A powerful examination of the unsettling history of photography and its fraught relationship to global antiblackness. Since photography's invention, black life has been presented as fraught, short, agonizingly filled with violence, and indifferent to intervention: living death--
mortevivum--in a series of still frames that refuse a complex humanity. In
Mortevivum, Kimberly Juanita Brown shows us how the visual logic of documentary photography and the cultural legacy of empire have come together to produce the understanding that blackness and suffering--and death--are inextricable. Brown traces this idea from the earliest images of the enslaved to the latest newspaper photographs of black bodies, from the United States and South Africa to Haiti and Rwanda, documenting the enduring, pernicious connection between photography and a global history of antiblackness.
Photography's history, inextricably linked to colonialism and white supremacy, is a catalog of othering, surveillance, and the violence of objectification. In the genocide in Rwanda, for instance, photographs after the fact tell viewers that blackness comes with a corresponding violence that no human intervention can abate. In Haiti, the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, photographic "evidence" of its sovereign failure suggests that the formerly enslaved cannot overthrow their masters and survive to tell the tale. And in South Africa and the United States, a loop of racial violence reminds black subjects of their lower-class status mandated via the state. Illustrating the global nature of antiblackness that pervades photographic archives of the present and the past,
Mortevivum reveals how we live in a repetition of imagery signaling who lives and who dies on a gelatin silver print--on a page in a book, on the cover of newspaper, and in the memory of millions.
The URL for this publication is https: //on-seeing-mortevivum.org/.
一本關於攝影的令人不安的歷史和其與全球反黑人主義的緊張關係的有力研究。
自攝影發明以來，黑人生活一直被呈現為充滿痛苦、短暫、充滿暴力且不關心干預的困境：在一系列靜止的畫面中，拒絕了複雜的人性，成為一種活著的死亡——mortevivum。在《Mortevivum》中，金伯利·胡安妮塔·布朗向我們展示了紀錄攝影的視覺邏輯和帝國的文化遺產如何相結合，形成了黑人和苦難——以及死亡——不可分割的理解。布朗從奴隸的最早形象追溯到最新的報紙照片，從美國和南非到海地和盧旺達，記錄了攝影與全球反黑人主義歷史之間持久而有害的聯繫。
攝影的歷史與殖民主義和白人至上主義密不可分，是一個將他者化、監視和物化暴力的目錄。例如，在盧旺達的種族滅絕中，事後的照片告訴觀眾，黑人的存在伴隨著一種相應的暴力，沒有任何人類干預能夠減輕。在海地，西半球的第一個黑人共和國，關於其主權失敗的攝影“證據”表明，曾經被奴役的人無法推翻他們的主人並倖存下來講述這個故事。而在南非和美國，種族暴力的循環提醒黑人主體他們的低階級地位是由國家強制規定的。
《Mortevivum》揭示了反黑人主義在當下和過去的攝影檔案中普遍存在的全球性質，展示了我們生活在一個重複的意象中，這些意象在明示著誰活著、誰死在明膠銀版印刷品上——在一本書的頁面上，在報紙的封面上，在數百萬人的記憶中。
該出版物的網址是https: //on-seeing-mortevivum.org/。
Kimberly Juanita Brown is the inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College where she is also an Associate Professor of English and creative writing. She is the author of The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary.
