Tag: AFROCHIC

It’s CAA time and I am participating in a panel called “Photography and Race.” My talk is about race and modernism in interwar photography. One key phenomenon that I have noted is that lighting and shadow take on a metaphoric role beyond their descriptive function that gives visual expression to the period’s racial imagination in new ways. Older notions of race as biology and blackness and whiteness as material properties of the body are supplanted with more elusive codes that reside in the darkness and the light. That is not to say that move traditional means of visualizing race entirely disappear but the burden of representation is removed from the body in subtle but significant ways that allow for the articulation of changing racial paradigms. The preponderance of these shadows that limn blackness makes it difficult to select which images to show in my fifteen minutes. What a dilemma! Here are some of my current objects of fascination:

Carole Lombard by Otto Dyar, 1931

Anna May Wong by Hurrell, 1938

Katherine Hepburn by Ernest Bachrach, 1935

Model Helen Lyons Wearing a Dress and Matching Cape by Boue Soeurs, in Vogue, April 1922 by Baron de Meyer

Elsa Schiaparelli by Man Ray, 1930s

Josephine Baker by Huene, 1927

Nelly van Doesburg by Man Ray, 1925

Lillian Gish by Doris Ulmann, 1930

Delores del Rio by Ernest Bachrach, 1932