Good evening and thank you all for joining us for the second in a series of four terror lectures in American art.
This series is sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art, which is dedicated to fostering exploration,
understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts of the United States for national and international
audiences in collaboration with the Department of the History of Art in Oxford at Wooster College.
The foundation grants an annual fellowship to a leading scholar in American art.
My name is Phillip Bullock. Director of Tillich, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities Talk is delighted to host this lecture series as
part of our Big Tent Life Event series as part of the humanities cultural programme itself.
One of the founding stems for the future. Stephen Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
If you have any questions during this evening's lecture,
please do pop them in the YouTube chatterbox and we'll do our very best to answer as many of these as we can.
The Session. Tonight's lecturer Amy and Mooney is visiting professor in America 20 20.
And she'll be introduced by Dr Deborah Willis, University professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the School of the Arts.
Dr. Willis has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social and Cultural Africana Studies,
where she teaches courses on photography and imaging, kinesiology, cultural history, visualising the black body.
Women and Gender Research examines photography's multifaceted histories, visual culture, the photographic history of slavery and emancipation.
Contemporary women photographers. It's my enormous pleasure.
I'm great honour to welcome Deborah this evening. So without further ado, I'd like to hand over you to chat the proceedings.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Phillip. It's really exciting to be here to experience this online experience in terms of Amy's work.
I'm pleased to introduce Amy Mooney is.
She's an associate professor at Columbia College in Chicago, where she teaches courses on African-American art and visual culture.
Her publications include Archibold Jay Mottley, which was part of the David C. Driskell series on African-American art,
as well as her essays, has been in anthologies and catalogues including Beyond Face, New Perspectives and Portraiture.
Black is Black eight and Romey or Bearden in the Modernist tradition.
She is a recipient of fellowships from the American Council on Learning Societies.
Black met Black with Temporalis Research Consortium, with Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Joyce Foundation,
the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
We are collaborating on a project with the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College,
which recently launches a digital humanities project. Say it with pictures then and now that recovers a critically and critically examines the work
of Chicago's African-American photographers from eighteen nineties into the nineteen thirties.
As part of the Terror Foundation's Art Design Initiative,
this project will generate an exhibition and a catalogue to bring to light Chicago's contributions to the formation of modern black subjectivities.
During her tenure as the Tenure Foundation as a tenant I'm sorry.
During her tenure as a terror foundation visiting professor for American art, she will complete her second book,
Portraits of Note Noteworthy Character Negotiating a Collective American Identity,
a project that investigates the social function of portraiture, which is forthcoming at Duke University Press.
Welcome, Amy. Thank you so much.
Deb, it is truly an honour to have you as my interlocutor today, and I really am very much looking forward to our exchange after the lecture.
I'm going to go ahead and share our screen going.
There we go. So good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so very much for joining us today.
And it is truly an honour and I'd like to express appreciation for my colleagues in the
Department of History of Art here at Oxford and Wooster College who have so warmly welcomed me.
They also offer profound gratitude to the Terror Foundation and to Columbia College for supporting opportunities,
as well as to the Oxford students with whom I have been so privileged to work with.
And finally, I'd like to express my sincere appreciation to our colleagues at Oxford's Research
Centre for the Humanities for providing a platform for this evening's Lifestream.
This is the second of a four part lecture series drawn from my forthcoming book, as Deb noted,
and I explore the central role played in fostering social teams in the United States as progressive
individuals and institutions relied on its cultural capital to further their political ideologies.
Last week, they considered visual strategies enacted by African-Americans to counter racism in this week.
I continue to investigate how these strategies were employed through the medium of photography.
Today's lecture examines how photography becomes the most accessible form through which individuals could determine how they wanted to be seen.
The burgeoning black media ensured the publication and circulation of photographic portraits,
as well as the development of a modern criticality through the act of representation.
In this lecture, I explore how, in collaboration with their patrons,
African American commercial photographers generated a body politic that fostered racial equality through portraiture.
As in the first lecture, I'd like to begin with the portraits of the Obamas further querying this idea of regard,
both in terms of how we look as well as who we look at in the first lecture.
I argued that the illustrations and photographs and etiquette primers,
as well as corrective cartoons authored by African-Americans for African-American audiences, contributed to a lens focussed on racial uplift.
Today, I want to consider how that lens was further honed through photographic portraiture.
Both of these painted portraits were created through the lens of photography.
Both subjects suffer a study session as photography plays a central role in the artist's creative process due to the constraints of time.
The photographs had to serve as a reference point as their subjects who incidentally were running the country
could not afford the time needed to work from a live model with even if an expensive city was possible.
Photographs were still required to render the portraits for Sherard.
The photography assists in the translation of her subject from individual to archetypes.
Similarly, Wiley has long relied on for photographing his models as the first stage of his imposition on art history,
from which he then inserts that subject. There is no other technology that has more deeply impacted how we see ourselves and others.
In fact, I like to argue that the historic conditioning of the photographic gaze is embedded in the regard we afford to the Obama portraits.
There are three interrelated aspects a photographic history that today's lecture will emphasise its power to assure one's presence within history,
its capacity for reproduction and circulation, and its role as a social process.
Ever aware of the power of photography,
WB DeBois placed a call in the pages of the Crisis magazine for more African-American to consider the profession,
noting it to be, quote, a fine and paying career for artists, artisan, man and woman.
And quote, More to his point, however, was the medium's potential for social service,
as well as the ability to capture the delicate beauty and variety of African Americans
into counselling readers to avoid the horrible botch of white photographers who,
as he said, make the heart ache. Dubois due to the success of the Scurlock studio as well as the work of Cordelia's Zimbabwe and Arthur,
do then pose the question meant to encourage more African-Americans to take up the charge of representation.
William E. Woodard responded to this call and established photography studios during the 1920s in Chicago and in Cleveland,
Kansas City and New York City, with subjects ranging from anti lynching activists and recent Pulitzer prise winning Ida
B Wells Barnhardt to chorus lines featuring female impersonators such as Barney Clark.
What did studios developed?
Visual strategies of representation that are in keeping with his call, the peers who are better known, such as James, Andrew, Zie and James that year.
Allen, these photographers have come to represent the Harlem Renaissance,
but Woodford's studios also followed suit, both in terms of the aesthetic and approach.
They offered an array of props backgrounds as well as diffused order of Mattick lighting sharp or soft focus.
It was happy to direct subjects toward full length standing poses or the best angles for intimate close ups.
Unlike these photographers, however, Woodard's images were serialised and circulated within the Associated Press.
