Shine by Krista Thompson

SHINE
the visual economy of light in

african diasporic aesthetic practice
krista thompson
SHINE
The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
K r i s ta T h o m p s o n
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Duke University Press

Durham and London 2015
© 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thompson, Krista A., 1972–
Shine : the visual economy of light in African diasporic aesthetic practice /
Krista Thompson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5794-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5807-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-7598-2 (e-book)
1. Mass media and culture—United States. 2. Mass media and culture—Caribbean
Area. 3. Photography—Social aspects—United States. 4. African diaspora. i. Title.
p94.5.m552u685 2015
302.2′22—dc23 2014029965
Cover art: Ebony G. Patterson, Untitled Lightz I, 2013, detail. Mixed media
on paper, 81 × 148 in. Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery;
collection of Bill and Christy Gautreaux, Kansas City, MO.
This project was supported by the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts
Writers Grant Program.
Duke University Press also gratefully acknowledges the support of the

Globalization and the Artist Project of the Duke University Center for
International Studies, and Northwestern University, which provided funds
toward the publication of this book.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
For Ella, Chaz, Xavier, and Gabriella,
for the next show and tell
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xv
INTRODUCTION: Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 1

1 “KEEP IT REAL”
Street Photography, Public Visibility,
and Afro-Modernity 47
2 VIDEO LIGHT
Dancehall and the Aesthetics of
Spectacular Un-visibility in Jamaica 112
3 SHINE, SHIMMER, AND SPLENDOR

African Diasporic Aesthetics and the Art
of Being Seen in the Bahamas 169
4 THE SOUND OF LIGHT

Reflections on Art History in the
Visual Culture of Hip-Hop 215

Notes 271

Bibliography 317

Index 335
ILLUSTRATIONS
I.1 Bashment, a public bus in Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica, 2009 2

I.2 Kehinde Wiley, Three Boys, 2013 4
I.3 mob dancers performing in the video light, Santa Cruz, Jamaica,
2009 6
I.4 Street photography studio in New Orleans, 2009 8
I.5 Photo Sonny’s street photography studio, Kingston, Jamaica,
2010 11
I.6 The mob dancers, Kingston, Jamaica, 2011 13
I.7 Performers at Uptown Mondays dancehall in front of the video
light, Kingston, Jamaica, 2010 15
I.8 Reward notice for runaway slave, c. 1863 18
I.9 Ebony G. Patterson, Di Real Big Man, 2010 19
I.10 Hank Willis Thomas, Black Power, 2008 28
I.11 Satch Hoyt, From Mau Mau to Bling Bling, 2005 29
I.12 Robert Pruitt, For Whom the Bell Curves, 2004 32
I.13 Hype Williams, video still from Feel So Good by Mase, 1997 35
I.14 Kori Newkirk, video still from Bixel, 2005 36
I.15 Sthaddeus Terrell, photograph of Terrell and a Mardi Gras Indian
chief posing before Terrell’s backdrops, New Orleans, n.d. 41
I.16 Charles H. Nelson, Y’all Niggas Ain’t Ready, from the Backdrop Project
series, December 1999 43
I.17 Kehinde Wiley, The Annunciation, from the Black Light series, 2009 45
1.1 John Davis, street photograph, Atlanta, 2009 48
1.3 Edward Robinson, street photograph, New Orleans, 2009 49
1.5 Street photograph, New Orleans, 1999 50
1.6 Charles H. Nelson, Real Niggas Don’t Die: Tupac and Biggie (Call and
Response), from the Backdrop Project series, Five Points marta
Station, Atlanta, 1999 51
1.7 Sthaddeus Terrell, photograph of a field of backdrops at the Mardi
Gras Indians event, Super Sunday, New Orleans, 2000 53
1.9 John Davis’s photography studio with backdrops by James Green,
Atlanta, 2009 57
1.11 Backdrop featuring brand-name goods by artist identified as Len,
New Orleans, 2008 58
1.12 Street photography studio backdrop by artist identified as Len, New
Orleans, 2008 58
1.13 Street photography studio, New Orleans, 2009 61
1.14 Darrin Clark’s street photography studio, New Orleans, 2009 61
1.15 Street photography studio using green-screen technology, New
Orleans, 2009 62
1.20 Edward Robinson, street photograph, New Orleans, c. 2009 67
1.21 Edward Robinson, street photograph, New Orleans, c. 2009 68
1.22 John Davis’s street photography studio, Atlanta, 2009 70
1.23 Charles H. Nelson, Real Niggas Don’t Die: Tupac (Call and Response),
from the Backdrop Project series, Five Points marta Station,
Atlanta, July 3, 1999 73
1.24 Jamel Shabazz, photograph of a Harlem photographer documenting
a young father with his sons, Harlem, New York, 1997 75
1.25 Charles H. Nelson, Real Niggas Don’t Die: Biggie and Tupac, 2002 76
1.26 Charles H. Nelson, Real Niggas Don’t Die: Tupac, 2000 76
1.27 Charles H. Nelson, Novus Ordo Seclorum, sketch for backdrop, [1999–
2009] 77
1.28 L. W. Seavey, photograph illustrating the use of Seavey’s background,
the Alcazar, New York, [c. 1890–1903] 80
1.29 Unidentified photographer, [Mr. Lewis Young of Monroe City],
c. 1910 81
1.30 Philip Kwame Apagya, Francis in Manhattan, 1996/2000 83
1.31 Richard Simms, club photograph, Washington, DC, [1970s] 86
1.33 Blair Stapp, photograph of Huey P. Newton, c. 1967 87
1.36 Jamel Shabazz, photograph of four young men, East Flatbush,
Brooklyn, 1980 94
1.37 Sthaddeus Terrell, club photograph, New Orleans, c. 1991 95
x Illustrations
1.38 Charles H. Nelson, Real Niggas Don’t Die, [1999–2009] 96
1.39 Photo Sonny’s studio, Kingston, Jamaica, 2010 97
1.40 Sthaddeus Terrell, club photograph, New Orleans, late 1990s 99
1.41 Terell Hawkins, photograph of his own backdrop, 2009 100
1.42 Perry’s street photography studio, New Orleans, 2009 102
1.43 Eddie Robinson’s street photography studio, New Orleans, 2009 102
1.44 Backdrop of Shine by W. Jackson, New Orleans, 2009 102
1.45 Charles H. Nelson, Keep It Real, [1999–2009] 107
1.46 Ronnie Kelly’s street photography studio, New Orleans, 2009 109
1.47 Sthaddeus Terrell, funerary backdrop, New Orleans, n.d. 110
2.1 Video light at Wedi Wedi dancehall, Kingston, Jamaica, 2010 113
2.2 Dancers before a videographer and in front of a screen at Wedi Wedi
dancehall, Kingston, Jamaica, 2010 113
2.3 Ebony G. Patterson, Wi Oh So Clean, from The Fambily Series
(Revisited), c. 1962 / c. 2012 116
2.4 Dutty Fridaze dancehall, May Pen, Jamaica, August 2007 119
2.5 Poster advertising stage show in Santa Cruz, Portmore, Jamaica,
2009 122
2.6 Jack Sowah Video Productions, video still of dancehall dancer Bogle
at Fiesta La Roose, Kingston, Jamaica, 2000 123
2.7 Video light at Passa Passa dancehall, Tivoli Gardens, Jamaica, 2009
127
2.8 Video light at Passa Passa dancehall, Tivoli Gardens, Jamaica, 2009
128
2.9 Video light at Wedi Wedi dancehall, Kingston, Jamaica, 2010 129
2.10 A woman before the video light at Wedi Wedi dancehall, 2010 129
2.11 A loose-fitting sheet forms a screen used by Sowah in the Wedi Wedi
dancehall, Kingston, Jamaica, 2011 132
2.12 Sowah and his video camera, Wedi Wedi dancehall, Kingston,
Jamaica, 2011 134
2.13 Male performers at Wedi Wedi dancehall, Kingston, Jamaica, 2010
137
2.14 Advertisement for Vybz Kartel’s Vybz Cake Soap 140
2.15 J. W. Cleary, A Native Washerwoman, Jamaica, c. 1906 143
2.16 Photo Sonny’s backdrop, Uptown Mondays dancehall, Kingston,
Jamaica, 2009 146
2.17 A cab in Kingston playing music videos, 2009 147
2.18 Dancer counts money before the video light at Passa Passa
dancehall, June 2010 148
2.19 Peter Dean Rickards, Tommy Thompson (Owner, Brite Lite Funeral
Home), 2012 150
Illustrations xi
2.20 Radcliffe Roye, Stars among Stars, 2011 152
2.21 Ebony G. Patterson, Untitled III, from the Gangstas for Life series,
2007 158
2.22 Detail from Ebony G. Patterson, Untitled III, from the Gangstas for
Life series, 2007 159
2.23 Ebony G. Patterson, Counting Money HaHa (The Counting Lesson
Revisited), 2010 160
2.24 Albert Huie, The Counting Lesson, 1938 161
2.25 Ebony G. Patterson, Goffa, from the Out and Bad series, 2012 166
2.26 Detail from Ebony G. Patterson, Goffa, from the Out and Bad series,
2012 167
3.1 A prom attendee arrives at the hotel, St. Augustine’s College prom,
Nassau, 2008 170
3.2 Cover art, “Jay-Z: Show Me What You Got,” single, 2006 176
3.3 Hype Williams, video still from Drive Slow, music video for Kanye
West, 2006 177
3.4 Dandy Lion Preschool float with the words “Shinnin’, Shimmer, and
Splendour,” Stapledon Gardens, Nassau, 2006 179
3.5 Young participant in the Dandy Lion Preschool float, Stapledon
Gardens, Nassau, 2006 180
3.6–3.9 Entrance of a car at the C. R. Walker Senior High School prom,
British Colonial Hilton Hotel, Nassau, 2006 182
3.10 Young couple at the C. R. Walker Senior High School prom, Nassau,
2006 183
3.11 Entrance of wax-covered jitney at the C. R. Walker Senior High
School prom, British Colonial Hilton Hotel, Nassau, 2006 183
3.12 Dandy Lion Preschool float, Stapledon Gardens, Nassau, 2006 185
3.13 A Cinderella-style prom entrance, Nassau, 2006 185
3.14 Young couple at St. Augustine’s College prom, Crystal Palace Hotel,
Nassau, 2006 186
3.15 Jeff Cooper, “How I See It,” Editorial cartoon, 2004 188
3.16 Malick Sidibé, Soirée de Mariage Drissa Balo, 1967/2008 190
3.17 Seydou Keïta, untitled, 1956/1957 191
3.18 Che Lovelace, “05,” 2001 196
3.19 Detail from Che Lovelace, “05,” 2001 197
3.20 Car with Haitian flags arrives at C. R. Walker Senior High School
prom, British Colonial Hilton Hotel, Nassau, 2006 202
3.21 Junkanoo band performing for entrance at St. Augustine’s College
prom, Nassau, 2006 204
3.22 Junkanoo parade group with Oscar theme, Nassau, 2008 207
3.23 Detail of Junkanoo costume with Junkanoo tricks, Nassau, 2005 209
xii Illustrations
3.24 Junkanoo performers at the Boxing Day parade, Nassau, 2005 209
3.25 Junkanoo parade with Oscar theme, Nassau, 2008 211
3.26 Junkanoo parade with Oscar theme, Nassau, 2008 211
4.1 Kehinde Wiley, Portrait of Simon George, from the Black Light series,
2009 218
4.2 Detail from Kehinde Wiley, Portrait of Simon George, from the Black
Light series, 2009 219
4.3 Pen and Pixel Graphics Inc., cover art, B.G., Chopper City in the
Ghetto, 1999 223
4.4 Hype Williams, video still from Feel So Good by Mase, 1997 224
4.5 Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors, 1533 226
4.6 Hookt.com, “What Is Hip-Hop?” Advertisement, 2000 231
4.7 Hans Holbein, Portrait of Henry VIII of England, c. 1536 231
4.8 Dirk Valkenburg, Slave “Play” on a Sugar Plantation in Surinam, 1706–
1708 234
4.9 Kehinde Wiley, Passing/Posing (Female Prophet Anne), 2003 239
4.10 Kehinde Wiley, Portrait of Andries Stilte I, 2005 242
4.11 Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck, Andries Stilte as a Standard Bearer,
1640 243
4.12 Yinka Shonibare, mbe, Fire, 2010 244
4.13 Kehinde Wiley, Portrait of Simon George, from the Black Light series,
2009 246
4.14 Kehinde Wiley, Le Roi à la Chasse, from the Black Light series, 2009
247
4.15 Detail from Kehinde Wiley, Le Roi à la Chasse, from the Black Light
series, 2009 248
4.16 Kehinde Wiley, St. Sebastian II, 2006 249
4.17 Lorraine O’Grady, Art Is . . . (Caught in the Art), [Afro-American Day
Parade, Harlem], 1983/2009 251
4.18 Kehinde Wiley, Alexander the Great, Variation, 2005 253
4.19 Kehinde Wiley, Labyrinth (Blue Diamond), 2002 255
4.20 Luis Gispert, Untitled (Single Floating Cheerleader, a.k.a. Hoochy
Goddess), 2001 259
4.21 Detail from Luis Gispert, Untitled (Single Floating Cheerleader, a.k.a.
Hoochy Goddess), 2001 261
4.22 Luis Gispert, Untitled (Girls with Ball), 2000 262
4.23 Detail from Luis Gispert, Untitled (Girls with Ball), 2000 263
4.24 Paul Pfeiffer, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (17), 2004 265
4.25 Hank Willis Thomas, Branded Head, 2003 266
4.26 Luis Gispert, Untitled (Car Toes), 2002 267
4.27 Luis Gispert, Low Profile, 1999 268
Illustrations xiii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I began to document street photography studios set up on the streets

