Photography: Race, Rights and Representation by Mark Sealy

Description

A sequel to the best-selling Decolonising the Camera: Photography inRacial Time, Sealy’s new book offers essential insight into the workphotographs do in culture, drawing on his experience as director ofAutograph from 1991-2021. 

 

With the reverberations of Decolonising the Camera still being felt across culturalinstitutions, universities and photo festivals today, this new text from Mark Sealydeepens and widens his argument for seeing photography ‘in racial time’.

A more personal and meditative text, Photography: Race, Rights and Representationreflects on key moments in Sealy’s long career uplifting Black photography in Britainand beyond. Through a series of essays, interviews and reflections, he discusses thework of key players in Black photography through the conduit of his curatorial work.

From conversations with icons like Stuart Hall and Sunil Gupta to artists like Masterji,Aïda Muluneh and Dana Popa, this book offers readers a variety of entrypoints.Arguing for a jazz-like, sensorial approach to photography as an antidote to theclassifiying colonial lens, Sealy uses this collection as a signpost to the decolonialpossibilities for curatorial practice beyond the current conjuncture.

As the success of Decolonising the Camera has shown, Sealy’s insight and anaylsis islong overdue in the world of contemporary photography and visual practice.Photography: Race, Rights and Representation is an enticing accompaniment to agroundbreaking text.

Weaving together analyses of work by Black photographers in the UK and internationally, interviews with key figures and personal reflections on the changing landscape of Black photography, this book offers an exploration of the past, present and future of decolonial visual practices. Sealy marks out a new path for photography – jazz-like, sensorial and experimental – in order to free it from the classifying colonial lens, offering the reader the opportunity to move both conceptually and spiritually into new visual realms when reading an image.

Mark Sealy’s Photography: Race, Rights and Representation is essential reading forall of us rethinking images in the twenty-first century.

– Deborah Willis, Chair, Department of Photography & Imaging, New York University

 

Mark Sealy is interested in the relationship between photography and social change, identity politics, race, and humanrights. He has been director of Autograph ABP (London) since 1991. He has written for many international photographypublications, including Foam Magazine, Aperture and Next Level. He is currently Principal Fellow Decolonising Photographyat University of the Arts London.