This as his patrons likenesses were reproduced in the pages of newspapers like the Baltimore African-American.
These portraits transitioned from serving solely as representations of individuals to representing the
collective imaginings of a modern black consciousness that challenge the centralisation of Jim Crow.
Woodard studio generated a body of work that directs us to view photography as a social process.
Central to the conceptualisation of the new Negro. More than a rebuttal of the racist imagery of the early 20th century.
Or an attempt to fill in the lacuna of the canon. These photographs allow us to critique and interpret history what its photographs counter,
the conservative determinism that has characterised scholarship on the bar bourgeoisie,
allowing for a broader consideration of the work accomplished by photographer subjects and subsequent circulation of these images in its portraits.
We see the assertion of black individuals as viewing subjects who were deeply
invested in the negotiations between individual and collective identities,
supporting a far greater inclusive party in regards to class, gender and sexuality than previously imagined.
His emphasis on entrepreneurial growth and civic custodianship did more than contribute to the establishment of a black middle class.
In her germinal book Signs of the Time,
Elizabeth Cable argues that the oppressive work of Jim Crow was determined more by custom, taste and convention than by law.
Following Abels critical reading of segregation,
signage scholar Jennifer Rittenhouse traces the transmit mission of these everyday rules and behaviours as a racial etiquette,
which she defines as, quote,
an apt but bloodless term that should be used only in combination with vivid and frequent reminders of the measures white Southerners resorted to,
including lynching, rape and other forms of racial violence.
When blacks challenged this asymmetry. Although Woodard Studios was not located in the South,
it's important to remind ourselves that in many Midwestern and Eastern cities, segregation was the defacto custom.
In Chicago. In 1919, for example, a race riot that cost thirty eight lives was purportedly sparked because an
African-American teenager accidently floated over into the white section of Lake Michigan.
Racially restrictive covenants prevented black social mobility in these very cities.
So though many of its patrons participated in the Great Migration,
they did not escape the daily negotiations of discrimination and the threat of violence.
And as Dr Deborah Willis, a scholarship has demonstrated, their resistance,
resiliency and resolve form another layer of racial etiquette that can be seen
in the photographs of individuals who insisted on seeing and being seen.
A teenager's patron's wide array of customers taste in conventions.
I posit that the visualisations by Woodard in his studios represent a fierce effort
to counter the subjugation of black life by presenting its depth and breadth,
ensuring that a plurality of black lives could be seen and inspire resistance.
Portrait studios such as Woodard served as a mixing point between classes offering
the service sought out by many that promised acceptance and welcomed all.
To, quote, call and get acquainted with the meek sitting or not.
Perhaps the defenders proclamation that, quote,
Chicagoans have become so wooder eyes that nothing but the most veritable stranger would think of patronising any other studio and, quote,
not only promotes the specific studio,
but also hints at the ways that WOODER photographs functioned as a site of intersectionality for the representations of glamorous entertainers.
Two formidable actor activists to result factory workers,
Woodard's photographs represent socially and historically constructed selves
that could only be understood and understand themselves in relation to others.
Their portraits visualise an intra racial etiquette that promoted tolerance,
uplift and celebrate a black life in direct conflict with a violent racial subordination
that was continually recreated in the routine actions of the everyday world.
What are these photographs trace the arc of respectability in an anti-racist,
discursive strategy that subjects sought to X sought and extend extended to themselves and others.
And through the lens of self-determined wurth, these photographs trained others to see and to think differently.
For the portraits generated during this era allowed the subjects to critique,
interpret and shape identity to such an extent that their efforts continue to impact contemporary consciousness.
According to an announcement placed in The Chicago Defender, William Woodard establishes photographic studio in Chicago in 1920.
Born in March, Texas, in 1892, Woodard had a varied career before settling on photography.
He attended Atlanta Black Baptist College, the precursor to the prestigious historically black Morehouse,
which prepared students for teaching and the ministry. Though neither of those professions appealed to Woodard,
the exposure to the uplift curriculum and expectations of the polite influence to studio
manners and perspective on photography's ability to portray his subjects interiority.
Although he was only enrolled for a year, his participation in the same cultural context that includes etiquette author Silas Floyd and artist
John Henry Adams had a lasting impact on his understanding of the politics of race and representation.
After working briefly as an insurance salesman in Tennessee, what it was drawn to the opportunities in Chicago,
where he sought a field that would promise great usefulness and progress.
His earliest listings note that his photographic training was gained in the finest of studios.
And given Chicago's segregation, this likely indicates that he apprenticed at one of the downtown studios,
owned and largely patronised by whites such as Muffett Studio or Raymore.
In his early advertising through the studio, would it stress the artfulness of his approach?
And his offer of real art can extend to ongoing debates about the role of photographers
as creators rather than simple recorders of images promising class and charm?
Woodard noted that his skill in photographic manipulation was especially distinguished by its radiant and alluring portrayal,
as well as its touching individuality. His engagement with a language of portraiture is in keeping with Charles H.
Catherines assertions in his 1910 book. Photography is a fine art that the photographer must, quote, have sympathy,
imagination and a knowledge of the principles of which painters and photographers alike rely to make their pictures.
And for the captain believed that the photographic portrait was a collaborative effort and
that the photographer's own character and purpose were embodied in the resulting print.
Serving. But it's work. It's clear that like the portrait painters of his era, he understood that the expectations of the genre,
including capturing the serious character and establishing a relationship with the viewer.
Yet when interviewed regarding the expectations of art photography,
its approach seems to be in accordance with the council that was offered to readers of The New in Etiquette.
One of the books that we looked at last week,
which counsel to be yourself when being photographed by crafting a likeness that was in keeping with the subject's form and spirit,
he validated their sense of self-worth and its empathetic characterisation of its patrons desires,
underscores the social scrutiny that photographs were subject to.
And he wrote, quote, Of course, they didn't want their blemishes or bad points emphasised,
but neither do they want their forms of faces transfigured in such a way that their friends can't recognise them.
They feel humiliated when friends exclaim. Significantly.
Oh, that's a good portrait of you. No one likes to pass photographs around that are so good that they're too good.
And above all, they want their spirit to show in their photographs, noting that the photographs were passed amongst his clientele during social calls.
What Woodard acknowledges that the comparison between one's current physical presence and past photographs self was part of the exchange.
Further,
he opens up the understanding of photographs as what Elizabeth Edwards calls socially salient objects that validated one's identity and worth.
Like all portraits, is his ability to strike a balance between idealism and realism as well as an understanding of
patrons expectations was critical to building up a reputation as the deliverer of style and dignity.
