PHOTOGRAPHY, RACE AND INVISIBILITY

Abstract

Although colonial troops formed the majority of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Army, the photographs of the liberation of Paris in 1944 feature mostly white-looking soldiers. This was no coincidence: France’s allies insisted that Paris should be liberated by white troops only. The absence of blackness is particularly significant because the liberation has been an iconic object of national collective memory since 1945. So far, the response to this erasure has consisted in unearthing alternative images demonstrating the contribution of black soldiers. Despite its obvious rhetorical value, this approach leaves intact the alignment between photographic indexicality and race that permitted the exclusion of blackness in the first place. This article, by contrast, builds on recent reflections concerning photography and the ethics of spectatorship to question the forms of invisibility that are produced not just by leaving things out of the frame, but by race itself. Through the formal and aesthetic constructs that sustain the visuality of race, the article explores the symbolic work performed by both blackness and whiteness. Ultimately, it proposes a form of criticism that is both interpretative and performative, revealing not only the role of photographic representations in naturalizing race, but also the way race shapes photographic representations.

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