in Atlanta and New Orleans in the late 1990s, as I researched my disser-
tation on late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century photo-
graphs of Jamaica and the Bahamas. In the course of this work I was
always frustrated by the lack of information on local black photogra-
phers and the communities they pictured, while the photographs by
and histories of British colonials, white local elites, or tourists could
more easily be traced in the archives. Indeed some of the latter pho-
tographers seemed to preserve their images and papers with a sense of
their historical importance, with the archives in mind as their eventual
destination. An exhibition I curated in 2008 at the National Art Gal-
lery of the Bahamas, Developing Blackness: Studio Photographs of “Over
the Hill” Nassau in the Independence Era, was an attempt to provide an
alternate or an “other” history of photography (to use Christopher Pin-
ney’s and Nicholas Peterson’s term) in the Bahamas, one that focused
on the studio photographs created in the island’s black communities.
Over the years when I researched black photographers in Nassau, my
efforts were dogged by a sense among many that these popular photo-
graphic practices and their material remains were not significant or
valuable. Decades-old negative collections were thrown away, were left
in insect-infested cabinets, and were never collected by local institu-
tions. I started documenting the contemporary popular photographic
practices that I present in this study not for the purpose of making a
book but to forestall a future absence. In this respect, I see this book as a
type of historical study, one that creates a record that is ever mindful of
the conditions of race and class and place that facilitate the disappear-
ance of black subjects from the photographic archive.
I am eternally grateful to the photographers and videographers who
took the time to share their images, histories, and knowledge of their
trades with me, eventually trusting that I was not a business competitor
or tax collector. I especially thank photographers and photo backdrop
artists Darren Clark, John Davis, James Green, Terell Hawkins, Larry
Reid, Marlon Reid, Edward Robinson, Richard Sims, Sonny The Photog-
rapher, Jack Sowah, and Sthaddeus Terrell, who generously allowed me
to follow them and to pester their clients and who spent considerable
time helping me to flesh out the histories of popular photographic prac-
tices. I feel very fortunate to have been in your company and to start to
document your work.
I also thank the photographers and videographers Josh Chamberlain,
Davian A. Hodges, John Jones, Leading, Radcliffe Roye, Larry Short,
Otis Spears, and V. Thacker, who also added substantially to my under-
standing of these practices. My appreciation to the many studio art-
ists and directors, namely Marvin Bartley, Luis Gispert, James Green,
Ras Kassa, Che Lovelace, the late Charles H. Nelson, Rashaad Newsome,
Ebony G. Patterson, Peter Dean Rickards, Hank Willis Thomas, Kehinde
Wiley, and Harold “Hype” Williams, who shared invaluable insights into
the visual economy of the popular practices and helped me to develop
an understanding of a current running across contemporary art in the
circum-Caribbean. I thank the artists, galleries, museums, and estates
that granted me permission to reproduce artwork.
I thank too the many media specialists and producers who have
offered their invaluable perspectives on these popular practices and
broader insights into the history of the camera and visual media:
Johann Dawes, Delano Forbes, Marcia Forbes, Sonjah Stanley Niahh,
Yvette Rowe, Franklyn “Chappie” St. Juste, Carlene Samuels, Ras Tingle,
and Jay Will. My appreciation goes too to Sydney Bartley and Nicolette
Bethel, two government officials in the ministries of sports, youth, and
culture in Jamaica and the Bahamas. I also want to express my grati-
tude to the many people—dancers, prom-goers, photography studio
clients—who considered my questions and who trusted me with their
stories and photographs. Thanks to the librarians at the Nassau Pub-
lic Library in New Providence; the National Library of Jamaica and the
National Gallery of Jamaica, both in Kingston; and the library at the
University of the West Indies at Mona. During my research I worked
with videographers Esther Figueroa, Maria Govan, Jermaine Richards,
and Charlie Smith. I want to thank them for helping me not only to
document the photographic practices but also to see these expressions
in more nuanced ways.
I could not have produced the book without the financial support
of postdoctoral fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the
American Council of Learned Societies, and the Kaplan Institute for
xvi Acknowledgments
the Humanities at Northwestern University. I am eternally grateful to
the David C. Driskell Prize committee and David C. Driskell and Rhonda
Matheison and Philip Verre at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta for
supporting and encouraging my work at an early stage of this project.
Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences pro-
vided significant research support, for which I am thankful. I am in-
debted to the Andy Warhol Foundation for a Creative Capital Art
Writer’s Grant, which provided crucial financial support and a publica-
tion subvention.
This book benefited from the writing, research, and comments of
many scholars. I want to acknowledge the influence of photography his-
torians like Deborah Willis and the late Marilyn Houlberg, who early
on started to document popular photographic practices in the African
diaspora. I benefited from the crucial feedback and intellectual engage-
ment of many individuals through public lectures at Indiana Univer-
sity, Swarthmore College, Brown University, Southern Methodist Uni-
versity, McGill University, Princeton University, Columbia University,
the Kansas City Art Institute, the Telfair Museum, the University of
Alabama, the Academy at the University of Trinidad and Tobago for
Arts, Letters, Culture and Public Affairs, the College Art Association’s
annual conference, New York University, and journal review processes. I
want to acknowledge especially Tim Barringer, Geoffrey Batchen, Maria
Elena Buszek, Tina Campt, Anne Cheng, Christopher Cozier, Rachael Z.
DeLue, Hannah Feldman, Tatiana Flores, Hal Foster, Anthony S. Foy,
Saidiya Hartman, Barnor Hesse, Cecily Hilsdale, Corrine Kratz, K. Dian
Kriz, Nicholas Laughlin, Thomas Lax, Harvey Neptune, Christopher
Pinney, Richard Powell, Christine Ross, and Harvey Young.
Thanks to Ken Wissoker, editorial director at Duke University Press,
for his encouragement and interest in this project and his broader field-
bolstering support of visual and art-historical studies of the African di-
aspora. My appreciation goes to Jade Brooks and Liz Smith for shep-
herding the book through the production process.
The years of research, travel, and grant-writing undertaken for the
book could not have happened without the support of Badia Ahad, Rocio
Aranda-Alvarado, Judith Bettelheim, Magdalene Carey, Hollis Clayson,
Petrina Dacres, Khyla Finlayson, Jacqueline Francis, Pamela Franco,
Jonathan Greenland, Michael Hanchard, Arlington King, Amy Mooney,
Steven Nelson, Annie Paul, Jerry Philogene, Kymberly Pinder, Veerle
Poupeye, Lane Relyea, Vaughn Roberts, Rebecca J. Saah, Thomas Saah,
David Scott, Michelle Joan Wilkinson, and David Van Zanten. The com-
Acknowledgments xvii
munity of innovative scholars at Northwestern University who com-
pose the Blacks Arts Initiative, which includes Lisa Corrin, E. Patrick
Johnson, Ramón Rivera-Servera, Ivy Wilson, and Harvey Young, are
sources of inspiration and support. I thank the chair of the Department
of Art History at Northwestern University, Jesús Escobar, for his en-
couragement and willingness to create conditions for me to further my
endeavors. My deepest gratitude goes to my colleague and friend Huey
Copeland for his close and critical reading of parts of the manuscript;
for his wisdom, humor, and vision.
I want to acknowledge Richard Iton, my former professor and good
friend, who passed away suddenly as I was finishing this manuscript.
Your generosity, integrity, humility, and wit, and your scholarly legacy
of redefining politics through a reading of popular culture, are things I
will keep with me always. I also want to acknowledge two of my men-
tors, the late Richard Long and Ivan Karp, who were so influential on
my scholarly career.
Thanks to James Bliss, Emilie Boone, John Farmer, and Frances
Trempe, who helped in the preparation of the manuscript, with re-
search assistance, copyright permissions, and copyediting. I want to ac-
knowledge publications where aspects of this book previously appeared:
Art Bulletin (chapter 4) and African Arts (chapter 3).
Thanks to A.K. for always being there, literally and figuratively, with
an umbrella. My deepest thanks to my family, who so patiently live with
my work and projects. Thank you Ella and Anthony Thompson, Antonia
and Andre Carey, Gabriella and Xavier Carey, and Chaz Thompson for
supporting me throughout my endeavors.
xviii Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels
Genealogies of performance attend not only to “the body,” as Foucault suggests,

