Mixed Race Studies

Zun Lee’s Polaroid Archive Preserves African-American Self-Representation

Photo District News
2015-08-26

Holly Hughes

Photographer Zun Lee is dedicated to countering stereotypical, often negative views of the African-American family. While he was working on Father Figure, his book about African-American fathers, he stumbled on some old Polaroids that appeared to have fallen from a family photo album. He was intrigued to see how the Polaroids —”the Instagrams of their day,” he calls them — reflected “the way black people saw themselves in private spaces and in ways not intended to be seen, or judged, by others.” By searching yard sales and e-Bay, Lee has amassed 3,000 of these now “orphaned” mementoes and recently began posting them on a Tumbler and an Instagram feed named “Fade Resistance.” After winning a Magnum Foundation Fellowship last week, Lee now plans to develop his Fade Resistance collection into an interactive digital archive that will allow the public and collaborators from other disciplines to add their own stories, videos and images. His long-term goal, he says, is “to encourage new ways of understanding black identity and representation in today’s world.”…

Read the entire article here.

Color film was built for white people. Here’s what it did to dark skin

Vox
2015-09-18

Estelle Caswell

The biased film was fixed in the 1990s, so why do so many photos still distort darker skin?

For decades, the color film available to consumers was built for white people. The chemicals coating the film simply weren’t adequate to capture a diversity of darker skin tones. And the photo labs established in the 1940s and 50s even used an image of a white woman, called a Shirley card, to calibrate the colors for printing:

Concordia University professor Lorna Roth has researched the evolution of skin tone imaging. She explained in a 2009 paper how the older technology distorted the appearance of black subjects:

Problems for the African-American community, for example, have included reproduction of facial images without details, lighting challenges, and ashen-looking facial skin colours contrasted strikingly with the whites of eyes and teeth.

How this would affect non-white people seemingly didn’t occur to those who designed and operated the photo systems. In an essay for Buzzfeed, writer and photographer Syreeta McFadden described growing up with film that couldn’t record her actual appearance:

The inconsistencies were so glaring that for a while, I thought it was impossible to get a decent picture of me that captured my likeness. I began to retreat from situations involving group photos. And sure, many of us are fickle about what makes a good portrait. But it seemed the technology was stacked against me. I only knew, though I didn’t understand why, that the lighter you were, the more likely it was that the camera — the film — got your likeness right.

Many of the technological biases have since been corrected (though, not all of them, as explained in the video above). Still, we often see controversies about the misrepresentation of non-white subjects in magazines and advertisements. What are we to make of the fact that these images routinely lighten the skin of women of color?…

Read the entire article here.

Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity

Canadian Journal of Communication
Volume 34, Number 1 (2009)
pages 111-136

Lorna Roth, Professor of Communication Studies
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Until recently, due to a light-skin bias embedded in colour film stock emulsions and digital camera design, the rendering of non-Caucasian skin tones was highly deficient and required the development of compensatory practices and technology improvements to redress its shortcomings. Using the emblematic “Shirley” norm reference card as a central metaphor reflecting the changing state of race relations/aesthetics, this essay analytically traces the colour adjustment processes in the industries of visual representation and identifies some prototypical changes in the field. The author contextualizes the history of these changes using three theoretical categories: the ‘technological unconscious’ (Vaccari, 1981), ‘dysconsciousness’ (King, 2001), and an original concept of ‘cognitive equity,’ which is proposed as an intelligent strategy for creating and promoting equity by inscribing a wider dynamic range of skin tones into image technologies, products, and emergent practices in the visual industries.

Jusqu’à récemment, en raison d’un préjugé favorisant la peau claire dans les films couleurs et dans la conception des caméras numériques, la reproduction des couleurs de peaux non-caucasiennes a été très déficiente, exigeant le développement de diverses techniques de compensation et d’amélioration. Utilisant la carte de référence normative « Shirley » comme métaphore pour refléter l’évolution des rapports entre les races et leurs pratiques esthétiques, cet essai analyse les processus d’ajustement de la couleur dans les industries de la représentation visuelle et identifie certains prototypes de changements dans le domaine. L’auteur situe ces changements historiquement en se rapportant à trois concepts théoriques : « l’inconscient technologique » (Vaccari, 1981), la « dysconscience » (« dysconsciousness » – King, 2001), et un concept original, « l’équité cognitive », proposé comme stratégie intelligente pour créer et promouvoir l’équité en inscrivant un plus grand éventail de couleurs de peau dans les technologies et produits de l’image et dans les pratiques émergeantes des industries visuelles.

