By Mark Sealy Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD School of Modern Languages and Cultures Durham University 2015 ii Table of Contents. Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time Acknowledgements Page (1) Abstract Page (2) Introduction Pages (3) – (16) Chapter 1: The Congo Atrocities, A Lecture To Accompany a Series of 60 Photographic Slides for the Optical Lantern. By W.R. (Revised by Mr E.D. Morel and Rev. J.H. Harris.) Price 6d. Pages (17) - (60) Chapter 2: Race Denial and Imaging Atrocity Pages (61) - (97) Chapter 3: Violence of the Image Pages (98) - (143) Chapter 4: Decolonial Frames Pages (144) - (164) Chapter 5: Wayne Miller – ‘Black Metropolis’ Pages (165) - (186) Chapter 6: Rights and Recognition Pages (187) - (217) Photographic Archives Consulted Page (218) Bibliography Pages (219) - (236) Photographs Caption Sheet PowerPoint Presentation “The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author's prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged.” Mark Sealy iii Acknowledgements I would like thank the following organisations and individuals for their generosity and support throughout the journey of this doctoral study thesis, without which this would not have been possible. Arts & Humanities Research Council for awarding grant funding to support the research and study. My supervisors at Durham University in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures Professor Jonathan Long, to whom I would like to express my deepest gratitude for his patience, intellectual generosity and insightful calm and structural thinking during the research and writing of this thesis. Thank You. Also Professor Andrea Noble for her initial guidance, planning and support and Professor Ed Welch for encouraging me to enter this programme of study at Durham University. I would also like to thank Ms Lucia Luck Secretary in the School of Modern Languages for being incredibly helpful at all times. My Family The thesis would not have been possible without the support of my family. Thank You to Shona Illingworth, my wife for her encouragement, patience and endurance. Thank You to my children Alina and Antony (Sonny) Sealy. 1 Abstract for Thesis Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time By Mark Sealy 2015 This thesis argues that photography is tainted with ingrained racist ideologies that have been present since its earliest inception in 1839. It considers the act of photographing the Other as a site of Western violence, myth, fantasy and disavowal. It examines archival images through the prism of race, representation and human rights with the aim of extracting new meanings that bring the Other into focus. This is done by reading the images both against the politics of the time in which they were made and as contemporary objects at work in the political and cultural present. The thesis makes the case that photography is burdened with ideological fault-lines concerning race and rights. The fault-lines have been forged by cultural and colonial violence resulting in Western scopic regimes that have dominated and fixed the Other within an inescapable set of Western epistemologies that have been used to serve and enhance imperial perspectives on race. I argue that these perspectives are still active within the Western mindset manifest as benign acts of photographic empathy that work to ultimately bolster Western hegemonies and economies. This thesis is based on 25 years of experience as a researcher and curator of international photography exhibitions, direct research into archives in different continental settings, the presentation of papers in a variety of national and international contexts, and interviews with photographers, curators and academics. My hypothesis is that the history of photography can only be complete if the voice of the subaltern is made critically present within it, so allowing us to engage with important political racial memory work that can help us re-read the past and reconfigure different meanings concerning history, race, rights and human recognition in the present. I argue that photography requires decolonising work to be carried out on its history. I propose that if we do not recognise the historical and political conjunctures of racial politics at work within photography and the effects on those that have been culturally erased, made invisible or less than human by such images, then we remain hemmed within established orthodoxies of colonial thought concerning the racialised body, the subaltern and the politics of human recognition. 2 Introduction This thesis examines how Western photographic practice has been used as a tool for creating Eurocentric, violent, visual regimes. It explores issues of race and cultural erasure within photographic history through the direct analysis of photographic works. This analysis is done through lines of enquiry that are informed by two underlying questions. Firstly, has photography been a liberating device, or an oppressive weapon that holds the viewer/producer and citizen/subject in a violent system of continual exposure? And secondly, what epistemic value has photography brought to our understanding of difference? This thesis considers whether photographic works concerning visualisations of the ‘Other’ can produce different or new meanings when they are read critically through the prism of colonialism, its inherent forms of human negation, its temporalities and its violence. This is done with the aim of locating and reading the photographs discussed here within the ideologies of colonial time, space and place. Decolonising the camera in this context is an invitation for an analysis of photography to be made within and against the political and violent reality of Western imperialism. The central concept of decolonising the camera functions as a critical dialogue with colonial and imperial photographic histories, and the social and visual spaces they occupy. Through the photographs discussed, I argue that it is within these types of racialised photographic spaces that we can analyse the variant levels of violence done in photography concerning the making of the Other and from that perspective consider how these forms of violence worked in the service of Western colonial and imperial powers. ‘Colonialism has been a dispossession of space, a deprivation of identity’ (Barlet 2000, p.39), and it created a system of image production that maintained and disseminated its dehumanising ideologies. At the centre of this thesis lies the proposition that it is only in recognising photography as an active agent of Western colonising authority at work on the body of the Other, both in the past and in the present, that we can begin to fully recognise the complexities and political impact of photographs in visualisations of racialised subjects. Throughout this thesis I suggest that a photograph of a racialised subject must be both located and then de-located from the racial and political time of its making and not solely articulated by its descriptive (journalistic) or aesthetic (art) concerns. I maintain that it is only within the 3 political and cultural location of a photograph that we can discover the coloniality at work within it and that it is only then, through this understanding, that a process of enquiry can begin into the nature of its colonial cultural coding. A key function of decolonising the camera is to not allow photography’s colonial past and its cultural legacies in the present to lie unchallenged and un-agitated, or to be simply left as an unquestioned chapter within the history of the medium. Decolonising the photographic image is an act of unburdening it from the assumed, normative,