Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography

Description

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. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Photographic Returns 1 Looking Forward and Looking Back: Rashid Johnson and Frederick Douglasson Photography 2 Photographic Remains: Sally Mann at Antietam 3 The Scene of the Crime: Deborah Luster 4 Photographic Referrals: Lorna Simpson’s 9 Props 5 Afterimages: Jason Lazarus 6 Photographic Reenactments: Carrie Mae Weems’s Constructing History 7 False Returns: Taryn Simon’s The Innocents Coda: A Glimpse Forward: Dawoud Bey’s The Birmingham Project Notes Bibliography Index Plates