Full Description
In Photographic Returns Shawn Michelle Smith traces how historical moments of racial crisis come to be known photographically and how the past continues to inhabit, punctuate, and transform the present through the photographic medium in contemporary art. Smith engages photographs by Rashid Johnson, Sally Mann, Deborah Luster, Lorna Simpson, Jason Lazarus, Carrie Mae Weems, Taryn Simon, and Dawoud Bey, among others. Each of these artists turns to the past-whether by using nineteenth-century techniques to produce images or by re-creating iconic historic photographs-as a way to use history to negotiate the present and to call attention to the unfinished political project of racial justice in the United States. By interrogating their use of photography to recall, revise, and amplify the relationship between racial politics of the past and present, Smith locates a temporal recursivity that is intrinsic to photography, in which images return to haunt the viewer and prompt reflection on the present and an imagination of a more just future.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Photographic Returns 1
1. Looking Forward and Looking Back: Rashid Johnson and Frederick Douglass on Photography 16
2. Photographic Remains: Sally Mann at Antietam 34
3. The Scene of the Crime: Deborah Luster 61
4. Photographic Referrals: Lorna Simpson's 9 Props 93
5. Afterimages: Jason Lazarus 112
6. Photographic Reenactments: Carrie Mae Weems's Constructing History 133
7. False Returns: Taryn Simon's The Innocents 152
Coda. A Glimpse Forward: Dawoud Bey's The Birmingham Project 170
Notes 175
Bibliography 213
Index 229