This concept of dignity is especially telling of the photographer's intent in his perception of his patron's desire.
A portrait testifies to one's self worth and value.
It can engender respect from others and thereby causing them to acknowledge and respect it in others further.
Scholar Carol Chollet notes that, quote, Dignity can be maintained against the force of outside powers that threatened an individual.
And for W.P. Dubois, quote, Individuals who do not protest against injustice are likely to lose their sense
of dignity as actions of protest against the invisibility of oppression.
Portraiture afforded an opportunity for styling of the self as a way of being and becoming further through style.
African-American subjects could exert ecstatic freedom that was denied in their daily social and political lives.
Art, technical skill than a well appointed studio were amongst the means that Woodard and his train staff promised clients,
quote, a sympathetic treatment calculated to bring out those individual characteristics of your own personality and quote.
By 1923, what announced the opening of a new studio in Kansas City managed by his relatives, Gene Dewey, put Woodard early successes,
necessitated the hiring of additional photographers, including Myles Webb and Harold Young, who were noted as very capable artists.
Charles Evans Woodard, Gene Williams nephew, also joined the Chicago Practise, serving as his assistant Reception Lady Hales.
Jacob played a central role in the business. It was celebrated for her contributions in shaping this modern photographic studio.
What is readers learnt at Woodard's? Jacobs ensured a lasting relationship with the studio because she could, quote,
tactfully take you in hand and become the most valuable person in the world to you.
She had the knack for drawing out the best expression and for putting the client at ease.
And Jacob led the customer to select the portraits that showed them at their best possible advantage.
And her efforts reveal the studio's investment in the portrait as a validating social exchange.
Toward this end, Woodard placed advertisements from the sources that featured his photographs, capitalising on the effect of the work,
letting the likenesses of individuals and groups serve as evidence of the ways that he could
similarly apply his skills to potential customers through the inclusive language of advertisers.
He distinguishes himself as an advocate, stating, quote,
Are people that need a studio where they could have the work done properly by one of their own race, unquote.
And noting that as patrons come from all walks of life. Woodard frequently offered discounts and coupons to, quote,
bring these high grade pictures within the reach of all product development in black consumer culture.
Also inform Woodard's practise as his clients sought to align their economic, social and political agency with its most productive years.
Correspond with the development of Don't spend your money where you can't work and double your dollar campaigns that unified,
diverse segments of African American populations.
The commercial success of the studio allowed for expansion and we move to New York City in 1932 drawn to Harlem.
He established a studio just blocks away from the successful guaranteed photo studio run by James Van.
Underseas image that you see here. There he hired and train Woodford Hall.
Allen, whose portrait of Woodard you see here, she took over and renamed the studio after herself.
When Woodard returned to Chicago in the early 1940s in New York, the studio flourished,
especially due to the patronage of stars of the stage and screen.
It's for these reasons that Woodard's attention to the taste, customs and conventions of a diverse black subjects is so critical.
The studio continually expanded their approach to the portrait, moving from standing or seated pose with the subject positioned against a peanut
background or heavy velvet drapes to a closer cropped focus on the subject's face.
Overall, the portraits are brightly lit with a subject angle to most flattering position for head shots like that of actor Monty Holloway.
Here, the photographers seemed to favour an atmosphere atmospheric background that added a bit of tonal texture to the image.
The focus is central and sharp, and often the photographers directed light toward one side of the singer's face,
making the most of the medium's ability to register contrast. For group portraits, Woodard and his team work both in studio and on site,
with the logistical challenges seemingly well resolved and the resulting images and then keeping abreast of the latest developments in technology.
The studio invested in code expert eating Panorama's circuit camera,
allowing for broader perspectives and the documentation of large scale events such as the
eighth annual homecoming of the African-American owned Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company.
Some patrons favoured a more formal throwback to the Victorian era,
choosing iconographic additions such as plants and books or Bracher landscapes
like those that were used for African-American photographer Thomas Askew,
who generated numerous images for Dubois's award winning exhibition on the American Negro for the nineteen hundred Paris Exposition.
This range and style allow clients to craft images that secured their reputations and establish a sense of history,
historic presence previously denied to black subjects.
What are its regular contributions to historic projects that celebrated black achievements such as
John Chy Tietz souvenir of Negro progress from 1925 shed light on the ways that the photographer
invision the merger of a commercial consciousness with a collective aesthetic and social purpose
published in advance of Chicago's A Century Progress World Fair that was scheduled for 1933.
This booklet reflects the inclusive city,
an interdependent interdependence of African-American commerce and culture in this urban centre commissioned by the DeSalvo Association.
Woodard was tasked with taking numerous studio portraits,
as well as documenting the spaces and buildings and occasions that signal progress since the city's founding by John Baptist to sample.
From depictions of factory workers in assembly plants to a panorama of portraits of the city's cultural and entrepreneurial
country contributors in which he included his own self-portrait that you see over there at the upper left,
would its images match the organisation's goal of providing a pictorial cross-section of Negro life in the metropolis?
End quote. More than a mere souvenir. The book was in charge.
To, quote, interpret the Negro to himself and to his community.
End quote. And like the etiquette tax examined in the previous chapter.
This project was infused with the recognition of the importance of images in identity formation,
as well as the impetus for uplift and by interpreting the Negro to himself.
The DeSalvo Association, which included numerous wealthy black businessmen,
sought to define a collective racial identity that not only celebrated with the stories of their own efforts,
but also their dependence upon a broader network of labourers and consumers that constituted the diverse community.
The emphasis on self definition and the early publication of this interpretation was central to controlling the public narrative of the World's Fair,
which in 1893 had failed to represent African-American achievements,
causing ideally Wells and Frederick Douglass and others to pen essays that
protested against the racism and dehumanising stereotypes that it perpetuated.
Forty years later, when faced with the opportunity to redress,
African-American leaders sought to usurp any attempt at misrepresentation throughout the 66 pages of Souvenir of Negro Progress,
author John T. interspersed Woodard's photographs,
along with a few other African-American photographers with historic facts regarding black migration,
economic achievement, as well as social and political progress from Woodard's photography in the souvenir.
We can see the strategic ways that African-American identities were defined not only through individual portraits,
but also by the establishment of a counter public sphere.
In several examples, team included a portrait of a successful entrepreneur juxtaposed with photographs of their place of business.
More than a demonstration of properties owned by African-Americans.
The completion of the SERZH with a destination enabled the imagining of participation in patronage
that was denied by the discriminatory conventions of the mainstream American public sphere,
constituting a holistic experience.
