For this meeting, on June 2, 2020, we picked up with Cole's narrative on race and blackness in photography by reading Lorna Roth's essay from 2009 called Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm. Roth is a communications professor at Concordia University in Montreal who has for three decades written about indigeneity and race as they pertain to visual culture.
The timing of this reading was both horrifying and telling of our times, as the world witnessed the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020. Much of our discussion for this meeting was collectively processing and reporting on the uprisings in our respective cities in response to the murder and the continued exposition of white supremacy in the United States and beyond.
In this article, Roth captures the heft and power of an already-established critical race discourse in the arts (e.g. Berger and Krauss) and trains it toward something quite specific: photographic film and printing paper. It's the first extraordinarily detailed, scholarly account of a story with which most photographers are familiar, i.e. the racial bias built into film sensitivities.
Traditional Kodak “Shirley” card.
In researching this week's reading, I came across the Vision & Justice conference held in 2019 at Harvard. There are no less than 17 videos of the conference available for viewing; highly relevant and recommended!