Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography

by Shawn Michelle Smith

In Photographic Returns Shawn Michelle Smith traces how historical moments of racial crisis come to be known photographically and how the past continues to inhabit, punctuate, and transform the present through the photographic medium in contemporary art. Smith engages photographs by Rashid Johnson, Sally Mann, Deborah Luster, Lorna Simpson, Jason Lazarus, Carrie Mae Weems, Taryn Simon, and Dawoud Bey, among others. Each of these artists turns to the past—whether by using nineteenth-century techniques to produce images or by re-creating iconic historic photographs—as a way to use history to negotiate the present and to call attention to the unfinished political project of racial justice in the United States. By interrogating their use of photography to recall, revise, and amplify the relationship between racial politics of the past and present, Smith locates a temporal recursivity that is intrinsic to photography, in which images return to haunt the viewer and prompt reflection on the present and an imagination of a more just future.

Genres: Photography

248 pages, Paperback

Published January 3, 2020

Reviews

[Elise · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this for a class called contemporary issues in photography that surprisingly was one of my favorite classes ive taken. super interesting read that i probably would have never gotten around to if it weren’t for this class, i love it when i actually like school