The images irrefutably documented and validated the existence of black urban modernity, bringing face in place together.
These representations thwarted Jim Crow by showing the possibility of establishing lives that were self-determined and self-reliant.
Souvenired did not simply just offer a history of progress.
Its images and brief narratives also portended the future of success of those featured in its pages and by extension,
offered readers guidelines on combating oppression through patronising and emulating black owned and operated businesses.
Mamie Klencke Skill, for example, established the ideal tearoom in 1923 from a reception for the Republican National Convention to the meeting.
That idea BlueBell's Mother Club to the marriage of Louis and Lillian Armstrong.
The ideal tea room became a destination in Chicago's Bronzeville neighbourhood.
In the souvenir, Clinkscales venue is described as a chic and colourful feature and the social life of Chicago.
For photographs by Woodard's show, a beautifully appointed reception room,
a private dining room in two tea rooms that guaranteed access to black clientele,
whereas other white owned establishments, even when located in a predominantly African-American neighbourhood,
practise segregation and discriminatory service.
At the centre of the page position, just about the photographs of the interiors is a portrait of Kingsville by Woodard's, her composed expression,
formality of dress and sideways glance at the camera convey her own social ambitions and expectations of patrons with a rose,
a black beads and upswept hair secured by an ornate Spanish comb.
She represents the most current of fashions, touting that Hearst in her establishment that quote, scarcely a day goes by.
But this is some kind of exclusive function.
Clinkscales communicates her own rising status as she simultaneously indicates the type of customers that she hopes to serve.
Yet through her portrait and photographs of the interior rooms,
she provides unlimited access to readers who may not be able to afford to dine at the ideal hotel room.
Let me imagine doing so. The reviews of her enterprise emphasise the materiality of an aesthetic experience.
c.D need the desire to partake in such luxuries,
reflecting the circular relations between interior states and material conditions more than access to the latest and best.
And silverware, linen and glassware.
What its photographs captured African-American ambition for material success and finery as part of the ability to freely express one's manners,
tastes and conventions. During Jim Crow, the indignity of segregation and the humiliation of refuse service affected all African-Americans,
regardless of their individual or social and economic status.
At the top, a full page spread. The portrait of a beautiful and successful black businesswoman directs the reader to understand
the spaces below her are part of the counter public sphere in which blackness affords entree.
Click Clinkscales own trajectory to foetid businesswoman noley models, the behaviours and appearances required for such success,
but also advocates for race matters that support the diversity of black owned businesses.
As a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, Clinkscales was critical, critical,
I should say, critical of those who would raise the colour line, discriminating against individuals with darker skin tones.
In her Chicago Defender editorial, she fiercely advocated the quote The darker hued are as qualified to cope with the demands of the day,
and that there is a place in this sphere should be merited by one's moral, intellectual worth and not by colour tests, unquote.
Through her participation in the associated business clubs,
King Clinkscales called for racial solidarity in patronising black owned businesses, noting that, quote,
We must make our dollars run in a circle and we will never achieve success until we learn how to cooperate so that every dollar we spend,
we pass through a dozen other of our hands of our business people before it gets away and.
For scale, the achievement of ownership defies segregation,
and it's connected to a broader discourse in which black consumer culture practises
converted acts of desire into political and intellectual life of distinction and defiance.
What is photographs make the efforts of black success visible,
countering the enforced invisibility of such within the mainstream public sphere as heralded in the Chicago Defender,
the souvenir of Negro press progress, quote,
accomplish its purpose of providing an intelligence of accomplishments of the race to the world and above all,
overwhelming inspiration to the hundreds of struggling Chicagoans,
as well as the masses of millions who look forward to it as a promised land and quote what its photographs of goods and services
played a significant role in expanding the awareness of the African-American Margaret Market and generating a consumer dignity.
Campaigns meant to assign positive meaning to black consumption with an indifferent,
if not hostile social context for the manufacturing sausages face powder to the services
of lunchrooms and X-ray labs wouldn't be visible not only those owning the industry,
but also those providing the labour through a wide array of publications during this era,
and when its photographs, technicians, waitresses and factory workers appear dignified,
representing themselves and their race in a positive and realistic manner that
establishes a work ethic as a central to the etiquette of the new Negro.
For these savvy businessmen, commissioning Woodard was a means of taking measure of the race's own advancement and
generated a powerful and persuasive visual narrative of African-American maternity.
Another important unity building aspect of the studio portrait was the way it was influenced by photo journalism.
This area's incredible expansion of mass media with its photo mechanical illustrations,
permitted the portrait to serve multiple purposes as called Barnett.
Establish The Associated Negro Press. In 1990, the demand for and circulation of photographs of black life increased dramatically.
Like many news agencies, Barnett did not have photographers on staff.
Rather, he purchased photographs on order,
directing photographers toward specific stories covered by a network of correspondents with improvements in ease of reproducing photographs.
Rotogravure sections that combine photo graphs and captions became more popular inserts for newspaper weekend editions.
And this period is also marked by the emergence of black media celebrities who also impacted the black
consumer culture by offering modes of dress and pose that were imitated by the general populace.
After 1920, the studio portraiture demonstrated almost universal assumption of celebrity posturing,
reflecting a shift in the photographer's approaches toward their subjects.
Instead of the so-called respectable classes showing the expressions and gestures of stage performers,
their glamorous close ups became a fashionable mode of presentation.
Like his contemporaries, Woodard composed and lit his uncelebrated subjects to the same effect as his star patrons for his photograph of receptions.
This is Lillian Bell. Woodard directed her to look over her shoulder in the same pose used by actress Franklin Alford.
In both cases, their accomplishments Taysom presence were detailed in captions affording the careful study and emulation with
black popular magazines and newspapers devoting pages to stage performers as well as previous social clubs.
The intermingling of classes was visually presented to readers through a montage of photographic portraits, if not actually experienced in person.
Forming a diverse visual composite, the images constructed a collective consciousness, staging a realm,
a receptivity around blackness that countered the absence of everyday life in the white press,
as well as the circulation of derogatory images that perpetuated racism, as evidenced in the New York Amsterdam News or in The Chicago Defender.
It was not unusual for photographs of the elite and the everyday in the inner teener to all appear on a single page.
Woodard's photographs of the Turner Twins representing Middle-Class Maternal Pride about the photograph of a minstrel comic team of Miller and Liars.
And then we have a comedian, the minister from Abyssinia, represented on the same page as Josephine Baker,
as well as Woodard's group photograph of the General Welfare League.