Read the entire article here.

Photographer Explores The Beautiful Diversity Of Redheads Of Color

The Huffington Post
2015-08-25

Priscilla Frank, Arts Writer

Michelle Marshall

Red hair is usually the result of a mutation in a gene called MC1R, also known as a melanocortin 1 receptor. Normally, when activated by a certain hormone, MC1R sparks a series of signals that leads to the production of brown or black pigment. Yet, in cases when both parents are carriers of the recessive MC1R gene and said receptor is mutated or antagonized, it fails to turn hair darker, resulting instead in a beautifully fiery buildup of red pigment.

As previously estimated by BBC News, between one and two percent of the world’s population — or 70 to 140 million people — are redheads. In Scotland and Ireland, around 35 percent of the population carry the recessive gene that yields crimson locks, and the redhead count is around 10 percent. As such, the word ginger often calls to mind visions of Celtic-Germanic attributes — namely, pale, white skin…

White skin and red hair may constitute the stereotypical image of a redhead, but it’s by no means a comprehensive one. French-born, London-based photographer Michelle Marshall is documenting the stunningly diverse manifestations of the MC1R gene, particularly in people of color…

Read the entire article here.

Tony Gleaton: Photographing The African Story Across The Americas

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2015-08-23

Karen Grigsby Bates

Photographer Tony Gleaton died last Friday after struggling with a particularly aggressive cancer for 18 months. He was working, signing prints, talking to museums (several have his work in their collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem) and checking in with his friends right up to the last day. I admired his work, but also treasured his friendship.

For many years, Tony often showed up on my Los Angeles doorstep with a huge sack of dirty laundry slung over his shoulder and a box of contact sheets under one arm.

“Here,” he’d say, placing the box in my hands, and walking through the door. “Look at these. I’m gonna do some laundry, okay?”…

…In the beginning, he got a lot of pushback. “Why do you want to take our picture?” the villagers would ask, warily. “We have no money to pay you.”

When Tony would explain that he was documenting the African Diaspora around the world, and that they and he were both part of it, the conversation often became even harder.

“You want to take pictures of black people?” they’d ask.

“Yes, like you and me … ” he’d begin

“Well,” they’d respond, looking at his fair skin, light hair and blue-green eyes. “You’re not black. And we’re certainly not black. So you need to do that somewhere else.”

Eventually he learned to refine his approach and tell the villagers he wanted people in the States to see how beautiful people in the villages were. “I just gave up on the black connection. It was important to me, but not to them. They see race differently than we do. And it’s only a social construct anyway.”

There is still stigma to acknowledging blackness in many parts of Mexico, and Tony’s work raised the profile of Latinos with what is sometimes called “the Third Root” — Spanish, Indian, African — in Latino culture. His work eventually expanded across the Americas to form an exhibit called Tengo Casi 500 Anos (I Have Almost 500 Years) — Africa’s Legacy in Mexico that explores the African presence in the Americas. He’s also chronicled black, Indian and Mexican cowboy culture, as well as life in American Samoa and the Mississippi Delta…

Read the entire article here.

Exhibition: Zun Lee, Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood

The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center
Contemporary Gallery
233 4th Street, NW
Charlottesville, Virginia 22903
2015-06-09 through 2015-08-29

Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Friday, 12:00-18:00; Saturday, 10:00-15:00

Through intimate black-and-white frames, the viewer gains access to often-overlooked moments in the lives of African American men whom Lee has worked with since 2011. Lee brings into focus what pervasive father absence stereotypes have distorted – black men who define parental presence on their own terms and whose masculinity is humanized, not viewed with suspicion. Using his struggle with father absence as inspiration, Lee examines a complex subject matter with profound vulnerability, resulting in a richly woven narrative that is deceptively simple yet multidimensional.

For Father Figure, Zun Lee used his personal journey of discovery and identity formation to examine manifestations of black fatherhood largely ignored by mainstream media. The book has been shortlisted for the Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and named a winner in the Photo Books category of the 2015 PDN Photo Annual competition.

Zun Lee is an award-winning photographer from Toronto, Canada who was named onto PDN’s 30 List in 2014. His visual storytelling has been widely featured in The New York Times and other publications..

