Images of whiteness: can we imagine a world without white eyes?

White people are blind to the dominance of white visuality, and we can understand this most clearly with the invention and popularization of photography – a visual world white people created in our own image. What if the canonical history of photography is best understood not as an objective “history of pictures”, but as a history of white visuality, even white visual racism? What if the camera is the extension of the white eye?

In order to untie ourselves from whiteness, and from white dominant photographic practices, we need to subvert what I call “the image of whiteness”. Images are, after all, forms of imagination – so why can’t we imagine a world without whiteness, without white eyes?

In the hope that we might get there someday, let’s consider how contemporary photographic art on the subject of whiteness, in its varying subtleties and guises, can be put to use as a form of subversion, or disruption – a rebuttal to white visual culture. How might photography be reclaimed from its own history, in order to help even white people see anew?

The Image of Whiteness introduces readers to extracts from the troubling story of whiteness, describing its falsehoods, its paradoxes and its oppressive nature, and highlights some of the work contemporary photographic artists are doing to subvert and critique its image and its continuing power. Below is a selection of some passages from the book.

Michelle Dizon and Việt Lê

Michelle Dizon & Việt Lê, White Gaze (book spread), 2018. Courtesy the artists and Sming Sming Books.

In White Gaze, Michelle Dizon and Việt Lê appropriate photographs from the National Geographic archive and put them to anti-racist use. The American magazine has a long history of racist visual overtones that place people of colour in a subjugated relationship to the imperial gaze of white western photographers. The artists juxtapose images with concrete poetry to create image-text intersections that reveal privileged looking. Dizon writes: “There are certainly a lot of images where the camera is present, or where a white photographer took a picture within a specific context. Where there is looking, it’s usually a very gendered looking, and those forms of gendered violence across the bodies of both colonized women and men run throughout these images.”

Ken Gonzales-Day

Gonzales-Day, East First Street (St James Park) from the series Erased Lynchings, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

Ken Gonzalez-Day’s images from the series Erased Lynchings sees the artist digitally remove the dead hanging body of a nameless murdered person of colour, in order to avoid re-victimising the individual. This places our attention on the real guilty subjects, those white people who take it upon themselves extrajudicially to police black and brown bodies. The black body is here removed from the gaze of white eyes, a form of sight which undergirds the social dominance of whiteness. Gonzales-Day writes: “The work asks viewers to consider the crowd, the spectacle, the role of the photographer, and even the impact of flash photography, and their various contributions to our understanding of racialized violence in this nation.”

Hank Willis Thomas

Hank Willis Thomas, Wipe Away the Years 1932/2015, from the series Unbranded: A Century of White Women, 1915-2015. Courtesy the artists and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Hank Willis Thomas’s works Unbranded: A Century of White Women, 1915-2015, are made by appropriating old advertisements and removing logos and text. What remains are images that function both as a reflection of the way women are expected to perform as both gendered objects of beauty available to the patriarchal gaze of men, and as complicit possessors of whiteness. In one image, a white woman gazes tearfully into a mirror, perhaps in crisis about her own subjectivity. Of this image, philosopher George Yancy writes that white people should go home this evening and “take a long look in the mirror and pose this question: what in the hell makes whiteness, my whiteness, so special? By posing the question, they will begin to glimpse the insidious norm that is operating, perhaps they will see the lie that has functioned as the ‘truth’ for so long, the lie that returns them to themselves as ‘innocent’ and as disconnected from white supremacy.”

Buck Ellison

Buck Ellison, The Prince Children, Holland, Michigan, 2019. Courtesy the artist and the Sunday Painter, London.

The subjects portrayed in Buck Ellison’s part-documentary, part-staged photographs could be any number of wealthy Americans who form an elite class of expensively educated individuals, proud of their success and the history of the US. Is this a “perfect white family”, or is it a picture that contains and reports a number of questionable and humorous white appearances? In the form of a semi-formal group portrait, the photograph captures a number of posh signifiers: flowery upholstered furniture; a large, welcoming fireplace fronted by a traditional rug; plenty of pictures and books (knowledge is power); the boy wearing his polo-neck tucked in and the girls in plaid skirts and knee-high hosiery. (European cultural heritage: check).

John Lucas and Claudia Rankine

John Lucas & Claudia Rankine, Stamped, 2018. Courtesy the artists.

Stamped studies the complexities of blond privilege in relationship to whiteness. The artists approached blond strangers on the street, then photographed their hair. The images were closely cropped and presented on postage stamps that frame blondness in terms of social value. The work asks, why, despite only 2% of the American population being naturally blond, do so many people choose to dye their hair a color that reflects whiteness, beauty and desirability? Of the images, Rankine writes: “Can you separate the history of blondness in Europe from America? I don’t really think so. I think that it’s one story. And the most flagrant white supremacists in the United States are often referring back to European history in which these values were first institutionalized and used to justify genocide.”

Nancy Burson

Nancy Burson’s digitally constructed portraits of Donald Trump portray the US president as various “races”. The images were originally commissioned by a high-profile magazine, which eventually decided not to publish them. Burson has been collaborating on the development of digital morphing technologies since the mid-1970s, and these new works see the artist hoping to understand what sort of empathy Trump might possess for people of coloor should he see these images of “himself” presented in various states of fictionalized biological difference.

The Image of Whiteness is published by SPBH Editions/Art on the Underground and can be purchased here