Non-Black photographers need to step aside and let Black people tell their own stories. It's the most helpful thing they can do.
- In the wake of global protests over the killing of George Floyd, photos of the demonstrations have flooded news coverage.
- But allowing white and non-Black photographers to capture these images contributes to a long history of erasure, exploitation, and misrepresentation of Black communities.
- It's paramount that publications and editors assign these stories to Black photographers, and for non-Black photographers to step aside.
Right now, Black people are being attacked at every imaginable level. Black transgender women are brutalized and murdered. Black men are choked to death in the streets, gunned down on sidewalks, hunted and shot while jogging, and even shot to death sitting in their own homes. Black women are mysteriously falling from roofs, murdered in parking lots, and shot to death while sleeping in their beds.
The long-foreshadowed race war, which has been in progress since the dawn of Reconstruction and arguably before, appears new in the light of technology, the surveillance state, and the carceral state. The capacity for sharing the truths of this moment has been elevated to unimaginable heights because of the power and import of social media. Now, more than ever, Black people have the opportunity to share our stories and our experiences, from our perspectives, rewriting an egregious history of erasure and framing.
So why is it so hard for white photographers and white publications to stop erasing our voices?
Historically, depictions of Black people, Black life, and Black need have been grossly manipulated
The image of the Black man as a brute, savage, or animal finds its roots in slavery and the propaganda that was used to normalize Black people as property meant to be dominated. Caricatures of Black people as unintelligent and unintelligible, as Sambos and Sapphires, and as monsters and mammies, have had long-lasting effects on how Black people are perceived and treated around the world.
During the current protests meant to honor the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Sean Reed, and the many, many other Black people brutalized and murdered by state-sanctioned violence, Black people have had to contend with so much. We have had to reckon with insurmountable loss during a global pandemic that ruthlessly targets our communities.
Many of us are so enraged by this current slew of atrocities that we've decided to put our own lives in jeopardy amidst the ravages of the pandemic; to storm the streets and demand something this country has never once offered its Black architects — justice.
We've had to deal with fantastical, destructive, and childish anarchists who treat this moment like a re-creation of "V for Vendetta" or the chaos largely romanticized in "Joker." These people cannot engage with the world unless it's through the lens of fantasy.
They are fixated on stirring violence and setting things on fire, and they are co-opting the movement for Black lives and fixing the lens of this moment on Donald Trump and his cataclysmic failure as a human being and a president. But this unrest is about much more than the Orange Menace; it is about whiteness, white supremacy, violence, racism, fairness, and this country's refusal to reckon with its history. And in this moment, it is clearer than it has ever been that white folks still believe that they are the best people to tell our story in the mainstream.
Books, journalism, music, photography, and cinema have often tried to manipulate the viewer into adopting a specific viewpoint; consumers then deduce how to feel about a subject based on this perspective.
We are now witnessing the irresponsible legacy of this framing carry over to the coverage of these protests
A prominent example can be found in Philip Montgomery's recent photo essay for Vanity Fair. The images, although beautiful, exposed protesters' faces, cinematized and sensationalized their outrage, and implied that moments of historical Black unrest are best captured by a non-Black photographer. Montgomery was even given unfettered access to George Floyd's memorial service.
The photos stirred non-stop ethical debates in both Montgomery's and Vanity Fair's Instagram comments. After days of silence, Montgomery finally released a statement in his Instagram stories. It was mostly empty of any accountability or historical knowledge. Although Vanity Fair never responded to questions around their ethics and hiring practices, days later it published a story that contained photographs sourced from a variety of Black and POC photographers, seemingly in an attempt to shift the conversation.
New York Magazine, meanwhile, chose to commemorate this moment in "George Floyd's America" by having a white photographer — ironically named Michael Christopher Brown — photograph their cover. This does nothing to honor Floyd's legacy; it simply builds on this country's dependence on racial erasure and historical amnesia.
When Black photographers are included in this discourse, it is either as an afterthought or through plunder. Buzzfeed apparently understood the importance of looking at the current protests through the eyes of Black photographers, but simply embedded their images from Instagram, utilizing a new legal precedent. The product was a list that eloquently demonstrates the problems that Black photographers constantly face.
