The tempo of academic publishing is sometimes maddeningly slow, but it also provides the opportunity to return to archival research with fresh eyes, and the perspectives of other scholars and researchers, and to think about what it means for the present.
As part of my ongoing research into how racialized subjects pictured themselves as citizens in Canada after 1947, my essay about family photography in The Clarion newspaper, and the use of Viola Desmond’s studio portrait in the past and present, is out now in the journal Visual Studies. Though the research for this article began with a search for images of Desmond in the Nova Scotia Archives, it quickly became a much wider story about how the newspaper served both community, national and international anti-racist mobilizing in the post-war period. I’m grateful to many people for their feedback, ideas, and references in developing this paper, particularly Deanna Bowen, Gayatri Gopinath, Ariella Azoulay and the anonymous journal reviewers.
A short excerpt is below and the full article is available online:
This intersection of the physical spaces and temporal phases of anti-racist activism and photographic visibility means that many of the activities that would lay the groundwork for the modern Civil Rights movement went un-photographed. As the visual theorist Leigh Raiford writes, ‘Photography is well suited to capturing demonstrations, confrontations, action. Yet by the very nature of its production and dissemination, the medium often cannot so easily capture long-term organizing, growth, development, process’ (2011, 236). For the visual historian, looking for images of early civil rights activism in Canada therefore necessitates looking to private images, in the form of family photography and studio portraiture, and how they circulated, to trace the visual residues of the actions and affects of these quiet and determined activists. As part of my larger study into how racialised subjects used the camera to make claims for belonging at the moment Canada’s first citizenship laws were being passed in 1947, this essay charts the traffic of visual grammar across emerging Black counter-publics in Canada and the United States after the Second World War, and it asks how domestic photography was deployed in this traffic: both to claim the position of the citizen, and as a generative and forceful genre that could respond to acts of racial violence happening across North America. The essay therefore builds on a growing body of work that critically revaluates the political work that family photography does (Hirsch 1997; Hirsch and Spitzer 2020; Lum 2017; Orpana and Parsons 2017; Wexler 2000), arguing against totalising assumptions that domestic photography is always used as an apparatus of social control and attending to its ‘aspirational politics’ as a diasporic practice of refusal (Phu and Brown 2018). In what follows, I examine how domestic and private images from the 1940s prefigured now well-established debates about respectability politics and quietness in civil rights discourse and image-making. In so doing, the essay does not seek to resolve these tensions but to demonstrate the uneasy ways questions of self-presentation have informed the imagery of Black citizen claims in the post-war period, and to look for the frequencies of resistance (Campt 2017) that these seemingly banal and domestic photographs might nevertheless contain.
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