Different Book

"This book represents a sample of the striking photographic images produced, in an explosion of creative work since the mid-1980s, by artists culturally or geographically marginalized from the centres of power and authority. Following an introduction which sets the work in a historical context, the book's main focus is the work of a selection of contemporary photographers who have used the image to explore and subvert the idea of 'black identity'. It charts their struggles to make the invisible visible, to open a 'third space' in cultural representation, and to 'write' their experiences, their bodies and their subjectivities back into the frame from which they were excluded - a new kind of photographic ' writing-of-the-self' or auto-graphy." The book includes the work of African, African American, Black British, British Asian, Afro-Vietnamese, Aboriginal and other diaspora artists. The term 'black photography' is used in its broadest, most inclusive sense. Black is considered to be a political and cultural, not a genetic or biological, category. It is a contested idea, whose ultimate destination remains unsettled. And 'identity' is understood as always, in part, an invention; about 'becoming' as well as 'being'; and subject to the continuous play of history, culture and power. What makes it possible to compare the work of these photographers across their significant differences is their common historical experience of living in a racialized world. The many ways in which this fact inflects their practice is the 'difference' which generates the title: Different.