Photography and the Practices of Critical Black Memory
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4495343 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Leigh Raiford, L Chas Raiford (University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 112-129 |
| Publication date | 2009-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History and Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00522.x |
| OpenAlex | W2025835322 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 26 |
Not too long after photography's grand debut in 1839, physician and inventor Oliver Wendell Holmes described the new technology as a "mirror with a memory." What might this phrase mean for the question of African Americans and their relationship to the vicissitudes of photography and the vagaries of memory in particular? Through readings of works of art and social activism that make use of lynching photographs, this essay considers ways in which photography has functioned as a technology of memory for African Americans, what the essay calls critical black memory, and proffers a mode of historical interpretation that both plays upon and questions photography's documentary capacity.The essay makes two claims specifically. First, the mechanical reproduction of lynching by way of the photograph has been central to the recounting and reconstitution of black political cultures throughout the Jim Crow and post-Civil Rights era. From the usage of lynching photography in pamphlets by early twentieth-century anti-lynching activists, to posters created by mid-century civil rights organizations, to their deployment in contemporary art and popular culture, this archive has been a constitutive element of black visuality more broadly. Second, African American engagements with photography as a "site of memory" suggest a mode of historical interpretation in which African Americans simultaneously critique the "truth-claims" of photography while they mobilize the medium's documentary capacity to intervene in the classification and subjugation of black life
Art · Cultural memory · Interpretation (philosophy) · Photography · Politics · Politics of memory · Sociology · Visual arts · Anthropology · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture
Hyear Come De Parade
Somebody do Something!”
Visualizing Protest
"Dead Citizen" and the Abject Nation
“I feel I am at the stage now of really learning something”
Lessons from photoelicitation
The Marathon Continues
Return
Digital Visual Activism
Space, Place, and Countervisuality in Montgomery
Rupert Gray's Vulnerability … and Ours
Fanon, Foucault, feminisms
Re-covered
Toward an Endarkened Photovoice Methodology
Introduction
Photographs and Film Recordings as Valuable Documents in Sports History Research
Ceylon African Mānja performance
The dying Black body in repeat mode
Capping Power? Clothing and the Female Body in African Methodist Episcopal Mission Photographs
Attempting Escape
Yes. Still. Movement
Uncirculated
Locating Kenya's emergency detention camps
Livestreaming the ‘wretched of the Earth
Eliciting Selves
The Spectacle of Lynching
| Unique citing works | 26 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,63 |
| Citation span | 2010 - 2025 (16) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 21 |