Photography and the End of Segregation

FAIN: FT-54500-06

Maren Elizabeth Stange
Clark University (New York, NY 10003-7120)

I argue that during the years 1936-1984 African Americans achieved substantial and irrevocable control over their public photographic representation, an intervention in an ubiquitous medium that required change on several fronts: social documentary, commercial photojournalism, and art. Primarily black photographers intervening in racist discourses insistently contributed nuanced,complex, and various images of people of color to United States’ visual culture, opening new imaginative and material possibilities for photographers coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s.