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PHOTOGRAPHY: RACE RIGHTS AND REPRESENTATION Mark Sealy

Lawrence Wishart 978-1913-5463-35 £ 14

Following the 2019 publication of Decolonizing the Camera: Photography in Racial Time, this new collection from Mark Sealy presents his writings across the past 30 years, during which time he has been best known as the director of Autograph, formerly called the Association of Black Photographers. The variety of these texts is rich and invigorating, covering a huge amount of ground. In this way, his new book could be said to offer breadth where the previous work offered depth, and the two complement one another very helpfully. In most of these short, direct essays, Sealy is ‘writing with’ photographers’ works on the occasion of certain publications or exhibitions curated by himself and others, including work by Maud Sulter, Joy Gregory, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, James Van Der Zee, Wendy Ewald and Oscar Muñoz. Other chapters take the form of more personal reflection or two-way conversations, formerly published in a variety of settings. They are brought together here, he says, as ‘cultural offerings that attempt to give voice to historically marginalised perspectives within photography’. From this dynamic constellation of writings, certain concepts recur and persist, such as what it means to ‘read’ or interpret images, and the colonial determinism that underlies photography’s epistemological framing, no matter its subject. Rather than headlining the publication in an explicit way, these threads of argument are there for the reader to gather up for themselves in a way that aligns with Sealy’s discussion of jazz as a model for thinking and seeing. There is a repeated rejection, for example, of the orthodoxy of a ‘decisive moment’, which is linked by Sealy to an Enlightenment, and by extension, Imperialist epistemology. One of his methods for pushing back against this is to consistently foreground the heart, affect, and the emotional context that determines both the making and viewing of photography. He writes movingly of his own moments of encounter, the most direct and detailed of which is offered in response to photographer Max Kandhola’s Illustration of Life (2003), seen in the aftermath of the death of Sealy’s own father. This is one reminder, among many in the book, of the importance of allowing affect to move us beyond the formal frame of a photograph, not least because this can make way for the possibility of political change. While the collected writings originate as far back as 1995, the book opens close to the present moment, with a conversation between Sealy and Foam Magazine editor Elisa Medde, originally published in October 2020. This puts all that follows into a contemporary and urgent context. In their discussion, Sealy and Medde reflect on the

Images from Towards a Promised Land (2005-6) by Wendy Ewald cultural and political shifts that have followed the murder of George Floyd, providing a prism though which to see the content of the book as a whole. This moment was ‘vital’, writes Sealy, because of how ‘it arches us back to centuries of violence against black people.’ Sealy is an authority on the British photography industry of the past thirty years and beyond. He is arguably at his strongest in the portions of the book in which he is a history-teller, making it an essential primer on the history of photography in the UK. He effectively weaves together analysis of photographic work with an account of this structural background: the political movements that made certain work possible or necessary, the funding landscape, the relationships and flows of power, community and infrastructure – all of which are described from his perspective as both a hugely influential insider and someone always attuned to the marginal and marginalised. The conversations that open each section of the book serve well to include the voices of other key figures, including Stuart Hall, Earlie Hudnall and Sunil Gupta – Hall’s work is also referenced throughout the book as a critical touchstone.

Where the role of the curator can sometimes be perceived as little more than ‘art-world’ gatekeeper, Sealy makes a clear case for the political and representational significance of curation as labour, reminding us of the capacity for curation to redress harm, making space for ideas, visibility and counter-hegemonic narratives. ‘For historically marginalised people,’ he writes, ‘photographs, when presented with care, can help locate our missing chapters. Images keep people in life; when curated with dignity, they can resurrect cultures than have been denied visibility or made silent.’ This work is a valuable contribution to the recent and long-overdue critical discourse on the practice of curation in general, and in particular its ethics of care.

— Jennifer Good