2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
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print this pageA Welcome Weight on My Body: Affect, Black Visuality and Analogue Photography
Michèle Pearson Clarke
Friday, March 20 - 10:00AM to 11:00AM
Valdosta
Considering photography's problematic historical relationship with issues of race and representation, the contemporary Black artist is always already facing the paradox of how to create photographic representations using a tool long complicit in our oppression. Emerging as an analogue technology in the early 19th century, photography did not so much record the reality of Blackness, but rather signified and constructed ways of seeing it as deviant and other. Any possibilities of where and how Blackness might be seen were further constricted by the technological biases long inherent in film chemistry and processing procedures.
When I look at any image of Black people, or I imagine anyone looking at one of
my own images, I am profoundly aware of the presence of this vast and distorted archive, operating as a kind of thick filter, and obscuring and complicating the view. In this presentation, I will share my theoretical way out of this photographic conundrum, one that turns away from vision and conceptualizes the touch and sound available in an analogue photograph as integral to seeing Blackness differently.
speaker
Michèle Pearson Clarke Pearson Clarke
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