With Professors Deborah Willis and Tamar Garb

Images of black social protest are forever fixed in the popular imagination through photography. From the medium’s beginning, race and gender have shaped and controlled the production and reception of photographic representations of people, both politically and aesthetically. This conversation will explore the mobilisation of photographs in the ongoing struggle for human rights, and with reference to the American Civil Rights and Anti-Apartheid movements. We will think about visual activism, visual politics and the power of images to record and advocate at the same time as register violence, erasure and repression. The historical role of photographers in producing an archive chronicling social issues, racialised death and trauma as well as resistance and refusal provides a resource with which we can think, navigate and describe the past. How these relate to current struggles for recognition and redress are urgent issues that contemporary reworkings of the archive, and visual/oral testimony address.