but also to bodies—to the reciprocal reflections they make on one another’s sur-
faces as they foreground their capacities for interaction.
—Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (1996)
This is not counter-discourse but a counterculture that defiantly reconstructs

its own critical, intellectual, and moral genealogy in a partially hidden public
sphere of its own.
—Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (1993)
It is eleven o’clock at night, and a bus christened Bashment careens

down the streets of Kingston, Jamaica (fig. I.1). A rainbow of colors radi-
ate from the front of the Route 39 bus in quick succession, reproducing
in aerodynamic design its swift movement. These shimmering colors
reflect the shine of the bus’s rims, detailing, and arabesque insignia. On
this night, the bus transports a group of dancehall performers, the mob
and Cadillac dancers, a videographer, and me to a stage show north of
the city. We are late, so the bus blazes through the winding streets to
make up time. Beaming with bright white and electric-blue lights, it ap-
pears to hover over the potholed streets, like an object from the future.
Flat television screens built into its exterior give Bashment its glow.
When red traffic lights bring it to a momentary halt, children approach
with wide eyes, their faces lit by the flickering yet persistent light from
African American hip-hop and r&b music videos emitted from the bus’s
hd panels. But before many of the accidental spectators can fully take
in its music video offerings, Bashment is gone in a noisy flash.
I open with a description of Bashment because its display of the
latest consumer electronics and music videos, featuring shimmering
contemporary consumer culture, makes explicit a fact that animates
this book: photographic and videographic expressions and even the
I.1. Bashment, a public bus in Jamaica with HDTV screens on its exterior.
Kingston, Jamaica, 2009. Photo by author.
display of visual technologies like the camera or the hdtv screen and
their shining effects are central among African diasporic communities,
not only in Kingston but also in other parts of the Caribbean and the
United States. Especially among young people, images—whether beam-
ing from buses, animating miniature screens in taxis, radiating from
local and foreign music-television channels, emanating from makeshift
projector screens, or transmitted through cellophane-covered dvds—
dominate how people in the African diaspora experience culture, music,
their sense of the world, and their places within it.
My point is not to argue for the uniqueness of the popularity of
visual technologies in black communities in the United States and the
Caribbean, even though studies suggest that it is especially pronounced
among these groups, but to understand the distinct historical, socio-
political, and ultimately aesthetic ways African diasporic communities
take up photography, videography, and other forms of lens-based tech-
nologies at the turn of the twenty-first century.1 What do these visual
expressions—their content, form, and affect—signify for black pro-
ducers and consumers, who often hail from the urban working-class
communities of these post–civil rights and postcolonial societies? How
do they offer the means for these subjects to reflect on, represent, and
recast their relationship to the modern, the past, the commodity, the
global, the diasporic, and the national? How do these expressions influ-
2 Introduction
ence the ways people across the African diaspora think about their self-
presentation, self-representation, visibility, and viewership in black
public spheres in and beyond their communities?2
This book takes up these questions by considering contemporary
popular uses of the camera in different parts of the African diaspora,
primarily over the last twenty-five years. Specifically, it examines how
lens-centered practices have informed both a representational system
and a network of material and performative practices in the United
States and two of its diasporic neighbors in the northern English-
speaking Caribbean: Jamaica and the Bahamas.3 This marks in the Afri-
can diaspora a geopolitical and cultural space that has been described
as the circum-Caribbean.4 It is a region with intense and intimate his-
torical ties maintained in the twenty-first century through lens- and
screen-based technologies. Focusing on this area as a unit of analysis
pries open national, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries between
places bound together by networks of people, goods, and visual and
performance practices. Analyzing the photographic and videographic
genres that circulate across populations in the circum-Caribbean allows
for a concentrated view of more widespread processes. These forms offer
a glimpse of the way specific visual technologies mediate the ways dis-
parate groups of people of African descent come to think of themselves
as a transnational community.
While attentive to the photographic and videographic expressions
these groups share, I am equally interested in the distinct ways that
people engage photography and video in different locations. These rep-
resentational practices are uniquely informed by the historical cir-
cumstances that forged the African diaspora in the Americas and by
postcolonial formations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and culture
in each place. They also respond to the ways African diasporic groups
have precisely been defined as such through vision and visual technolo-
gies. The popular visual expressions inform performance practices, con-
sumption habits, transnational aesthetic communities, configurations
of economic and cultural value, contemporary art, and new modes of
visibility—and “un-visibility”—that highlight shifting configurations
of politics in the contemporary circum-Caribbean.5
This book offers a historical and critical analysis of several of the
most widespread forms of photographic and videographic practice
among black urban populations in this region. It also presents an art-
historical analysis of the work of artists who draw on these popular ex-
pressions, including the late Charles H. Nelson, Ebony G. Patterson, Ke-
Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 3

I.2. Kehinde Wiley, Three Boys, 2013. Oil on canvas, 92 × 92 in. Courtesy of the artist
and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.
hinde Wiley, and Luis Gispert. Like the artists of the popular genres,
studio artists have developed photographic practices locally that they
circulate transnationally. The US-based artist Wiley, for one, works in
different locations and in 2013 produced a series of paintings, The World
Stage: Jamaica, some of which featured Jamaican dancehall participants
(fig. I.2). In the same year Jamaican-born artist Patterson worked on
the art project Illuminated Presence with urban youth in Chicago.6 The
contrapuntal analysis of transnational contemporary art and popular
practices offers a broader view of the social, political, and aesthetic con-
texts in which both forms flourish. At stake in exploring works of art in
relation to popular culture is not simply an expansion of the sources art
historians typically consider in interpreting contemporary art. Artists
considered here use approaches to representation from black popular
4 Introduction
visual culture to assess critically genres ranging from painted portraits
canonized in the history of art to contemporary print advertising. In-
formed in part by their engagement with popular practices, many of
these artists foreground the effect of light and the illusion of the real
in the history of Western painting. In this way, they highlight distinct
forms of image-making in the African diaspora and offer a critical and
illuminating perspective on the history of Western art.
Performing Visibility and Popular Photography in

Urban Communities in the Circum-Caribbean
The social significance and even predominance of the camera in con-

temporary African diasporic communities may be elucidated by describ-
ing what unfolded at the stage show after Bashment arrived in Santa
Cruz. When Bashment finally appeared, ablaze both visually and soni-
cally, it immediately brightened a disaffected atmosphere. Some of the
headliners had pulled disappearing acts, and would-be partiers milled
about outside the modest-looking club in disgruntled pockets. The bus’s
glowing entrance promised excitement, hype, and connectedness to a
black transnational urbanity in this quiet country community. As the
dancers stepped off the beaming bus, coordinated in dress and over-
sized rock-star shades, the fledgling affair came alive. While the fanciful
dance moves of the performers and the break-dancing of their coun-
try counterparts warrant a separate analysis, I want to call attention to
one particular member of the entourage: the videographer. With a large
camera perched on his shoulder, like a searching mechanical bird, the
videographer produced the party’s visual charge. Entering the dimly lit
club, he turned on his video camera and its bright light. As the dj in-
creased the music’s volume, matching the light’s intensity, the videogra-
pher scoped the room, coming to rest on the mob dancers, who seemed
energized by the camera’s spotlight (fig. I.3).
Since the late 1980s, the videographer wielding a large camera
crowned with a searing bright white light (a harsh light without a dif-
fuser) has become a fixture in Jamaica’s urban dancehall and club cul-
tures. Performers often compete, performing creatively, agilely, or
sexually, to attract the videographer’s attention and to bask in what is
described locally as the “video light”: the bright light from the video
camera. An informal payola system exists, fights break out between
performers, and dancehall attendees even bleach their skin (which pur-
portedly prepares them for the video light), all in an effort to become

