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What Is The Theme Of In Our Glory Photography And Black Life By Bell Hooks

1504 Words7 Pages

An Evaluation of bell hooks’ Definition of “Representation” In bell hooks’ essay “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” bell hooks suggests to African Americans to use the power of photography in their fight for representation. Throughout her essay, hooks highlights how photography is an essential tool for liberation in the black community and for combating the black images brokered by white society as the black reality. hook wrestles with the idea of visual politics and her belief that blacks could control their own representation by harnessing the power of the camera to capture their own photographic images. Hooks views the “field of representation is an ongoing struggle.” (hooks 57) she defines this “field of representation” as “how …show more content…

She describes how her father, the top the “patriarchy in [their] household.”(60), was known as “picture takin’ man” putting him in charge of making them pose for cameras, thus bell hooks “hated the images that camera produces”(hooks 60) so much that she “refused to be captured by anybody else’s camera”(hooks 61) and to “document her life.” (hooks 61) Her experience highlighted the power of the photographers and the ability they have to choose the image you will portray. How could these photos be “true-to-life” snapshots if they were stages and posed? Bell hooks earlier explains how “contemporary commodification of blackness creates a market context wherein conventional even stereotypical, modes of representing blackness may receive the greatest reward” (hooks 58) Images that would “subvert the status quo are harder to produce.” “There are no perceived markets for them,” hooks claims. From this statement, we can see that within picture taking, the photographer is also influenced by the questions of how the images could be perceived by the viewer, giving the viewer more power than the photographer. In order to create pictures freely, the black community should focus on creating a “perceived market” (hooks 58) that would accept their photos and their true sense of

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