The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization

by David R. Roediger (Primary Contributor), George Yancy (Primary Contributor), Renee Mussai (Primary Contributor)

How contemporary photographers from Hank Willis Thomas to Libita Clayton have subverted the constructions and complicities of whiteness From the advent of early colonial photography in the 19th century to contemporary “white savior” social-media images, photography continues to play an integral role in the maintenance of white sovereignty. As various scholars have shown, the technology of the camera is not innocent, and neither are the images it produces.
The invention and continuation of the “white race” is not just a political, social and legal phenomenon; it is also a complexly visual one. What does whiteness look like, and how might we begin to trace an antiracist history of artistic resistance that works against it? The Image of Whiteness seeks to introduce its reader to some important extracts from the troubling story of whiteness, to describe its falsehoods, its paradoxes and its oppressive nature, and to highlight some of the crucial work photographic artists have done to subvert and critique its image.
The Image of Whiteness includes the work of artists Abdul Abdullah, Agata Madejska, Broomberg & Chanarin, Buck Ellison, John Lucas & Claudia Rankine, David Birkin, Hank Willis Thomas, Kajal Nisha Patel, Michelle Dizon & Viet Le, Nancy Burson, Nate Lewis, Libita Clayton, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Richard Misrach, Sophie Gabrielle, Stacy Kranitz and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa.

200 pages, Paperback

Published July 5, 2022

About the author

David Roediger teaches history and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, with a B.S. in Ed from Northern Illinois University. He completed a doctorate in History at Northwestern in 1979. Roediger has taught labor and Southern history at Northwestern, University of Missouri, University of Minnesota, and University of Illinois. He has also worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. He has written on U.S. movements for a shorter working day, on labor and poetry, on the history of radicalism, and on the racial identities of white workers and of immigrants. The former chair of the editorial committee of the Charles H. Kerr Company, the world's oldest radical publisher, he has been active in the surrealist movement, labor support and anti-racist organizing.

Reviews

[˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚Hatool˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I might write a longer review in the future, but reading the interviews and looking at the photographs in this book have made me feel a certain emotion that I cannot explain and have not ever felt while reading a book. I mean this in the most positive way I can, no matter how morbid that emotion was.