No one forces white photographers to accept assignments that involve lofty and intricate racial sensitivities
No one is forcing white photographers to imbue themselves with the power of telling a person or a people's story that they could never understand. No one forces white photographers to make personal bodies of work that center the plight and panic of the Black experience.
As a photographer, you have the capacity to decline an assignment that you do not adequately understand. If white photographers and photojournalists cared about Black people and their Black peers, beyond putting a pointless black square on their Instagram profiles as some foolish attempt at public solidarity, they would simply decline these assignments, state the reasons why, and recommend someone from these communities to tell their own story.
More of the blame should be placed on the laziness and incompetence of the photo editors who look nothing like the people in the stories they commission. Over the past three years of working as a photographer, I have watched, gobsmacked, by the constant displays of favoritism, elitism, and nepotism in the photography industry.
Simply put, photo editors tend to hire those who resemble them. I have gotten into countless arguments with these people about their hiring practices. Many of the photo editors that I have spoken to have told me directly that they have colorblind hiring policies that don't consider race. That these institutions leave Black photographers out while simultaneously priding themselves on diversity and inclusion is laughable.
More importantly, how is it that white photo editors — who should know better than most about the importance of framing, and the history involved — don't understand the ethical responsibility they have to hire people from the communities they photograph?
In photography, much of the visual discourse, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Movement for Black Lives, has been dominated by the same groups who put forth grotesque depictions of Black people
You can trace the plight and the violence that our community faces to the historical and global depictions of Black people as lazy, violent, and uneducated, instead of underfunded and under siege. When a white photographer shows up to our communities and sticks a camera in our faces, it directly contributes to this lineage. There's little reason to trust that this is not the very intention.
During the 2014 protests demanding justice for Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, innumerable white photographers stormed the community. They dove through crowds, ducked teargas canisters, and dodged rubber bullets meant to disperse the crowd. They did all of this to capture award-winning images.
Robert Cohen captured an impactful photograph of activist Edward Crawford throwing a tear gas canister back at police. While Cohen won himself a Pulitzer, Crawford was found dead from a gunshot wound, an alleged suicide. (Five other men, all with connections to the protests, have since died under mysterious circumstances.)
With the advancement of surveillance technology, everybody participating in protests has a responsibility to blur out the faces of protesters, or find new ways to photograph them that makes them unidentifiable. This is paramount. White photographers and publications neglecting this practice, with the intention to win awards, can be fatal.
These conversations are now taking place online and across social media. Photography collectives like Women Photograph, Authority Collective, and Diversify Photo have been vocal about urging white photographers and publications to reconsider their harmful practices.
They've written open letters to discriminatory contests, publications, and camera companies, doing social media takeovers that highlight the brilliant work of Black photographers and photographers of color for hire, and creating resource databases for readings and events that hope to further the agenda of equalizing the playing field. During the current protests, Authority Collective created a resource called "Do No Harm: Photographing Police Brutality Protests" that urges the reader to reconsider and interrogate the role, history, and intentions of white photographers and publications as well as offering best practices.
Speaking to white people about justice and truth, for so many of us, feels like screaming in agony into a void of intentional ignorance. The consequences of racial bias and media framing, the continued painting of Black people as animals, as violent, as deserving of extermination, as anything other than human, is bolstered every time white and non-Black photographers are commissioned to tell our stories.
White and non-Black photographers continue to pillage our communities, to profit from our culture, our aesthetics, our anguish, while never offering us opportunities to right the wrongs of history and create truer narratives. There are more than enough capable, skilled photographers around the globe to tell their own stories. We must stop offering the pen that writes the narratives of our lives and our histories to the same white men and women who have and continue to do us the most harm.
A real show of love for Black people involves simply listening. It involves recalibrating your thinking and reconditioning the harmful, voyeuristic, white supremacist sensationalism that so many photographers and publications champion.
Most importantly, it means hiring brilliant Black photographers and all photographers of color. There is a history out there that needs correcting. Let us tell our own stories.
Gioncarlo Valentine is an award-winning American photographer and writer based in New York. Backed by his seven years in the social work field, Valentine's work focuses on issues faced by marginalized populations, most often focusing his lens on the experiences of Black/LGBTQIA+ communities. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times and has had his work published in Propublica, Esquire, The Fader, The Rumpus, and The New Yorker.
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