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2024, De Gruyter
The representation of black men’s bodies has become a subject of debate in the discourse of American photography in recent decades. This article focuses on a new series of photographs of young black men, titled Men, made by the American photographer Sally Mann between 2006 and 2015, and addresses the question, what sort of intervention do these photographs produce within photography’s critical discourse of black masculinity? Comparing this series to diverse key representations of the black male body in the history of American photography (from the Pictorialist movement to abolitionist imagery), while taking Mann’s oeuvre into account, I argue that these photographs deal with the vulnerability of Black masculinity beyond Southern exceptionalism, or “synecdochic nationalism,” to use Angela Miller’s concept. Rather, they expose vulnerability as a profound contemporary experience (among many), which effect Black men’s lives in the US in both urban and rural centers, North and South. Closely examining the roles and meanings of Mann’s use of the wet collodion technique, I further argue that this series stresses the limitations of photography as a system of representation, exposing it as a fragile, constructed medium, disguised as pure replication of the visual “reality” of difference. By emphasizing the act of photographing—with its histories, codes of representation, and material manufacture—Men questions the assumed naturalness of the social construction of Black masculinity, disclosing it as an unstable relational structure. Finally, using Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of otherness, I propose that the series’ ethical complexity complicates the ethics of representation of Black masculinity in American photography, and reveals vulnerability as a critical category with the potential to posit new political and ethical imaginaries.
This thesis addresses the black male body as a cultural artifact in American visual culture during modernity and contemporaneity and proposes a critical account of the cultural practices that contribute to its formation. The thesis employs a corpus of theoretical literature that explores concepts such as masculinity and social determinism of gender, race and racialization, the role of the body in identity formation and consequences of embodiments on self-perception and representation. Following relevant theoretical voices, I propose a critical framework for analyzing the black male body as it enters a larger imagery featured in visual works of art. My suggestion is that photography represents an ample site of investigation, as it is an endemic creative area in American visual culture. I argue that the driving forces at work in the production of the black male body as a cultural icon are infused with elements of ontological and epistemic violence, manifested as cultural aggression that restricts individual agency, controls cultural projection and representation and influences the process of identity formation. Consequently, I suggest that further studies and investigations in contemporary American culture need to acknowledge and critically address this problematic, as the black male body remains a central figure in cultural production.
2012 •
Glossy men's magazines are frequently vilified for their overt visualising of gender stereotypes. This article tenders that as a niche publication, founded by and targeted at upwardly mobile black men during the early stages of democracy in South Africa, the aspirational photographs of black men in BL!NK magazine are a justified form of visual short-hand. The argument is made here that although the photographic representation of black masculinity is entangled in stereotypes associated with (white) Western, hetero-normative manhood, the images offer just enough differentiation from the norm that they may be deemed seditious within the particular historical context. This article comprises an analysis of the photographs of black men in one sample issue of BL!NK and thereby positions this magazine as an archive of South African identities that both endorsed and challenged staid gender tropes. By naming, analysing and historically situating three specific photographic typologies of black manhood typically found in BL!NK, the author hopes to underscore the importance of such niche publications as points of intersection between global and vernacular culture, and powerful platforms for the visceral trying on of new selves.
Reviews in American History
"Retreat From Racial Essentialism: Reading the Photographer as Text"2019 •
This article, in part, tries to introduce some of the difficulties in writing about the realm of ‘represented’ or ‘representational’ masculinity that I have faced in my own limited research on the representation of men in South African art and media. My encounter of visualised masculinities is briefly sketched in the hope that having this backstory will add depth and texture to my analysis of the ways in which ‘South African masculinity’ might have been communicated to or be ‘read’ by the viewers of the Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography exhibition held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2011. This exhibition is specifically chosen as the subject of this article as an example of the representational construction of South African-ness by South Africans but curated with a predominantly non-South African viewer in mind. A photographic exhibition seems a helpful site to talk about the importance of the representational realm since photography seems intuitively geared towards selecting and amplifying subject matter which, on a collective level, is thought to be curios, worthy of attention or interesting. As a photographic exhibition, Figures & Fictions is also balanced between the genre of ‘documentary’ with all the associations of objectivity, activism and agenda this brings with it and the critique of these connotations typically embedded in postmodern photographic art. Photographic art has been at the forefront of exposing a sort of masculine crisis and for this reason too forms the focal point of this essay. Throughout I return to Susan Sontag’s conception of ‘the interesting’ as tool for unpacking whether the representation of men specifically is interesting and what exactly this might mean.
2016 •
Much has now been written about the divisive nature of the so called porn wars that ripped through the feminist movement in the 1980s and 1990s, What was previously a somewhat agreeable alliance between radical and liberal feminists turned into the full scale battle that continues today, albeit in a somewhat muted form. While there have been some new players added to this debate recently, specifically post-modem feminists, there are still clear divisions between those feminists who argue that pornography is, in its production and consumption, a form of violence against women, and those feminists who see pornography as having subversive and potentially liberatory consequences for women\u27s sexuality. While I set my arguments within a broadly defined radical feminist paradigm, it is my contention that both sides have tended to assume a gender system which is race-neutral, an assumption that cannot be sustained in a country where gender has proven to be a powerful means through which ...
2021 •
Masculinities: Liberation through Photography is the catalogue of the photography exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery (London), conceived and edited by curator and writer Alona Pardo. And yet, this publication is more a thorough handbook than it is a straightforward photographic catalogue. In this outstanding work, Pardo presents her in-depth research on the cultural construction of masculinities and the visual representations of the topic via the media of photography and film from the 1960s to the present day.
Visual Studies
Masculinities Liberation through photography2021 •
Masculinities: Liberation through Photography is the catalogue of the photography exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery (London), conceived and edited by curator and writer Alona Pardo. And yet, this publication is more a thorough handbook than it is a straightforward photographic catalogue. In this outstanding work, Pardo presents her in-depth research on the cultural construction of masculinities and the visual representations of the topic via the media of photography and film from the 1960s to the present day.
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