“Can a photographic lens condition racial behavior?” asks Harvard University professor Sarah Lewis in a 2019 essay published by The New York Times in dialogue with the groundbreaking Vision & Justice conference — a program exploring the democratic right to representational visual justice and the impact of images in public space.*1 Potential answers to this question can be found in two separate publications that surfaced that same year: Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (Mark Sealy, 2019) and The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization (Daniel C. Blight, 2019). Cultural historian Mark Sealy, for instance, references the work of theorist Stuart Hall in his claim that “cultures do not exist outside of how they are represented, and in the hands of the colonizer, photography has dominated how the Other has been portrayed (…) [supporting] racial violence [while celebrating] White*2 dominance over the Others.”*3 For writer Daniel C. Blight, through the invention of the “New World,” “photography became the social and technological record of “seeing White” (…) a visual tool of racist pseudoscience, power, and colonization.”*4

Informed by Caribbean intellectual thought, I propose an archipelagic reading of photography art history to subvert its continental paradigms. Continental photography history –as I have called it — describes a ‘collective hallucination’*5 that validates the grand narratives of newness, progress, and universality that achieved their most potent expression in the nineteenth century during European imperial expansion. On the one hand, this discursive framework embraces the invention of the camera and its gradual technological development to produce at each turn more ‘transparent’ images; on the other hand, it emphasizes the explorer’s method – that is, a person who “sallies forth with confidence that if the world is as yet unknown, then it at least may be surveyed and hence known via [photography].”*6 This ‘collective hallucination’ is no more than a belief that photography is an objective praxis to look at the world in search of knowledge and truth. The fact that White men created many of the photographs included in Western private and public collections means that our view of the world has been so far mediated through the lens of masculinity and Whiteness. How can we remap this imperial-colonial-patriarchal politics of knowledge production? 

Taking as a point of reference the 2023 online exhibition Identity, Connection, Place organized by the Feminist Photography Network, I explore how Stacey Tyrell and Farihah Aliyah Shah, two contemporary Black women artists of Caribbean descent, appropriate the photographic medium to deconstruct racial bias and express new poetics of belonging. To engage with Caribbean thinkers such as Edouard Glissant and Derek Walcott is not an arbitrary choice when considering photography art history. As expressed by scholars Tatiana Flores and Michelle Stephens, an insular narrative “brings to the fore issues arising from the colonial legacy—such as sovereignty, migration, sustainability, and, of course, race and ethnicity.”*7 Likewise, the origins of photography are not unrelated to Christopher Columbus’s fateful landing in the “New World” in 1492. Continental photography was one of the Empire’s most powerful ideological tools, visually reinforcing the logic of European colonial rule and its concept of race.*8

The complicity of photography within the imperial project is revealed in the work of Stacey Tyrell. Born in Canada to parents from Nevis, Tyrell’s visual practice explores identity, race, and heritage as it relates to the specificity of the Caribbean and its diaspora. In the series Pour la Victoire (2015-2018), she researches the Euro-centric constructs of White and Black femininity (see Mistress and Slave from Untitled series, 2018) by embodying the allegorical personifications of major powers involved in the slave trade: Spain, England, France, Portugal, Netherlands, et al. Tyrell’s (self)portraits of historical women characters, such as Columbia (United States), Canadiana (Canada), and Hispania (Spain), reveal an idealized cannon that represents White women – and by extension the imperial motherland – as pure, civilized, and glorious. In contrast, she argues, a sexualized (and racialized) woman would not be deserving of respect. The White woman-imperial nation would bring enlightenment and culture to the “dark corners” of the world.*9