06/05/2020
I have been struggling. As a white photographer, I have been ambivalent about our role in documenting this historic time. I love the fact that we, Caucasians can support our friends of color by coming out and protest against police brutality and 400 years of injustice that WE caused. We are responsible, we are the problem, and we have to be a large part of the solution.
However, we as white photographers can't deny our white privilege that allows us to afford expensive equipment, allows us to be seen in galleries and in social media, allows us to get attention for our work on whatever we are working on, allows us to be hired by leading media outlets, allows us to travel, to create a genre of "travel photography" with pretty images of places and emotional photos of suppressed and impoverished communities that we have no connections with.
When we take photos, we inject our view and our ego into our art. When I see white people taking selfies while marching, I can't stop asking, whether those images taken are about the taker or the subject. The verb "to take" a photo speaks for itself. You take a piece of reality and make it yours. Then you post it on social media and get hundreds of "likes". Are those likes for the beautiful images coming from an established photographer to congratulate them for their courage to participate and for their "eye" for the best composition, or they are for the subject that they photograph, the documentation of an event or the lives of "others".
To me, it is time for photographers of color be recognized and deserve to lead in this fight. For the next not sure how long, I am committed to post about great African-American photographer from the history of photography, who are not included in history of photography textbooks, even if they created very important work during their carrier while often fighting prejudice.
James Presley Ball was a free man, born in 1825 in Frederick Co. VA and died in 1904 in Honolulu, HI. He learned from John Baley and become one of the masters of the daguerreotype technique. He created the exhibition of "Ball's Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States: Comprising Views of the African-American Slave Trade". He photographed a bunch of white prominent figures and took the iconic photo of Frederick Douglass. However, one of his most touching works is the portraits of William Biggerstaff, a freed slave who was convicted in Helena, MT for the killing of another African-American man over a white woman. Ball fought for justice for Biggerstaff, who claimed self-defense without success and was lynched in 1896. Ball took photos before, during and after the ex*****on. (sources: https://sites.duke.edu/vms590s_01_f2012/tag/technique/ , wikipedia)