It is this visual intersectionality that demonstrates a people in process where everyone is afforded an opportunity to look and to be looked at.
During this decade, the work of uplift increases the urgency and scope in ideology.
Another of the organisations that sought to update and reorient uplift strategies was the Washington
intellection in two collegiate club membership was open to anyone who had college credit and curiosity.
Their programme reflected a liberal and diverse set of interests ranging from birth control to the lasting impact of imperialism.
The group published two volumes that became known as the Wonder Box, totalling over 500 pages of essays,
photographs, advertisements and lists of black agency and creativity conveying diverse points of view.
The tax review. The myriad of expectations that black youth negotiated as they were schooled in the previous generation.
Strategies for Uplift, yet sought to visualise black audience objectivity and to generate broader discourse on black cultural capital.
As one of the official photographers for both the 1927 and the 1929 editions.
What did studios help to visually express the group's objectives?
Volume one,
what it was responsible for several hundred year book style headshots that were Offaly set within an Egyptian motif designed by Charles Dodgson,
who also illustrated the cover in the pages that presented the group's members,
12 individual oval portraits are arranged alphabetically on a drawing of an
upwards topped with two angels supporting a crest with the club's parodic shield.
The obelisk is flanked by listings of the members names of the martyrs social organisations to Achee or he belonged,
as well as a brief aphorism, frequently referencing the themes of uplift.
Each subject is posed at a flattering angle and formally dressed for the occasion.
Some acquisitions against studios painted pastoral scenes, while others selected a dark,
plain curtain of you look off to the distance while others gaze directly at the camera.
And in some cases, the gaze is aligned with their chosen maxim.
The direct, confident stares and before and divis and author G files seem fitting of their respective statements of a woman can,
if she will, and never admit defeat. Continuing the EgyptAir motif,
each obelisk is anchored with a drawing of three pyramids that is diagonally crossed with a label for the intercollegiate,
the completion of what water its headshots with ancient Egyptian iconography testifies to the long shadow of Howard University
professor Alan Mark and his influential essay on the legacy of the classical civilisation inherited by African-American moderates.
At the time of the publication, Lockard recently lectured in Chicago at the opening of the Art Institute of Chicago's Negro, an Art Week exhibition.
The Wonder books read as the disease of those seeking progress and dedicated quote to those students and far
sighted citizens who gave an order that the youth of tomorrow might be inspired to become courageous leaders.
And quote the editor, Frederick Robb requested readers to, quote,
cultivate habits of thrift and thoroughness and to lay the foundation for the sound basis of character and practical sense in energy and integrity.
And quote. With the trajectory of uplift, such a charge may sound prescriptive and even oppressive.
But within the pages of this volume, even more so in the subsequent publication of Volume two.
In 1929, which adopted a more art deco style, the conceptualisation of self and society broadened to include topical essays on contemporary issues,
usually thought to be beyond the range of the middle class or Dubois's characterisation of the elite talented tenth
labour relations women's roles in industry in a satirical examination of the expectations of the old and the new.
We're all amongst the concerns discussed and photographed within its pages.
Rob followed much of Locke's characterisation of the mindset of the new Negro during her in his political AVC to achieve social justice as well as,
quote, better schools. More teachers with higher salaries.
Numerous parks and playgrounds, sanitary alleys and paved streets had for the editor and members of the intercollegiate.
The new Negro, quote, supports human principles, has a scientific mind, is broad minded.
It is an opposer of war and welcomes criticism as a stepping stone to progress in broadening previous definitions.
They proclaimed that as a fusion of the races of all the world, the new Negro was evolving an all encompassing 20th century black identity.
Central to this identity was the understanding of labour and manufacturing and the dependence upon black workers.
As noted by Chicago historian Christopher Reid.
Members of the intercollegiate dug deep to research the living and working conditions of African-Americans canvassing
Southside neighbourhoods to complete an employment survey conducted under the auspices of the Chicago Urban League.
Several of the photographs of workers that appeared in Tate's Hooven Year of Negro progress were reprinted in the second volume of the Wonder books,
but are further contextualised by research articles that encourage critical looking incident assessment of black lives.
Unlike the more celebratory tone, the souvenir Frankie Adams article titled The Negro Woman in Industry is denunciatory,
using words, photographs to advocate for the improvements in working conditions and compensation.
Adams focuses on specific labour practises that were addressed in the Urban League study published in 1922.
This study likely commissioned WOODER to document that in these trees, employing African-American women printed alongside tables with a record.
The types of industries and the number of workers employed,
whether its photographs were descriptively captioned in the study and the direct viewers toward
a critical looking to note that the work room is poorly lighted and generally unattractive,
or the shop has been prudish partitioned for the accommodation of Negro women workers.
The workshop is unattractive and the lighting is extremely poor for the character of work that is required in the photograph of the Lampshade Factory,
what it angled the camera to provide a broad view of the assembly room with its peeling paint,
while also documenting the extensive workforce labouring in a relatively narrow space in the foreground of the photograph.
Two women are seated in the front of completed elaborate decorative shades.
They do not look at the camera. Rather, they seem despondent, staring at the objects of their labour.
Their expressions contrast with the two workers directly behind them who smiles.
They focus on their task.
And at the centre of the image, a woman stands at the left holding a pencil in her hand while looking over the labouring women.
Presumably, she's a supervisor, an important achievement for an African-American worker,
as frequently they were passed over in favour of hiring whites.
Her supervision of girls. When this same image was presented in souvenir.
It was not used to address workers rights, whether it was used to illustrate the progress of industry.
The surroundings were cropped. So the only African-American supervisor and the smiling workers were visible.
The cut of the crop is especially telling as it removes the presence of the
seemingly just grunted told labourers in the foreground of the original photograph.
Tietz caption reads, Making little sheets. A group of coloured group world girl workers making lampshades.
Another industry in which Chicago beats the world.
In contrast, when the original photograph in its entirety was printed in Volume two, The Wonder books,
Adams captioned it as illustrative of his concerns, writing, quote, interior of a lamp shade factory showing coloured shade makers at work.
There is quite a small army. This class of labour in Chicago trained to give service at minimal cost.
The Negro woman must be more interested in getting labour psychology and protecting themselves through legislation, education and organisation.
Using another Woodard photograph, Adams also addressed the discrimination that African-American women faced,
noting, quote, Women play a large part in various industries in Chicago.
Usually they are unorganised, woefully underpaid, working long hours under most unhealthy conditions.
The lowest tasks are the only ones usually performed by women of colour.