I.3. MOB dancers performing in the video light, Santa Cruz, Jamaica, 2009.
Photo by author.
visible—to be made spectacularly present in the lens of the video cam-

era.7 Many seekers of the video light hope that the circulation of their
images through dvds, the Internet, or television will bring them fame
and fortune.8 Michael Graham (“Crazy Hype”) of the mob dancers ex-
pressed faith, for instance, that the video light would take the dance
group “to the stars.”9 As veteran videographer Jack Sowah (Courtney
Cousins) explained, “Light can do so much for them [dancehall partici-
pants]. If not in the video light no one will see them. . . . The more the
light shine on you the brighter you get.”10 Light has the power to bring
geographic transcendence and social ascendance. Photography and
videography, as well as the spectacle of picture-taking, so evident in
video light, have restructured and reoriented more long-standing cul-
tural sites and expressions, like the half-century-old dancehall culture,
and have been central to the creation of new aesthetic practices.11
The significance of these technologies was underscored that night
in Santa Cruz. Some forty-five minutes into the festivities, the light
on the videographer’s camera went out, leaving only its afterimage
ablaze, followed by a vacuous darkness. Although the dancehall beats
continued to sound throughout the dimly lit hall, the dancers immedi-
ately dispersed and meandered away, seemingly released from the cam-
6 Introduction
era’s orbit. As the videographer worked feverishly to remedy the out-
age, one partier decided to take the video-light concept into his own
hands. Holding his cell phone, equipped with a surprisingly bright beam
of light, he stretched out his hand and cast the beam onto a woman
standing next to him. Assured that the small light illuminated her, she
started to dance amid the restless gazes of onlookers, a few of whom
replicated the man’s makeshift video-light technology.
This impromptu staging of video light was revelatory for me. It testi-
fied to the centrality of visual technology, to the fact that the dance could
not take place outside its auspices. It also called attention to the dancers’
state of waiting for visual technology to become active—indeed, to be-
come subjects. The camera’s substitution by a beam of light also high-
lighted some of the alternate uses and meanings of photographic and
videographic technology evident in Jamaica’s dancehall communities
and across other populations in the African diaspora. The incident spot-
lighted, for one, the way participants in some popular visual practices
in the circum-Caribbean emphasize the physical presence of technology
and the display of objects associated with photographic or videographic
representation—lights, cameras, screens, backdrops. Technology often
becomes a prop in performances of visibility rather than or in addition
to being a tool that produces a physical representation. In these practices
the process of being seen being photographed constitutes its own ephem-
eral form of image-making. The pose, the gesture, and the choreography
of the body before a photographic lens and an audience are types of rep-
resentation that do not need the physical image produced by the camera.
For some, like the woman performing before the light of the phone,
being illuminated in the aura of visual technologies is an intrinsic part
of these practices. Indeed, the very term “video light” attests to this
interest in and awareness of the optical affect and effect of light gen-
erated at the moment of photographic or videographic production. The
expression brings into focus the visual and representational work of
light within these diasporic photographic practices. The materiality of
the photographic appears reconfigured in popular practices that em-
phasize the optical effect of the moment of being photographed as im-
portant in its own right.
Photography, Cultural Identity, and the Practice of Diaspora
This book focuses on several photographic and videographic genres in

the circum-Caribbean in which light and the effect of being represented

I.4. Street photography studio in New Orleans, 2009. Photo by author.
take center stage and explores some of the shared visual technologies
that have informed such approaches to the camera and visibility in pub-
lic space. Many of these practices have not been subject to scholarly con-
sideration. I offer, for one, a history of video light. This visual practice
has played a central role in the creation of local and African diasporic
communities, which were formed around the distinct types of viewer-
ship that were produced through the rapidly moving video camera and
its bright light in the dancehalls and through resulting videos and dvds.
Another popular photographic genre found across black urban commu-
nities in the United States and Jamaica is “street” or “club” photogra-
phy (fig. I.4). Photographers such as Ivery McKnight, Greg Sanders, and
Richard Sims popularized street photography in Washington, DC, in the
late 1980s. In this genre clients pose for Polaroid or digital photographs
before makeshift hand-painted backdrops, often in front of an audience
and under bright lights. These backdrops, found at hip-hop concerts
and festivals celebrating black culture across urban communities in the
United States, often depict fantastical displays of wealth, from gleam-
ing luxury items to Caribbean seascapes. Street photography gained
currency in Jamaica in the 1990s when an individual known locally as
“Sonny” became one of several photographers who introduced the form;
the backdrops there are regularly found in the island’s dancehalls.12 The
hand-painted backdrops provide one means by which signifiers of status
8 Introduction
in hip-hop culture and black urban cultures in the United States become
present in and configured through Jamaican dancehall culture. The very
process of posing, of staging one’s visibility for the camera as a display
of social standing, has also traveled with the transient photographic
studios. High school proms in the Bahamas present another local prac-
tice focused on public performances for the camera. These public events
are the most popular and anticipated occasions for youths and their
relatives in the capital, Nassau. Young people stage elaborate red carpet
entrances—many inspired by hip-hop music videos—to produce events
that will live on in spectators’ memories. In addition to evincing spec-
tacular forms of image-making, I examine how these practices take spe-
cific material forms—the Polaroid, the vhs tape, the digital print, and
the projected video image.
All of the popular visual practices considered here circulate between
or are influenced by different African diasporic groups or cultural forms.
In the past, black intellectuals and political leaders, newspapers and
magazines, oral histories, music, and sartorial styles profoundly shaped
how modern African diasporic groups came to think of themselves as a
community who shared political concerns, cultural routes, social values,
historical experiences, and intertwined futures.13 The writings of Brent
Hayes Edwards and Paul Gilroy have been central in highlighting the
role of print culture and vernacular music, respectively, in creating a
poetics that was open and translatable to a range of diasporic audiences,
across language barriers, geographies, and temporalities in the early
twentieth century.14 But there has been a relative neglect of the work of
visuality in scholarship on cultural formation and exchange in the Afri-
can diaspora, despite the fact that a key text on the subject, Stuart Hall’s
“Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” takes film and to a lesser extent pho-
tography as its starting point.15 Contemporary African diasporic forma-
tion across many black urban communities in the circum-Caribbean, I
demonstrate, takes place in the light of technology, in the flickering,
unsettled, reflective and bright surfaces, the pixels, of photographic and
videographic representation.16 How have the unfinished or “fantastic”
qualities of music in the African diaspora been transformed when visual
means of expression become primary modes of cultural circulation?17
How do photographic and videographic technologies and the material
and aesthetic effects of photographic and videographic forms newly ar-
ticulate the joints and gaps formed between diasporic groups?18 How
is diasporic formation conducted through aesthetic formations and
toward what end?19 How do visual technologies expand, constrain, and

change the terrain through which diasporas are imagined and brought
into being?
As visual modes of transmission have informed and transformed on-
going processes of diasporic translation, the “practice of diaspora” has
changed: ways of seeing and performative approaches to being seen and
represented have become intrinsic to and constitutive of contemporary
African diasporic communities. The circulation of photographic and
videographic expressions has influenced how people across the African
diaspora learn to see and assign value to being seen, to perceive and
participate in viewership and spectacles, and to create forms of cultural
production in which the camera—the video camera, the still camera,
even the telephone camera—is central. These technologies facilitate a
shared visual literacy and spectacular visibility, which is manifest in the
way diasporic subjects engage in shared performances of visibility—
practices that involve staging the act of being seen and being seen in
the process of being seen. These expressions have created new forms
of participation in black public spheres, even as the aesthetic commu-
nities of viewers and performers across the diaspora who use these ex-
pressions have transformed the political meaning of visibility in their
respective societies. The camera, the right to be seen, the right to self-
representation, might even confer what Paul Gilroy characterizes as the
“dimensions of citizenship blocked by formal politics and violently in-
hibited by informal social codes.”20
Recent scholarship has explored “photography’s capacity to build
or envision [an African diasporic] community across geographic loca-
tion,” to quote photography historian Leigh Raiford.21 Photographic and
videographic genres are mobile and mobilized, affective and effective,
in picturing and producing notions of black community across geogra-
phies and cultures in the African diaspora. The ways photographic prac-
tices of diaspora work to create and secure attachments to broader com-
munities, geographies, and cultures in the African diaspora might be
elucidated by considering a street photography studio set up in Kings-
ton, Jamaica, in 2010, that featured a backdrop portraying the Brooklyn
Bridge and the United States flag in paint (fig. I.5). The backdrop rep-
resented the bridge with sparkling white lights, from a bird’s-eye per-
spective, portraying it as a visually accessible metropolitan landscape.
Electric light, so emphasized by the use of white paint in the backdrop,
became an essential part of representing the city, the modern, the cos-
mopolitan, the American dream, the dazzling possibilities of bright
lights. By posing against the drop in Kingston, clients could have a cer-
10 Introduction
I.5. Photo Sonny’s street photography studio, Kingston, Jamaica, 2010.
Photo by author.
tain proximity to the New York borough, home to one of the largest
and most diverse communities in the African diaspora.22 Photographic
forms like the street photography not only circulate particular iconog-
raphies and represent specific geographies, but the shared genres in-
form a sense of connection between diasporic groups, encouraging simi-
lar approaches to posing in public, to a photographic self-fashioning.
They also offer the possibility of recognition by one’s peers and diasporic
counterparts as coparticipants, with different levels of power and visi-
bility, in visual cultural expressions. The different configurations of di-
asporic spaces in the street photography studios highlight the way con-
temporary practices of diaspora, aided by visual technologies, involve
forms of projection, of virtual extension into and imaginative dwelling
in other geographies, communities, and temporalities.
The photographic medium, which often captures an unrecoverable
moment from the past, allowing it to reside “freeze-framed” in other
times and spaces, might have a special analogous relation to African di-
asporic communities who are often cut off or removed from spaces and
times. As Christian Metz so eloquently describes it, “Photography is a
cut inside the referent, it cuts off a piece of it, a fragment, a part object,
for a long immobile travel of no return.”23 Metz’s observation might be
particularly prescient for African diasporic subjects, who use photog-

