The photographic arts Book

A nuanced, theoretical take on the "color line." Smith makes a compelling, and convincing, argument for centering the visual negotiations, racializations, and representations at play when it comes to creating whiteness, strengthening white supremacy, and constructing Black identities. Smith makes a case for the importance of visual culture to "New Negro" identity and political articulations.

While Smith's argument is certainly helpful to me in adding a stronger theoretical basis to my work, Smith's analysis could've done more to interrogate gender, patriarchy, and Black womanhood. The restrictions imposed on Black women's sexuality through these early days of "racial uplift" politics are clear, but, how did Black women circumvent these norms? How can we methodologically analyze these photographs by looking more intentionally for "resistance"? I can't say that Smith didn't do this -- she actually did throughout--but, I just wanted more. Her strongest analyses tend to come through only in relation to colorism and biracial identities.

I also found myself wondering about the audience. In some ways, Smith does a really good job of showing the fragility and vulnerability of whiteness as inextricable from violence against Black bodies. At the same time, she shows that the anti-racist work of Black photographs was really about representation, self-presentation, and the display of middle-class status, especially through property. While I see this as a key point to consider within the context of the time, I'm left wondering about Black non-elite representations in Black intellectual culture. I can also see how this might've been beyond the scope of the project, but, what does it mean when Blackness becomes signified only through elite class status? What are the consequences of privileging, well, Black privilege?

Lastly, I always crave a larger diasporic context. How did Black intellectuals from the Caribbean and Latin America use photographs to resist white supremacy? What are the continuities and ruptures in the articulations and constructions of whiteness across the Americas?