The above scene is in a West Side factory. Unlike the sharp angle in the photograph of the Lampshade factory, in this image,
it centred the camera, altering its perspectives and the width and depth of the room,
or evident the workstations form of aggressive linear pattern that takes the eye to the end of the room,
where an African-American man in a suit leans against a door at each station.
Women are seated, surrounded by various hat making materials.
Some look up at the camera, but his positions in such a way that their individual features are difficult to make out.
Instead, the photograph becomes a more generalised portrait of working and the spaces in which said workers spend their hours,
as in the previous photograph. The interior is cramped and is dimly lit.
More than of space,
Woodard's photographs portray the exterior conditions that could potentially contribute to the detriment of an interior sense of worth.
Yet Adams indicates there was a labour psychology at work in these representations that is more complex,
reflecting the developing conventions around racial profiling. Relying on this strategy a visual comparison.
Adams also incorporated photographs that show good labour practises in healthier environments, as seen in the Overton Hygenic Manufacturing Company.
In this photograph, what if camera surveys and open room with a large window in which there are three rows of tables at each table?
A few workers sit labelling and assembling goods into packages should be neatly stocked.
Shelves, ample lighting and a prominent radiator give the ambience of a well-run, proud employee environment.
And it's not lost on readers that unlike the bad conditions in which the white foam factories such as the
Gauge Brothers wholesale milliner's where whereas the good conditions are provided by Anthony Overton,
maker of the popular high brow and facial power and other cosmetic products, as a point of pride, Overton,
one of the most successful African-American entrepreneurs in Chicago, had a policy of employing an exclusively African-American workforce.
Adams draws from his familiarity with such policies,
calling for the development of a labour psychology that not only generates opportunities for education and better working conditions,
higher wages and organised labour, but also develops a worker's sense of self as connected as a contributor to society, he writes.
As a group, society must work to, quote, appreciate the importance of its job.
And by this, I mean something I call job respect. The best picture of job respect was given to me one evening by one of my industrial girls
Hear Me remark that I encountered 50 silk lampshades in people's windows within a block.
And she said, quote in the quote I bought one of those lampshades was from my factory.
And Adams calls that job respect. In effect, practising job respect enable the worker to see herself as an empowered producer with the potential.
An Adam's anecdote about delivery from one of his industrial girls, however,
makes it clear class distinction between the presumed reader and the factory worker.
The two are tied together through the marketplace and the mobilisation of the working class and mutual pursuit of civil rights job.
Respect is not only a prescription for the worker, it's also a contingency for the black consumer to support.
Black owned businesses and operated industries further through the use of what are its portrait of a respectable business
and injures the would be entrepreneurs to provide appropriate working conditions and policies for their employees.
The Wonderbook demonstrate that Woodforde studios and their patrons sought to accommodate diversity,
allowing for the celebration of ambition with the ideas of common interest in what scholar Stephanie Shaw calls socially responsible individualism.
Their inception of the new Negro included urbanity. The journey.
And most importantly, civility. More than a set of mors governing comportment.
Civility was an extension of one's self to another,
reflecting the desire for mutual recognition and a form of activism that historically has been overlooked.
Actions of civility, as varied as they may be, are central to the formation of a collective consciousness and acceptance of difference to
intercollegiate progressive visualisation included Woodard's photographs of factory workers,
X-ray machinery, soldiers, gas stations, buildings, as well as the honorary portraits of the illegal settlers,
African-Americans who made Chicago their home prior to the 20th century.
In total, the Wonderbook served as a portrait of civility necessary to support black daily life.
As historian Adam Green astutely observes, the framework for uplift became a composite orientation,
melding the interests of diverse communal consistencies constituencies rather than consolidating the authority of one.
Fittingly,
Woodard placed full page advertising in both volumes of The Wonder books that address the studio's role in fostering such a diverse community.
In addition to a portrait of a staff member, the ads included a photograph of a well appointed Salam like living room,
where potential patrons could comfortably convene and view samples of the work and find quality mountings frequently mentioned in their promotions.
By establishing such spaces, would it create a place for social viewing that not only ensured his success,
but also afforded the opportunity for careful study of the way his previous subjects chose to have themselves represented?
His alon became an ever evolving primer on who was who and what to wear,
as well as the diverse ways that modern black lives were being lived with their recommendation that you,
quote, have an immortal reproduction of yourself, made the Woodard way and quote,
The photographers recognised that the commissioning of a portrait is layered with expectations.
It indicates self-worth and a desire to be remembered beyond the constraints of time and place.
It imagines that a likeness can communicate interior qualities such as respect, ambition and civility.
And as an object, its report, Reproduction, Circulation and Preservation,
reflects social capital determining its value in the past, present and future.
What its work demonstrates, how portraiture was and is to be understood as one of the ways in which social groups and individuals,
collectively and individually represent themselves to themselves.
Looking to the depth and the breadth of hundreds of photographs that were produced in Goodhead Studios,
we can better understand the Harlem Renaissance not only as a moment characterise for our
call for more virtuous black images and more depictions of the upper and middle classes,
but also an era that fostered intersectional social consciousness.
Further. If we can keep in mind the fluidity of modern identity and see these earlier sources as one of many sites of
continuous production definition and redefinition of roles and behaviours we can understand in the woods,
photographs not only provide critical memory of black subjectivity,
but also foster are all contemporary consciousness and actions of civility because of their efforts as well as those of their patrons.
We can regard the Obama portraits within this historic scheme and marvel at their presence and aspire to attain their level of dignity.
Thank you so very much, very much look forward to your questions and the opportunity to have a discussion with Dr. Deborah Willis.
Hi, Amy. Thank you. OK.
Got all the clicks in order. Thank you. Really enlightening and important to think about all of the points you brought up within the lecture.
I'm thinking about today as we think about what's going on in the world today and to consider the concept
of portraits and protests and how connecting Woodard's work to the collective imagination from the future,
from now into the past, but also through the future. So I love the idea that you talk about winterised images,
but I also would like everyone else says as you begin to think about it, also to add your questions to the YouTube.
On the right side, there's a chat room.
We have about four questions now that I'd like to start off with one of my questions and to think about the concept of protest portraits,
photography as portraiture and protests, but also just think about how you use how not you.
But also the idea of looking at today when we see what's going on in the news,
how Woodard is also looking at this sense of what's missing from the news.
In the 1920s and 30s in Chicago.
How how can you talk more about how he was able to create not only the realities of the people that he photographed or own business owners,
but also their desires not only for uplift, but also for just having a life of a business life and women working?