raphy at times to negotiate their conditions as African diasporic sub-
jects. If African diasporas come to think of themselves as such through
a memory of or consciousness of the experience of rupture, removal, the
cut, then they might seize onto photographs because in some respects
they ontologically reproduce and redress a diasporic condition.24
Often these photographic genres circulate across media and through
informal and underground economies. Kingston’s videotaped dance-
hall performances sometimes travel—as dvds sold on urban streets,
through YouTube, or on stations like hype tv—across Jamaica, the
United States, the Bahamas, and more broadly.25 It is not uncommon,
as Sowah explains, for video footage from Jamaica to be copied multiple
times by its producer in Kingston, counterfeited by a distributor in Flat-
bush, New York, and uploaded as a compressed file by a purchaser to a
website.26 At each stage the video (and more recently the dvd) can de-
teriorate, becoming visually marked or pixelated with each copy. Even
with recent advances in Internet bandwidth speeds and video compres-
sion, in the case of dancehall videos in Jamaica there are literal gaps in
translation of the image on screen. The brightness of video light and the
rapid movement of the camera in the dancehall can result in streaks of
light within the footage, in a visual noise materialized on the surface of
video. This is evident in a video recording of the mob dancers available
online (fig. I.6). The processes of duplication and reduplication repro-
duce a type of cultural formation in the African diaspora, one in which
the form constantly changes over time and across space, bearing traces
of and constituted by these processes of transformation and loss.27 The
formative role of visual technologies, of bytes and pixels, in the trans-
lation of African diasporic cultures is often visualized as viewers across
the diaspora experience black culture through the matter, grain, and
texture of visual technologies.
These popular visual technologies also cause interruption, disrup-
tion, and blindness that are equally significant in the formation of dias-
poras. What escapes translation and is lost if a primary means through
which Jamaicans in the diaspora and African Americans experience
dancehalls is through pixelated videos? How significant is it that street
photography backdrops in Kingston picture the Brooklyn Bridge and a
cityscape full of lights, while in Atlanta and New Orleans these back-
grounds represent the Caribbean as a beach space devoid of streetlights
or any signs of modernity and urbanism? How do these practices cause
or reflect misrecognition and new forms of cognition that are intrinsic
to the creation of diasporic communities?
12 Introduction
I.6. The MOB dancers, Kingston, Jamaica, 2011. Video still
from YouTube video, posted January 12, 2011, www.youtube
.com/watch?v=Avj4jKvVuYY.
The exchange of visual media has also been a means through which
performances of gender and sexual identities have been reinvented and
reimposed in each context. Photographic practices offer modes through
which normative ideals of gender and sexuality have been unsettled. For
example, the prevalence of male dancers in hip-hop music videos, as
Jamaican cultural historian Donna Hope has argued, contributes to the
popularity of male performers in the dancehalls and to the presentation
of new modes of masculinity.28 In these popular expressions, signifiers
of gender have become unmoored from the ways they historically pro-
duced meaning and remain in flux, in formation, refusing easy catego-
rization and capture.29
To examine these expressions, this book puts photographic practices
into conversation with performance studies. Sonjah Stanley Niaah and
Joseph Roach have analyzed the way African diasporic and other so-
cial groups use performance practices to occupy, always imperfectly,
the gaps in social-cultural networks. They explore the way these popu-
lations produce and enact counter-memories and counter-histories
through performances.30 Such performances, mediated through visual
media, have increasingly come to be about staging one’s visibility. Visual
technologies occupy the spaces, virtually extend the worlds, and create
the reflective surfaces of interaction between African diasporic groups.
In order to assess the social and sensorial effect of visual technolo-
gies and how they intercede in “performance genealogies,” I did much of

the research for the book with and through a video camera or still cam-
era.31 In addition to taking my own photographs, I worked closely with
videographers (like Jermaine Richards, whose video light went out in
Santa Cruz) and photographers in Jamaica, Nassau, Washington, DC,
Atlanta, and New Orleans.32 I aimed to take seriously predominant aes-
thetic practices and technologies of representation in black communi-
ties. I sought to pursue an art history formulated not just in the ar-
chives but in the streets, sites where art historians typically do not look
for their subjects. What are the tools, methods, and sites for the forma-
tion of alternate modes of writing African diaspora art history?
On Photographic Becoming: The In-Between State

of Photography in the African Diaspora
These popular African diasporic expressions take specific forms that

expand existing considerations of what constitutes photographic prac-
tice. The use of light produced through visual technologies generates
distinct aesthetic, synaesthetic, physiological, and phenomenological
effects, creating or denying types of viewership in particular performa-
tive and spatial contexts. The special preference for being within and
producing a brilliant unrelenting white light, for one, in these popular
forms of photography and videography can produce a blinding, even
painful effect on both the subject before the camera and surrounding
spectators (fig. I.7). In the context of the dancehalls, the video camera’s
light generates a form of representation at the moment of blinding,
when the visual senses are inundated and exceeded. It induces a sub-
lime state of visibility in which the subject is so hypervisible that it
disappears from view. Video light and some of the other photographic
practices inhabit the representational edge of hypervisibility and invisi-
bility, optical saturation and blindness, presence and absence, blackness
and white light. They produce a form of excess, a visual superfluity, that
points precisely to the limits of vision or what lies just beyond photo-
graphic and visual capture.
In so doing, they create what might be described as “afterimages” that
can be seen and felt after the moment of the photograph’s production.
Afterimages are typically defined as optical illusions that persist in one’s
vision after exposure to light or a visual stimulus.33 I use the term here
to refer to the way light from photographic and videographic technolo-
gies sears itself into the retinal memory of viewers after their exposure
to a source of illumination has ceased. Afterimages are ephemeral, fugi-
14 Introduction
I.7. Performers at Uptown Mondays dancehall in front of the intense undiffused
video light, Kingston, Jamaica, 2010. Photo by author.
tive, existing in what Walter Benjamin referred to as the “irrevocable
instantaneity of a lightning flash” and the “now of recognizability.”34
Despite this fleeting nature, they can create an indelible embodied form
of representation. Audre Lorde used “afterimage” to refer to represen-
tations, specifically photographic, whose “force remains within my eyes
. . . etched into my visions” even after her eyes “are averted.”35 The use
of blinding, visually inundating light in the popular photographic prac-
tices produces this lingering and forceful type of image that insists on
occupying vision even if one looks away. Afterimages do the work of
memory over and against the possibilities of disappearance or forget-
ting, shaping the very matter of memory and photography through
their embodied forms.
In addition to focusing on the ephemeral effects of light, in these
popular practices there is a notable refusal of or disinterest in certain
physical forms of photographic record. Often when photographers and
their patrons produce material images, as is the case with the photog-
raphy studios set up on the streets and in public spaces in the United
States and Jamaica, they use photographic technologies, like the Polar-
oid, that are singular. Even when street photographers produce digi-
tal photographs, they habitually erase the files after printing them, in
effect creating nonreproducible images like Polaroids. These forms of
picture-making are not solely bound to celluloid or built of pixels but
appear both to invest in and to disavow, exceed, or eschew the material
image. These expressions elude capture through photographic form. In
the age of digital reproduction these popular photographic practices
deny easy serial replication and dissemination. They linger in between
representational states, appearing simultaneously like an analog and
digital photographic form, like a still photograph or a moving image;
they are about the pose and performance and about hypervisibility and
emblazoned disappearance; and they are invested in image production
and destruction.
Although these practices vary widely, in different ways they empha-
size a process of representational becoming before the photographic
medium settles into its more conventional material form.36 Whether
focusing on the emblazoned moment of picture-taking, disrupting the
trace of the negative, or producing a photographic form with a painted
backdrop, the popular urban diasporic photographic expressions remain
at home in an unsettled and in-between state.37 These African diasporic
expressions often freeze, hinder, or prevent the conventional ways the
vernacular photograph offers a likeness of something else, appears onto-
16 Introduction
logically identical with what it depicts while detracting from its own sur-
face and physical structure. These African diasporic practices prevent
the photograph from turning to its referent (the person or thing rep-
resented in the image), which, according to one preeminent scholar of
photography, Roland Barthes, defines what photography is and does.38
The ways these liminal representational forms call attention to and
refuse the typical appearance, materiality, and seriality of popular
photographs are notable, given the historical uses of photography by au-
thorities, colonial officials, tourists, and criminologists to render black
people legible as a group in the circum-Caribbean.39 People with differ-
ent agendas have employed the medium to define blackness and to deny
the rights of blacks as subjects and citizens capable of self-possession
or governance. This is typified in the use of a torn carte de visite on a re-
ward notice for a runaway slave from Georgia in 1863. In this image the
miniature photographic portrait, identified with the democratization of
the image and mobility of the working classes in Europe and the United
States, sought precisely to hold in place social hierarchies that defined
blacks as property rather than free persons (fig. I.8).40 Unlike the photo-
graph’s seemingly transparent surface, photographs of black people in
these contexts often foregrounded black skin as a signifier, represen-
tative of more than surface: of a host of ever-changing characteristics
inherent to black people. In this respect, black people’s surface appear-
ances (unlike the photograph’s surface) often could not be seen through
or beyond. Photography often delimited the ability to see black people
as subjects with complex interior lives.41
In particular, contemporary African diasporic photographic forms
may be understood in the context of the history of uses of photog-
raphy to define criminals. Allan Sekula notes the way photography
served almost from its inception as a tool to capture such types.42 But
what he defines as the repressive role of photography is not confined
to the production of wanted posters or mug shots. More expansively,
photographs—whether honorific studio portraits or composite photo-
graphs of criminal types—only make sense within a broader system
that depends on assigning bodies places within social and moral hier-
archies. Sekula terms this ordering of individuals through photography
a “shadow archive.” These multiple and mutually constitutive applica-
tions of photography provide a useful broader frame for understand-
ing the urban contemporary practices under consideration here, which
precisely involve communities defined variously as “urban” that have
often been subject to oversight, in all its implications of surveillance.43

