Eluding Capture: Shooting and Showing the Black Body from the Heart of Empire

About

CLASS DESCRIPTION

Through photography, paint and pen, the so-called West has imagined, invented and ingrained the Black body as an object to be seen, explored, studied and excavated at will. In fact, it is not possible to explore the history of image-making and analysis, without encountering the captured Black body again and again and again. Amongst many others, I argue that this way of seeing and being seen persists today, now across advertising, film and television, and of course social media. For those of us situated here - in the heart of Empire - how then do we show images of Black bodies - both archival and contemporary in ways that do not fix them under a hostile microscope, a dehumanising lens? How do we empower the image and the person or people it seeks to depict? In a world increasingly dominated by images, where what and how we see so often determines what we believe and how we behave, it is more important than ever to interrogate our role in shaping and sharing the visual world.

Is it ever possible to elude capture? In this lecture, I engage intersectional Black feminist research principles to explore the politics, practices and ethics of what and how we show the Black body, a culture I argue we are all involved in. What contexts, tools and tactics can we employ to challenge, subvert and shift not only the way we show these images, but also how we look at them, how we invite others to look, and thus how we look at and see ourselves.

ABOUT OUR LECTURER

Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone is a British-Ghanaian speculative writer, artist, researcher and pleasure activist whose praxis navigates that which she has termed “Intimate Ecologies” to explore Blackness, aesthetics and queer, pleasurable, interspecies futures. Ama is an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London), an MFA tutor at the Sandberg Institute (Amsterdam), and a Research Associate at VIAD (University of Johannesburg). Ama’s wider intra-disciplinary work thinks through sustainable ecologies of care and more-than-survival for BIPoC women and queer folk in the arts and academia. Ama’s writing was shortlisted for the 2023 Future Worlds Prize, she has had essays, short fiction and art writing published internationally, and has been exhibited across Europe. Ama has submitted her PhD at Birkbeck University of London; is a curatorial fellow with Frame Contemporary Art Finland (Helsinki) and EVA International (Limerick); a participant of the first Postnatural Independent Programme (Madrid); and was the 2020/21 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism with Bard College (New York). Ama’s work has been translated into Twi, French (forthcoming), German and Swedish.

INSTAGRAM: @amajosephine

X: @pleasureproff