I see the women, I think, in this shirt where they're sure their skirts and their shirts in the factory at the Overton factory.
So that collective sense of protests outside of the workers, the imagination of the larger culture,
that he was able to identify a way to look at black people in the broader sense of the reality of the everyday life there.
So just talk about some of the things that you found in that connecting that sense of protest from the outside world.
No. Thank you. Obviously, this project is so based upon your own research, I think about some of the very early things that you published.
Obviously, we all know reflections in black, but that black photographers,
an illustrated bibliography that you did, really had that listing of not only words,
but such a wide other array of commercial photographic studios that we have yet to explore and hence say it with pictures.
So thank you so much. And then also I want to recognise to the work of Volunteer Corps and the Black Women's Collective,
who likewise in Chicago did a lot of preliminary research. And I think that if we kind of look broadly at Woodard and try to contextualise them,
I know I focussed on him specifically for this chapter of it in our larger work and imagining
this collective desire to see yourself represented and recognising that you are not represented.
When you look broadly at visual culture and you look at the movies and you
look at the newspapers and you don't see yourself as you knew yourself to be,
I think is really the kind of pivotal point where these photographers were able to step in and
become generative and become supportive and then a whole kind of system evolves from that.
I mean, one of the key things to think about is that Woodard himself is a worker. Right.
And so he is very much thinking about the labour of photography and the way that it can be employed as a form of advocacy.
Fantastic. Here's a question here.
It's really interesting to see the interaction of the verbal and the visual and the way in which images are useful ways to convey complex ideas,
often just thinking about word and image.
Can you think of instances where there are tensions or something that's dialectical that's going on with these images?
I think that we saw a little that tension happening in the one Woodard image of the Lampshade factory where we saw it cut artfully.
And I remember looking at that image. I encountered it first in the Tate souvenir.
And I thought I was so all I did. OK. This was just a little art moment that, you know, some editor had.
But then when I encountered it later in the intercollegiate Wonderbook,
it was so clear that one source, Ed, was looking at it as an image of progress in an industry,
whereas the other one was really looking at it as to, again, call out exploitation and to really call use it as a form of advocacy.
So I think that that is a good example. Where, again, captions very much themselves act as the lens and they really narrow.
I think many ways that we approach an image, Hubble, for you to have in your work, if you like.
It's this. Now, I just wanted to respond to one of those.
The images that and the factory, the lampshade factory I found fascinating because I felt the two women were resisting the portrait.
I felt that they didn't want to be directed. They didn't want to sit at the front.
And so so that they were there. Their stance and their pose, I felt, was a sense of resistance to the movement.
And that's I kind of read their their images. So that's fascinating.
When even when they were cut out.
I miss the tension between the two, you know, workers who were pleased with the ideas that they were doing or pleased to be photographed.
Please keep working. You know, all of that is going on in there.
There's another question here. Your readings of the photography of labour and conditions, labour conditions was was utterly fascinating.
Did this focus help? Did this focus help make positive changes to the lives of those workers?
You know, I don't know if I can really speak to that.
I don't think that I'm entirely sure that there were some of the progressive reforms in those particular companies.
What I do know is that African-American entrepreneurs did, in fact, really helpful labour practises.
And like Anthony Overton, really made it a point to talk about his own companies not only being hygenic in a kind of cleanliness way,
but also very much supporting spirituality.
There's this astounding pamphlet that he puts out that includes spirituals and relates his product to the cosmetics
that he's making and then to the impact that he's having on Chicago in terms of being a successful entrepreneur.
And in one way, we could see that arc is like, oh, you know, all about himself and self promotion.
But another way, the way that he is combining culture and capitalism and the way that he is using also an advocate seed,
I think is really complex and worthwhile.
And we think about the work of darling Plaquemines and Jackie Jones, who are looking at women and Labour and Kathy Steets peace within the whole.
Her project on Hope in the Jar, her book.
But to think about the positive changes, the lives of the workers, they were working.
That's one positive change. I had an opportunity for education for their children and for their families.
And that's where I think when I look at the images of the group of women working that were working in the factories that they and then the hope of.
I love Mamie Clinkscales. I did not know her story, but also her tearoom.
So what I see in this sense of positive changes, I see this as a sense of growth,
that these women who were working had opportunities to have a leisure life as well as as a labour life in terms of working.
And that's how I kind of think about this. Answer those questions.
So I have another question, says one of the key words you often come back to is agency.
And there is a really powerful aspect of your lecture. Thank you.
What about the agency or the presence of the photographer? There was a fascinating discussion of cropping, for instance.
So I'd like to hear more about how the photographers conceptualise their own role and agency.
Did you ever write about their this explicitly?
This is a really tough question because unfortunately, Woodard's, in all its ubiquity that I've been sharing, does not have its own outcome.
Instead, its work is in the archives of all of its patrons and all of its publications.
And as such, we do not have a narrative to reclaim from the photographer other than what I have discovered
in a couple of interviews and magazines from the time that is shared within the lecture.
The other key thing to note, too, is there's a Woodard. But then there are many Woodard's.
So because it's a franchise which is really unique and interesting.
I think there are many individuals who are coming in and flavouring the kind of types of photography,
the approaches and their questions on how they interacted with their subjects.
So I think with their research, we might be able to tease out more specifics.
Like I know that at one point, Woodard's highly hires Myles Webb.
He actually was an independent photographer working in Chicago who had a school of photography that unfortunately was not successful.
And he comes to work for Woodard. So I think that there would be a really interesting interest is to try to further.
Understand, there are particular approaches and then there's also a really interesting back and forth
here within their own dialogue as to whether their work was perceived as art or not,
because in one way, we're really talking about commercial photography. We're talking about studio photography.
But yet at another time, Woodard strikes out and tries to get his photographs displayed in the hallway of a movie theatre.
Again, this idea of an exhibition. So I think that there's so much more work to be done in this aspect.
But perhaps, Deb, I'm thinking about what are the most influential books and exhibitions you put together?
The resistance be your motto that was about agency, right?
That's true. Let your motto be resistance.
The what I that question also takes me back to a wonderful film on the photographers, Morgan and Marvin Smith Moore posterity's sake.
They talk openly about agency and what they wanted to share in creating the images.
So they're the person who has a chance, is it?
South Carolina television of a television has it in their archive of Morgan and Martin Smith.
And they actually have a concept about that, about agency.
But I think the agency is also found in their advertising.
And when you read the advertisers advertising of of specifically the ones you just talked about, if Woodard and some of the others,
they describe what they see and what they feel that people how people should look and
what they should wear and what they hope that these people could do for the future.