Zun Lee, Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood is presented in partnership with the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph and is made possible through the generous support of the Blue Moon Fund, and Hampton Inn and Suites.

For more information, click here.

What It Was Like Being Mixed-Race Photographed By National Geographic

Multiracial Asian Families: thinking about race, families, children, and the intersection of mixed ID/Asian
2015-07-29

Sharon H Chang

Remember these pictures? They were part of National Geographic’s mixed race photo campaign “Changing Faces” published in October 2013. “We’re becoming a country,” stated the magazine, “Where race is no longer so black and white.” The images were shot by famous German portrait photographer Martin Schoeller who said he liked “building catalogs of faces that invite people to compare them.” I think it’s safe to say that happened. The gallery was widely viewed (it being National Geographic after all) and more or less greatly admired (it being Martin Schoeller after all). But there was some criticism, including my own, which I wrote about for Racism Review in “Mixed or Not, Why Are We Still Taking Pictures of “Race”?” One of the larger questions I raised was around the idea that we use images of mixed race people to debate race, without including those mixed folk in the debate themselves. I concluded that essay with a proclamation:

While modern race-photography believes itself to be celebrating the dismantling of race, it may actually be fooling us (and itself) with a fantastically complicated show of smoke and mirrors…We need to make much, MUCH more space for something ultimately pretty simple — the stories of actual people themselves which in the end, will paint the real picture.

But here’s a truth I want to share with you. I also felt at the time that me making this proclamation wasn’t enough. That I had to do more than just say it. I needed to live it; make a commitment to the practice I was preaching. So. As an old friend used to say, “Where attention goes, energy flows.” Soon after making this personal resolve I had the amazing good fortune of running into Alejandro T. Acierto, a mixed race identifying person who was photographed for National Geographic’s campaign. He graciously agreed share with me/us what “Changing Faces” was like for him through his own experience, his own words, and his own lens…

Read the entire interview here.

Q&A “Blaxicans of L.A.”: capturing two cultures in one

The Los Angeles Times
2015-07-21

Ebony Bailey

When race in this country is often discussed in black and white, where do those who don’t quite fit the dime fall?.

Walter Thompson-Hernandez, a researcher with the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration at USC, is attempting to answer that question with the help of his full-frame Nikon camera.

Two years ago, he began a research project on “Blaxican” identity, interviewing individuals of African American and Mexican descent like himself. He thought it was important to share his research with audiences outside academia, so he started a project on Instagram called Blaxicans of L.A., capturing portraits of Blaxicans and their families…

Read the entire article here.

Mexico’s hidden people

Cable News Network (CNN)
2015-07-10

Abby Reimer, Special to CNN

Photograph: Mara Sanchez Renero

(CNN)—An estimated 200,000 Africans were brought to Mexico under slavery, which ended in the country in 1829. Yet Afro-Mexicans remain a marginalized and often forgotten part of Mexico’s identity.

Photographer Mara Sanchez Renero first learned about Afro-Mexicans as a teenager, when she traveled to the Costa Chica region in southern Mexico. The black community there told her they were descendants of Africans shipwrecked off the Pacific coast in 1900.

But it wasn’t until she traveled back last year that she realized what little she knew. There, traditions and customs rooted in Africa — such as “La Danza del Diablos,” or the dance of the devils — have survived.

“I didn’t know there was that much African culture in Mexico,” Sanchez Renero said. “They didn’t teach me that in school.”

Sanchez Renero dug deeper into Afro-Mexican history and culture, ultimately deciding to tell the story of Afro-Mexicans through a series of photographs called “The Cimarron and Fandango.”…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

Afro-Iran | The Unknown Minority
2015-04-16

Mahdi Ehsaei, Photographer

The photographic series shows a side of Iran, which is unknown by even Iranians. A trip to a place which is inhabited and dominated by the descendants of slaves and traders from Africa.

The Hormozgan province in the Persian Gulf is a traditional and historical region with a diverse and unexplored population. It is framed with unique landscapes and people with profound personalities. Iranians, who still have African blood in them and continue their African heritage with their clothing style, their music, their dance and their oral traditions and rituals.

The resulting portraits reveal new facets and unfamiliar faces, which are not typical for the common picture of Iran. They show details documenting the centuries-long history of this ethnic minority. A confrontation between the Persian culture and the, for Iran unusual, African consciousness.

A surprisingly new experience for the viewer, which shows the current presence of Afro-Iranians in Iran.

For more information, click here.