"I think she's frozen"

"in the eyes of every editor in the world I was my ethnicity"

"any journalist could go to Pakistan and claim they had breakfast with terrorists and no one would question their claims"

"it wasn't that I was doing something radical; it was that nobody was doing anything"

"I was just the guy who decided to write about it"

"It was always a Maasai Moran in the background of those photo stories, never a Maasai woman."

(lightly paraphrased)

I so appreciate @Sugarintheplum pointing out that even those colonial images meant something when we saw them as international students

ambivalence is a useful word

"Africans whose features are lost in some kind of tropical fauna"

"I have no ideas why the bananas come"

"Nobody walks around hiding behind banana fronds"

"he invited me on instagram"

"It's not just Africa that's stereotyped—it's everywhere [he travels]"

"I realized how much this art photography permits people to participate in reproducing colonial tropes under the guise of artistic freedom"

paraphrased

I appreciate how @Sugarintheplum is pointing out the structures behind art photography

not simply the images taken and who takes them, but who judges competitions, provides resources, supports residencies

Candice Jansen asks what it means to collect—to archive—images of violence, taking South Africa as the archive.

Also, predatory archival practices. (Want to learn more about this.)

Predatory archival practices: for instance, taking images from archives, doctoring them in whatever way, and presenting them as original art.

Question of who owns images.

"ongoing tension between heritage and memory"—Candice Jansen

"the only benefit seemed to be for the people taking the pictures"—Benjamin Chesterton

thinking about the relation between image and story, and what story can do to think toward and around the image

(a paraphrase)

"my parents decided I was a demon child"

(how interesting)

this is interesting, tho, right?

because it means story can precede and accompany image in a way that storying the image might not be able to undo

(we are bios and mythos, as SW writes)

so that the question of storying an image is also about engaging the stories that precede and accompany the image

N asking Sarah Sentilles about the slippery work of images and especially the risk of visibility:

for some, visibility bestows value, privilege, rank

for some, visibility intensifies vulnerability to harm

(paraphrase)

(which is why I'm very ambivalent about visibility as a political strategy, especially if nothing else accompanies it)

how white supremacy weaponizes hypervisibility: whose harmed bodies are seen and circulated and what this seeing does to intensify vulnerability

Yet

sousveillance, yes? (h/t Simone Browne)

(which has been something that unsettled me about some works on colonial visuality: the idea that such images harmed those imaged, and the reluctance to think of how those imaged might have thought about those images

but this is a tangent, maybe)

An important question: what happens when the archive is "cleaned up"? When the violence is hidden away?

(this story is horrifying

a photographer asked a grieving mother if he could dig up her dead child and photograph the child

and did

the obscenity of it all
the obscenity)

Asim Rafiqui discussing photojournalism's interest in generating and sustaining hierarchical difference.

How photojournalism can reproduce colonial tropes.

Now @Sugarintheplum asking about institutional and pedagogical strategies to address the harm of unhumaning photojournalism.

"I'm not saying a white man cannot take an ethical photograph"

Talking about the cost of speaking out: loss of opportunities. Loss of invitations. Uninvitations if you are critical.

"revealing the original erasure"

thinking with Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum

I appreciate how @Sugarintheplum is generating an ongoing bibliography of artists and thinkers:

Saidiya Hartman
Tina Campt
Christina Sharpe
Zoé Samudzi
Sarah Sentilles
Fred Wilson
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Eric Gyamfi

Other books/thinkers mentioned

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies

Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography

Neelika SHOUTS OUT BLOGS!

Edward Said, Orientalism

TWITTER AS A CLASSROOM

Let me also shout out Malek Alloula's The Colonial Harem, which is a stunning book

(though some have had issues with it)

And Candice Jensen mentions Kimberley Juanita Brown, provides link

What. Is. That. Image.

Wow!
Wow!
Wow!

My brain has melted.

"images of violence can have commercial lives"

I am honestly so—what's the word?—about that duvet cover and iPhone cover

I don't know how to think it
I don't
I don't
I don't