I think that sense of agency, they they actually are expressing that in their in the advertising.
So we have another question. You talk about intersectionality this evening and an after exploring the nexus between gender and race,
where your US photographers aware of contemporary developments in interwar photography in Europe,
which was interest, which was interested in questions of class and worker identities.
I'm thinking here of August Sander, who's haunting photographs of German workers, are really interesting aesthetic and political objects.
I don't know if I can answer that question directly, but what I do know is that would it definitely it was looking at broad,
the mainstream Kodak and different kinds of photography magazines.
So I would not be surprised if he was very aware of different aesthetics and trends and engaged in that life.
He just wasn't represented in it. So I'm not entirely sure.
But we'll have to find out when we think about because of that time period, Sanders photographs were not circulating like they're circulating today.
So we really have to keep in mind of the access that we have today.
There's another question about the suffragette movement, the black suffragette movement.
How many women were photographed? I know. Worse to be Welles would do.
Is there a section that Woodard might have had or is there some some of the aid, some of the organisations that he photographed?
I heard that he definitely worked with WCP, but he didn't.
I'm aware of wasn't commissioned by a specific black suffragette movement, but he did photograph many of the suffragettes.
So, for example, Irene Gaines, she was definitely a long term patron.
And it's actually through Irene Gaines is diary that we get an understanding of what it cost for a Woodard setting.
She actually wrote it down and she was getting a whole spate of images created, I think a total of like 10 different poses.
And it was going to cost twenty dollars that she wrote down. So that was really fascinating discovery to see her represented.
But I think one of the other key things, too, is that Woodard was patronised by African-American women entrepreneurs,
especially Marjorie Stewart, Joan Joyner, who we know was this amazing entrepreneur focussed on black women's cosmetics.
She took was trained through Madam Walker's programmes, and then she established schools in Chicago.
And also she established beauty parlours.
And Woodard was hired to go and to spur supermoms, take photographs of the graduating classes to celebrate their accomplishments,
and then likewise to come into the beauty studios and to document her invention because she invents this kind of perm kind curler as wave to set with,
you know, bobs of the day, the undulations as such. And then also to just kind of.
Staged photographs so that women could understand, oh, well, this is what a modern, well appointed studio will look like and you two could have one.
And so she used those photographs and a lot of different promotions.
So migration is a is a is a wonderful story linked to this experience of the studio photographers in Chicago.
We know in terms of the migratory patterns from the South to the Midwest, and many of the people were migrant workers and many worked in the fields.
Now we see people working. I love the the ED where the faces of the women who will serve you.
So we know we see this. But I'm curious about this is a question here.
And then I want to add to my question with it. What a phenomenal talk someone said and they said thank you.
And I was wondering if you had noticed any style differences that arose from regional distinctions,
for instance, from Chicago to New York to the north and to the south.
And you introduced that with Baddi and the earlier photographers would ask you.
So I'm curious terms expanding standing that did you notice the style of in terms of
this actual seated post seated poses and three quarter length as standing poses?
Well, definitely in York, Woodard really works with these stars of the screen and stage.
And so definitely headshots, because, again, we know that this was something that the actors needed.
You know, that that was essentially a mode of ensuring employability.
So I definitely see a kind of increase in that and that at that point of time, I also know that it's him.
William E. Woodard is actually the person who is in New York where the other studios that continue to productivity during this time.
Again, there's just such a wide array of subjects. You know, you would think that at a certain point that we only have a face shot, the upclose.
But then I see, again, a variety of images coming back, like the one that was done by Elliot Carpenter.
He and his partner chose something that looks more like Thomas excuse approach.
So it's even though their work was done more toward the late thirties. So they're really different.
It seems so personal. And then I think what was really interesting about Woodford's as a studio is that you could go in and say,
this is my style and that they will try to accommodate it or try to help you hone it or direct it in a particular way.
And I think that that's why they were successful. Did you think in terms of the that question and relationship to the history of Frederick Douglass,
his portraits and the way that we see that Hendaye Wiley and Amy Sherrell in terms
of using photography first to preserve the image and to reference it later.
But now we're thinking about there's a question here that relates to an image of
a police today and are being photographed kneeling down with the protesters.
Mm hmm. So when we think about that, that is to be documented. That's that's documented.
But in terms of the tension that's happening now, what about the portrait, as if they're being photographed showing solidarity,
but also some later other policemen are feeding some of these people that that are kneeling with them.
So when we think about how photographs are used of propaganda, what are you considering?
I see this as we I believe in terms of what the boy says.
You know, art is propaganda.
But I also believe that propaganda has its good side in terms of pushing forward the portraits of people who were never recognised in fortunes,
of people who are seen as as human.
So when we think about these aspects of the humanity of these portraits, they have an action and they have an action that lasts today.
And so I'm curious about and this will be our last question since we are at our time limit.
But how do we reimagine this aspect of propaganda to expand upon the notion of humanity in all of these portraits that you shared with us today?
Absolutely. Portraiture is powerful. It's really the point where we are looking at one another in that look,
you have to decide how you value and see yourself as well as the individual who is in front of you.
And I think especially as we move through the lecture series and we're going to be looking at a
series of portraits that were done and now reside at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington,
D.C. There was definitely a subscription that through the portrait,
you could end racism by actually looking at someone in the face and recognising their accomplishments,
seeing their dignity, that there was it was irrefutable.
And then suddenly you would have to change your actions the way you voted, the way you were thinking.
And I think that this is one of the things that really needs to come back into our consciousness.
When you are looking at another person, how are you going to hold them in regard?
Are you going to have that moment of consciousness or are you going to refuse their humanity?
And unfortunately, right now we see quite significant refusal and quite significant racism.
Thank you, Amy. Thank you so much. That's a wonderful experience for us to explore the full aspect of photography.
Photography and portraiture for portraiture and protest that it's been an inspiring and thoughtful, thought provoking talk.
And to think I'd like to think about how we can move forward in the future to see photography in terms of the humanity of this experience.
But also I'd like to thank the towards team for hosting this tonight.
But also and they made it possible for us to explore this across the pond.
And for all of us to share this. And I'd like to thank you.
Thank all of the viewers from home and watching and experiencing from wherever you are in the world.
Please join us for next week's event, the 3rd of the terror lecture series with Amy Mooney on Monday, June eight at five p.m. U.K. time.
Next time, Amy will be joined by Melanie Chambless,
assistant professor in Humanities History and Social Sciences, Department of Columbia College, Chicago.
Thank you.