I.8. Reward notice for runaway slave, c. 1863. Manigault Papers, no. 484,
Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, The University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
I.9. Ebony G. Patterson, Di Real Big Man, 2010. Mixed-media tapestry with
wallpaper and flowers, 6.75 × 5 ft. Collection of National Gallery of Jamaica.
Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery.
Notions of the carceral, the criminal, the socially aberrant, and the
shadow archive haunt the popular expressions considered in this book.
The artists I discuss bring popular photographic forms into proximity
with state criminal photographic archives, stressing how they are inti-
mately intertwined. Patterson, for example, reframes and embellishes
mug shots of black men with aesthetic elements used to gain visibility
in Jamaica’s dancehalls (fig. I.9). Nelson used crime-scene photographs
as the basis of his backdrops, while wanted posters in part motivate
Wiley’s photographic engagement with black male subjects in his photo-
graphic series Black Light.44 More broadly, the popular diasporic expres-
sions and works of art explored here both use and refuse certain ways
blackness has been framed.
But I want to do more than suggest that popular practices merely
offer new structures for being seen that exceed the representational
containers fashioned for them by those in authority. Rather, I want
to stress a point Tina Campt makes very succinctly: “The visuality of
race and the indexicality of the photograph have been powerful twin
forces in the deployment of the racialized index to produce subjects
to be seen, read, touched, and consumed as available and abject flesh
objects and commodities, rather than as individual bodies, agents, or

actors.”45 As such, it is significant that contemporary photographic ex-
pressions neither quite allow the photograph to materially secure its
black subjects nor in some instances permit it to produce widely dis-
seminated photographic records or archives. These expressions often
remain in process, interrupting, if not undermining, the determinacy
evident in many of the uses of photography to configure blackness in
the past. Or they foreground what might be described as a photographic
opacity, the highlighting of the materiality of the photograph’s surface,
the process and physiological effects of its making, the inability of pho-
tography to capture its subjects transparently.46 The African diasporic
use of blinding light, for one, highlights photography as a medium that
induces blindness, exceeds the visual, rather than creating legibility or
indexicality.
Light and the Culture of Celebrity
Some participants in the circum-Caribbean incessantly and narcissisti-

cally use the camera to partake in what Daniel Boorstin has described
as “the white glare of publicity,” “the specious brilliance” he associates
with a US-styled brand of celebrity.47 At least since the 1950s, well-
knownness has increasingly become its own claim to fame, “an achieve-
ment that must be performed before an audience.”48 Photography, tele-
vision, and film all played roles in creating a sense of the ubiquity of
fame, which seemed “unbounded by time or space: constantly present,
constantly recognizable, and therefore constantly existing.”49 This
sense of the temporal and spatial unboundedness of celebrity may have
facilitated the co-optation of ideals of fame in disparate locations, such
as New Orleans, Kingston, and Nassau, where individuals and groups
redirected the structures and visual technologies of celebrity to focus
on themselves. These popular appropriations of celebrity culture—
particularly in the case of video light and the red carpet performances
at proms—testify to the pervasiveness, persuasiveness, and pluralist
spread of Hollywood’s culture of celebrity, as well as to its capricious-
ness, instability, and fungibility of meaning and the broadening scope
of its subjects of illumination.
Numerous scholars have critically assessed the shallowness and
simulated reality of celebrity culture.50 Such criticisms are germane and
generative here. Although investing in the luminous effects of picture-
taking might be the height of mystification, “the authentication of illu-
sion as more real than the real itself,” the fervent attentiveness to celeb-
20 Introduction
rity in these local contexts may reveal a certain fixation with status in
societies where fame and fortune increasingly appear to be achieved on
the basis not of merit but of the mastery of skills related to techniques
of the visual and the production and dissemination of one’s image.51
By examining these distinct local manifestations of celebrity, we may
glimpse structures of longing in post–civil rights and postcolonial
contexts—local people’s efforts to negotiate the political, economic,
sociological, and aesthetic spheres that make possible, maintain, or
constrain their ability to transcend their social status and the fixity of
their station, space, and time.52 These forms offer the possibility of mo-
bility and transcendence.
As attentive observers of the power and possibilities of performing
celebrity, participants in these African diasporic practices cast a spot-
light on the constitutive components of global visual media, the effect
and affect of its production of fame. They invest in but dissect struc-
tures by putting the illusion of celebrity on view. Using lights, cameras,
and red carpets, they make a spectacle of the spectacle of celebrity, per-
petuating, picturing, and performing the gestures, sights, and visual
apparatuses used in the manufacture of fame. The spectacle of stardom
becomes an end in itself, testifying to the way these practitioners simul-
taneously reconstitute and reify notions of celebrity as both conscripts
and transformers of its visual machinations, possibilities, and limits—
its power of persuasion and illusory effects.
These African diasporic popular lens-destined practices also high-
light photography’s role as a technology of race in which light has played
an intrinsic role. My primary interest in light lies less in its physical
properties than in how it has become refracted into Western epistemes
of representation since the Enlightenment. Since 1666, when Isaac
Newton studied the color spectrum and postulated “it was white light
that contained all other colours, rather than, as had been believed before
black,” whiteness has increasingly been associated with the meaning of
representability.53 Through the work of Newton and others, whiteness
came to seem invisible and universal, the ground on which representa-
tion took place. The ideals that surrounded whiteness became manifest
in lighting techniques and photographic and cinematic technologies.
Richard Dyer details how photographers pictured white women in ways
that associated them with celebrity, glamour, spirituality, universality,
ideality, and moral and aesthetic superiority.54 Intriguingly, he also ob-
serves that photographers used lighting to create a sense of white femi-
ninity as disembodied, not of the flesh, while they typically lit nonwhite

subjects to create the appearance of shine and sweat—a glistening that
highlighted the body and its surface. Photography long privileged and
universalized particular constructions of race and gender without ap-
pearing to do so.
The “racial character” of photographic technologies, as Lorna Roth
and Dyer point out, directly informed the appearance and illegibility of
black people.55 Roth, for instance, examines light-skin bias in color-film
stock emulsions, in “flesh-tone” reference cards used to achieve skin-
color balance in analog photography, and in the digital-camera tech-
nologies.56 The different popular photographic practices in the African
diaspora explored here intervene in these histories of technologies of
light and the production of race, making different claims on and invest-
ments in the photographic effect of white light.57 How can black people,
through popular practices, create different forms of legibility through
photographic and videographic technologies, given the historical re-
lation between whiteness and light and the very notion of the repre-
sentable? How might they differently shine, glow, or bling through the
photographic and videographic medium and in the public sphere?
Skin bleaching in Jamaica’s contemporary dancehalls, which in-
creased in popularity with the rise of the video camera and video light
in the early 1990s, is a revealing case in point. In this complex practice,
subjects often lighten the surface of their faces with chemicals. Some
dancehall participants believed that having lighter skin readied them to
be in the scope of the video light and in the videos or photographs that
might result from them.58 Many factors contribute to this practice, but
I want to call attention to skin bleaching as a response to and as a form
of visual technology. That skin bleachers lighten the surfaces of their
bodies to appear on video and in the video light, to be representable,
testifies to the ways photography privileges whiteness and to the dras-
tic, body-altering lengths to which some people go to be representable,
registered, and recognized, given the historical facture and uses of the
medium to image race.
But photography as a technology is not simply imposed and engaged
in a hegemonic way in the locations examined here. It is transformed in
the process. The bodies of men and women, manipulated to reflect light,
become a new form of photographic surface, absorbing and reflecting
light, appearing permanently marked by the light of representation.
Bleachers make their skins sensitive to light through the application of
a variety of chemicals.59 These substances make their bodies reflect and
absorb light the way photo emulsion makes photographic paper sensi-
22 Introduction
tive to the impressions of light. In this way the bleached subjects trans-
form their skins into photographs, becoming both what we might think
of as the subject of the photograph and its material matter. Skin bleach-
ing is an example of what we might describe as a body of photography,
the result of and transference of the effect of photographic technolo-
gies on the body and part of a broader creation of a social body through
vision, light, and visual media.60
Skin bleaching, video light, street photography, and the contemporary
art that engages these complex practices all raise questions about what
constitutes photography in these and other cultural and geographic con-
texts. In this way these expressions form part of “photography’s other
histories.”61 This is Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson’s prescient
term for scholarly analyses of the medium that take into account a range
of geographic locations and a variety of different media that inform how
photography is rethought across cultural contexts and over time. These
practices expand notions of photography beyond understandings of the
photograph as “a three-dimensional thing . . . [that] exist[s] materially
in the world, as chemical deposits on paper,” as Elizabeth Edwards and
Janice Hart describe it.62 While lens-centered African diasporic expres-
sions at times take more conventional forms, these expressions also
emphasize the moment of the photograph’s taking, the pose, the per-
formance for the camera—ephemeral processes and effects that elude
or do not privilege forms of material capture.63 These representational
practices put pressure on assumptions about materiality and reproduc-
ibility that very much undergird most histories of photography. In this
respect, they highlight what might be described as other ontologies of
photography—photographic practices that precede and exceed the ma-
terial forms conventionally associated with the medium. Perhaps the
pose, the staging of the photographic event and its spectacular effects,
and the body as photograph complicate and refuse notions of the on-
tology of photography because the material image is often beside the
point. What matters instead is how people use the camera in conjunc-
tion with other technologies to construct a complex set of relations to
their local, transnational, and diasporic communities.
The Visual Life of Things: Materialism Reconfigured

