Rebel Vision
by: Tara Pixley , June 25, 2022
by: Tara Pixley , June 25, 2022
For many Black female and non-binary photographers, photography is our ‘choice of weapons’ (Parks 2010). We wield the camera—this tool of colonial logic, heteronormative power, and racist ingratiation—as an activist intervention into spaces where the White Western Male Gaze continues to dominate practices and traditions in documentary and editorial photography.
As a Black femme queer scholar and practitioner of visual journalism, I focus my lens and scholarship on the liberatory possibilities of BIPOC/QTPOC perspectives behind the documentary camera. In the wake of the most recent crises of white supremacist violence, visualised by photojournalists on the ground of a besieged Capitol Hill, BlPOC visual documentarians offer longstanding critiques embedded in feminist legacies of resistance and refusal to these violent norms. For this special issue on Photography and Resistance, I produced a video essay historicising this moment and charting collective possibilities of resistance in visual praxis through the work of leading Black female and non-binary photographers associated with Authority Collective (AC). AC is an organisation centring the experiences of women and non-binary photographers of colour, charting alternative futures for what photography can look like when whiteness is made answerable for its structural violence.
The photographers featured in this video essay include photojournalist Akili Ramses, who has a 40-year career in the industry and is Executive Director of the National Press Photographers Foundation; non-binary Afro-Caribbean photo-ethnographer Oriana Koren, who documents African foodways and cultural traditions in America; Canon Explorer of Light Lynsey Weatherspoon, whose portraiture celebrates Black histories of the South; and many others. They discuss photography as a tool for the visual embodiment of women of colour feminisms. Together, the experiences of these visual media makers reflect on, contextualise, and historicise Black femme photographic practices as resistance, in a time when their voices must urgently be uplifted.
REFERENCES
Parks, Gordon. (2010 [1966]). A Choice of Weapons. St. Paul, Minnesota: Minnesota Historical Society.
WHO SUPPORTS US
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey