What did it mean to be a modern black photographic subject in images produced by white photographers?

Joan Bryant, associate professor in the African American Department at Syracuse University, will explore issues in the SUArt exhibition, Black Subjects in Modern Media Photography: Works from the George R. Rinhart Collection. It analyzes how white photographers presented people and practices as black subjects while the medium was becoming increasingly modern in the first half of the twentieth century.  It reflects on the silences regarding black people’s efforts to assert identities through mechanisms they did not control. Finally, it maps how photographers, their subjects, and viewers negotiated and contested diverse meanings of blackness.

Presented in collaboration with the Syracuse University Humanities Center in the College of Arts and Sciences, organizer of the 2020 Syracuse Symposium on Silence.

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