through the Visual Economy of Light
Photographic and videographic expressions created by black urban

populations in the circum-Caribbean also offer an opportunity to ex-

plore African diasporic perceptions of and approaches to global con-
sumer culture. Across these representational practices people choose
to be pictured with particular consumer goods and often engage in dis-
plays of conspicuous consumption. There is a distinct aesthetic of ma-
terial excess or what Kobena Mercer characterizes as “too-muchness”
evident in many of these expressions.64 They manifest a “bling-bling”
aesthetic—“ bling” being a word that in its doubling highlights the spec-
tacular display of material surplus. Such expressions involve not only
the possession of material things, but their embellishment or appear-
ance alongside signifiers of wealth and prestige. Bashment, the pimped-
out public bus, epitomizes a bling-bling aesthetic and its ability to trans-
form the ordinary into the spectacular. The most audacious participants
in these practices seem to be poster children for identity formation in
the society of the spectacle, who engage in consumerism for the pur-
pose of being seen and in some instances are turned into products to be
displayed and consumed through photography, video, or digital tech-
nologies.
While many people who participate in the representational and per-
formance practices studied here portray their personhood and prestige
through consumer goods, they simultaneously produce other forms of
value and status that mitigate, take on, and transform the shimmering
world of consumer culture. People in the African diaspora who engage
in these practices have created their own visual economy, a shared sys-
tem of value that circulates across geographic boundaries and that re-
volves in part around the visual production and recognition of light.
I use the term “visual economy,” as Deborah Poole does, to be atten-
tive to the circulation of objects and images in local political economies
and across global networks—to emphasize the industries and econo-
mies surrounding image production.65 The phrase as employed here also
stresses the way aesthetic qualities or ephemeral visual effects inform
the local, transnational, and diasporic circulation of goods and their
broader social life.66
In the practices considered here not just any expensive luxury item
has currency. Objects have value and are circulated if they exhibit cer-
tain aesthetic characteristics. Things that bling, shine, or shimmer, that
emit light, are especially privileged. Such investments in the visual
economy of light abound in hip-hop, where rappers often boast of the
blinding effects of their bling or the status they accrue through the
effect of light.67 Indeed, “bling” is often attributed to the New Orleans–
based rapper B.G., who purportedly coined the word in 1998 to charac-
24 Introduction
terize “the sound light makes as it hits a diamond.”68 The Oxford English
Dictionary would later define “bling” as “representing the visual effect of
light being reflected on precious stones or metals.”69 This attentiveness
to producing (or “sounding”) light is amply evident in the backdrops of
street photographs, which often portray material things with an atten-
tion to starbursts, reflect light through mirrors, or use words attest-
ing to the different qualities of light: “shimmer,” “shine,” and “bling.”
As such, although many participants in popular photographic prac-
tices may appear to be deeply invested in the appearance of material
wealth, this consumerism is based on luminous effect—on the intan-
gible and ephemeral visual qualities of commodities.70 This is not to sug-
gest that material wealth does not matter—it can matter with deathly
consequences—but to call attention to how it is mitigated and even
negated by the aesthetics of light. Bling and its local variants as such
may be seen as a mode of transmission in the contemporary African
diaspora, one that informs the ways communities of viewers differently
recognize and interpret value in their local and transnational contexts.
In other words, cultural forms associated with conspicuous con-
sumption in some ways reject or refashion notions of materialism,
privileging the shine of things as constitutive of value. What I describe
as a visual economy of light is in part a product of everyday aspira-
tional practices of black urban communities, who make do and more
with what they have, creating prestige through the resources at hand.
But these very processes can have a critical valence because they have
the potential to disrupt notions of value by privileging not things but
their visual effects. These popular expressions make conspicuously
hypervisible the economy of late capitalism and how it creates objects
of desire through technologies of light. Such practices complicate sim-
plistic assumptions about conspicuous consumption, “pecuniary emu-
lation,” and black urban populations. The display of flashy objects or
the effects of the performative moment of being photographed matter
most within this visual economy.71 Through a range of different types
of photographic and videographic images, objects, spectacles, and the
verbal re-creation of the moment of the picture’s taking a new, ever-
changing, and unpredictable community of viewers is created who re-
constitute and reenvision value.
This consideration of the value of light adds another voice to con-
siderations of materiality by emphasizing the way aesthetics shape ma-
terial practices.72 It also speaks to scholarly critiques of historical ma-
terialism offered from the perspective of the African diaspora. Theorists

from Cedric J. Robinson to Fred Moten have examined the way histo-
ries of diasporic formation, particularly racial slavery, allow us to ex-
pand and put pressure on our understandings of modernity, capitalism,
materialism, and Marxism and offer alternate ways of thinking about
notions of the commodity, value, property, and humanity.73 Bling and
related notions of shine may be understood as part of a black popular
cultural and scholarly approach that is attentive to diasporic peoples’
intrinsic place within, estrangement from, or relationship to modern
capitalism and Western societies’ definitions of citizenship.
Bling has historical precedents in the African diaspora. The folk hero
known as Shine bears this out. In African American and Caribbean oral
traditions recorded since the 1930s and 1940s in the United States and
the Bahamas, Shine was a heroic figure who worked in the bowels of
the Titanic (the ill-fated luxury liner, which was racially segregated).74
According to legend, it was Shine who first noticed water filling the
supposedly unsinkable ship. He warned his dismissive captain several
times over, to no avail. “Finally,” as historian Lawrence Levine summa-
rizes the many oral accounts, “perceiving the captain’s blindness, Shine
jumps overboard, withstands a series of temptations and threats, and
with superhuman skill swims to shore, the ship’s only survivor.”75 Shine
turns down several offers of material wealth and sexual favors from pas-
sengers (who want him to rescue them) before successfully swimming
on. There is much to be gleaned from the popular account of Shine and
his experiences on the Titanic, which in its day was a beaming symbol of
modernity, luxury, and Western technological advances and progress. I
focus on Shine because this folk hero is related to ideas of blackness and
light, African diasporic subjects’ locations within modernity and West-
ern nations, and African diasporic ways of seeing and coming to terms
with consumer culture and technology. Shine importantly sees the fatal
flaws of the modern ship because of his vantagepoint in the belly of the
vessel, even though his insights at first go unrecognized. Shine is sym-
bolic of an African diasporic location within and visual perspective on
modernity, Western capitalism, and notions of citizenship from an in-
terior of Western society. Shine—whose very name calls attention to
the effect of light—quite literally represents this eye, this vision into
modern and consumer society.76 The story of shine, and by extension
bling, crucially is not confined to a study of the African diaspora but
is an assessment of and a reflection on processes of consumer culture,
capitalism, and the modern more broadly: their aesthetic, political, and
social effects and their often unrecognized perils.
26 Introduction
Citizenship and Visibility in the Post–Civil Rights
and Postcolonial Eras
In every local context considered here, populations who engage in the

various manifestations of the visual economy of light have solicited
widespread rebuke as examples of crass materialism, individualism, and
narcissism, if not nihilism, by politicians, government officials, news-
paper columnists, an older generation of entertainers, and academics.77
The populations participating in these forms and in many instances the
practices themselves have been the foci not only of moral panics but of
social policing. Curtailments have ranged from cable companies restrict-
ing access to music video channels and governmental efforts to curb
proms in the Bahamas to deadly police raids of dancehalls in Jamaica.78
These popular representational practices have become central in public
discourses about rights to and within public space and what the respon-
sibilities of citizens are in contemporary black and post–civil rights and
postcolonial societies.
These expressions have been subject to controls in part because they
do not appear to buy into configurations of nation, culture, blackness,
respectability, and class that have been articulated since the civil rights
movement in the United States and the independence movements in
Jamaica and the Bahamas of the 1960s–1970s.79 Indeed, critics often
lament that expressions like video light or proms manifest a detour
from, if not an end to, the black nationalist agendas that informed cul-
tural and political life across these communities a generation ago.80 They
seem antithetical to the expressions designated and financially sup-
ported as “culture” in the 1960s–1970s by black leaders.
Many producers and users of these popular expressions came of age in
and after the 1980s—after the social, political, historical, and economic
shifts of the 1960s–1970s. Local communities also splintered along lines
of class, party affiliation, and color in this period. In the United States
this era, which started in the 1970s and early 1980s and continues to
shape African American communities in the United States, has been
described as postindustrial.81 It was a period marked by deindustrial-
ization, desegregation, the suburbanization of the black middle classes,
Reagan-mandated cuts to the welfare state, the aids crisis, the com-
modification of black popular expression, the cocaine and heroin trade,
and a rise in the culture of individualism and materialism, all of which
transformed and fragmented black communities. In Jamaica, in 1980,
the neoliberal Jamaica Labour Party came to power, opening up the

I.10. Hank Willis Thomas, Black Power, 2008. Lightjet print, 20 × 30 in. Courtesy of
the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
island’s market to global capital. To deal with steep cuts mandated by

the International Monetary Fund, the Jamaican government decreased
spending on transportation, health, and education, contributing to a
rise in unemployment and poverty and the expansion of an informal
sector of the economy.82 This period, marred by violent bipartisan party
politics, saw the rise of a brown middle class in the business and politi-
cal realms and the deepening of an economic and cultural gulf between
the classes.83 In the Bahamas in the 1980s, the black populist Progres-
sive Liberal Party government officially embraced a policy of Bahamiani-
zation. It retained national control of utility companies and attempted
to limit foreign control of businesses, jobs, and land, as the predomi-
nance of tourism, the offshore banking industry, and the illegal drug
trade evinced the islands’ integration into global economies and finan-
cial markets that catered to very wealthy foreign clients. The early 1990s
saw the removal of many barriers to trade and land ownership, which
contributed to an increase in land prices, crime, and the maintenance
of a regressive tax system that burdened the poor. Many blacks also re-
mained shut out of the business sector, still controlled by white Baha-
mians.84 In these neoliberal environments, consumer goods freely cir-
culated, and urban populations had limited means to acquire many of
these things.
28 Introduction
I.11. Satch Hoyt, From Mau Mau to Bling Bling, 2005. Ebony, zirconias, key, velvet-
lined case, and audio components, accompanied by a soundscape, 38 × 19 × 7 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
Several contemporary artists draw on urban practices in their work

to address these shifts and reconstitutions of black politics and cul-
ture. They invoke the icons and slogans of black nationalism from the
1960s–1970s but highlight the ascendancy of a new representational
moment in which a bling-bling aesthetic dominates the contemporary
social, political, and artistic landscape. This tendency is evident in Hank
Willis Thomas’s photograph Black Power (2008) (fig. I.10). This image
comes from his Branded series, in which he used print advertisements
from 1968 to 2008 that capitalized on black culture and black bodies,
from which he removed explicit references to the brand or object for
sale. In Black Power, for example, the words “black power” appear
to be composed of diamonds or rhinestones on the gold grill worn by
a smiling black man.85 The closely cropped image of the male figure’s
face calls attention simultaneously to the appearance of conspicuous
consumption in black culture after the black power era as well as to
the way blackness functions readily as a container of consumer culture
more broadly. Satch Hoyt similarly weds a globally inflected symbol-
ism of people power and working-class rights from the 1970s to con-
temporary consumerism in his 2005 work From Mau Mau to Bling Bling

(fig. I.11). The piece features a carved ebony Afro pick in the shape of
the iconic clenched upraised fist, which is inlaid with zirconias and em-
bedded in an opened plush velvet case. Thomas, Hoyt, and several other
artists, particularly in the way they juxtapose images or texts associated
with black nationalism from the 1960s–1970s with bling-bling materi-
als from the 2000s, heighten the question of the relation between these
two eras.86 Is the contemporary focus on materialism an outgrowth of
the civil rights and independence movements or metastasis of its aims
and imaginative possibilities? How might the political be rethought
today and what symbols might be effective in mobilizing affiliation
in the era of individualism? What is or might be the relationship be-
tween citizenship and consumerism for black subjects at the turn of the
twenty-first century?
The works of art discussed in this book highlight the way the acquisi-
tion and display of material wealth may indicate the changing and com-
plex ways that the ability to gain access to consumer goods interfaces
with contemporary notions of citizenship and informs the way groups
and individuals think about their representation within democratic
societies. Making this case in relationship to different Latin American
cities, Nestor Canclini acknowledges the importance of viewing pro-
gramming from Hollywood, Televisa, and mtv: “Especially [for] youth,
the question[s] specific to citizenship, such as how we inform ourselves
and who represents our interests, are answered more often than not
through private consumption of commodities and media offerings than
through the abstract rules of democracy or through participation in dis-
credited political organizations.”87 In other words, private consumption
may be seen as indicative not of the demise of the political but of the
changing ways people represent their interests in the face of widespread
disenchantment with long-standing political institutions, which have
changed the meaning and possibilities of politics.88 I read the visual
economy of light employed and deployed by the subjects under con-
sideration here as taking up and reconfiguring this right to consume as
a crucial aspect of contemporary belonging that is mitigated by the re-
lations provided by image culture and not by the state. Further, urban
subjects’ ability to occupy the frame of the video or still camera and
to picture themselves having access to particular consumer goods has
become one means through which they see themselves as represented
within civil society. The popular visual practices generate new subjec-
tivities and configurations of the political in what might be considered
30 Introduction
a post-rights era, when the expectations surrounding rights fought for
in the immediate postcolonial and post–civil rights eras seem to some
unfulfilled.
Historically, since Emancipation in 1833 in Jamaica and the Bahamas
and 1863 in the United States, consumption has played a complicated
role in the formation of black citizenship. Colonial rulers used the allure
of consumer goods as a tool in the transition from slavery to freed labor
in the Caribbean and the United States. In Jamaica and other places,
for instance, British lawmakers encouraged recently emancipated slaves
to desire material acquisitions because they hoped that the desire for
things would transform them into productive and disciplined workers.89
Some colonial administrators and imperialists even advocated Emanci-
pation so as to increase the number of possible consumers.90 In more re-
cent history, as Gilroy points out, in the United States blacks were con-
ceived as potential consumers before they could freely participate in the
sociopolitical system as citizens.91 They had rights (even though these
were negated sometimes) to buy into forms of freedom and mobility af-
forded by consumer goods like the automobile, to discover “themselves
and their agencies through their social life as consumers.”92 Gilroy sug-
gests that “there is evidence to suggest that, at times, forms of con-
spicuous consumption contributed to the strategies that the minority
pursued in order to win and to compel recognition as human beings, as
fellow citizens.”93 Despite this history, he remains skeptical of materi-
alism in contemporary African American hip-hop culture, arguing that
“consumerism has largely superseded the rights and responsibilities of
citizenship.”94
Some contemporary art practices that focus on conspicuous con-
sumerism intriguingly locate this phenomenon within this broader
history of black people’s long-standing and complicated relationship
to notions of the commodity in the Americas, one that goes back to
modern racial slavery. This is underscored in Robert Pruitt’s 2004 work
For Whom the Bell Curves (fig. I.12). Creating a map occupying five feet
across a wall, Pruitt represented the transatlantic slave trade by draping
twelve fake gold chains. This glimmering minimalist sculpture draws a
connection between chains as a black urban accessory and global econo-
mies of enslavement, highlighting a complicity and continuity between
bling-bling and racial slavery. Such a return to the history of slavery as
imagined through shiny consumer goods and representational practice
also abounds in popular culture. The rapper Kanye West, for one, makes

I.12. Robert Pruitt, For Whom the Bell Curves, 2004. Twelve gold chains, 47 × 60 in.
Collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph
courtesy of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.
the case in the song “All Falls Down”: “We shine because they hate us,
floss cause they degrade us. We trying to buy back our 40 acres.” Here,
he connects contemporary instances of shining to the broken prom-
ises of Emancipation. The contemporary artwork and rap lyric are but
two examples that elucidate that bling is a form through which dias-
poric people return to and reenvision the memory, the time-space, of
slavery and the unfulfilled promises of full citizenship after Emancipa-
tion and the civil rights and independence eras. Bling, then, is central
as a mode of transmission between contemporary diasporic cultures
and the particular formative moments in the past that diasporic people
hoped would transform their status in modern Western societies. Bling
also reflects the way blackness, as Saidiya Hartman points out, was and
is inextricably related to the “use of, entitlement to, and occupation
of the captive body.”95 This cutting back to and highlighting of slavery
raises and returns to the question, how do people whose forebears were
defined as property use objects to negotiate and represent their person-
hood and citizenship in the contemporary context?
The focus on shiny things and the photographic spectacle of con-
sumption in black urban practices in the circum-Caribbean might con-
32 Introduction
structively be assessed within this longer history of the relationship be-
tween black people and the commodity, a relationship that continues to
persist in global capitalism in the twenty-first century. The visual econ-
omy of light shows up the way blackness continues to connote fungi-
bility. Recent studies suggest that blacks are so associated with con-
sumption that when asked to imagine themselves in different social
roles, white students were more inclined to desire “high-status prod-
ucts” if they were role-playing as black characters.96 This study empha-
sizes how conspicuous consumption among black urban populations re-
flects a broader culture of consumption in the circum-Caribbean and
globally, even as it is often identified with or seen as visible on certain
segments of the population by critics of materialism among black urban
populations.
In many respects, we might see the fascination with adorning and
picturing the body’s surface in jewels, the taking-on of the shine of
things, as a type of screen. A screen in its basic common definition refers
to a surface onto which images are projected, displayed, or attached. A
screen may also characterize something that separates space or shel-
ters or protects someone or something, serving to obscure or conceal
it.97 Jacques Lacan’s influential formulation of the cultural screen is ger-
mane here, particularly as interpreted by Kaja Silverman.98 For Lacan
the screen refers to the external representations or the image repertoire
that one aims to assimilate into and through which one structures one’s
visual identity or ego. Those deemed “different”—whether because of
gender, sexuality, or race—may have a negative relation to their bodily
ego because of this cultural screen.99 In the case of the flaunting of shiny
material things in black popular expressive cultures, we might see these
urban practices as mimicking the image repertoire that mainstream so-
ciety has of blackness that long wedded it to consumption, whether the
association of persons seen as black with property or the use of black
culture to sell the latest commodity. The ostentatious display of things
might be interpreted as a protective means. We might understand the
use of material goods and the production of blinding light as a shield
or apotropaic, simultaneously reflecting and deflecting the deidealiz-
ing gaze on black subjects. Moreover, the photographic effect of light,
bling, visually suspends that which is not of the subject, the cultural
screen. The popular expressions analyzed here, with their attention to
the reflection of light off of surfaces, highlight a space just beyond the
surface, lingering on the gap between the viewer and the subject. This
taking-on and holding the gaze in abeyance is precisely the space/site

that African diasporic subjects negotiate in their photographic and ex-
pressive practices.
Describing photographs as structuring a relation to the screen, Kaja
Silverman maintains that many people pose themselves and attempt to
be seen as they are imaged through the gaze. Many of the practices ex-
amined here do not rely on the physical image as a source of alignment
with ideality. Afterimages, created in the body, are precisely not subject
to some of the kinds of negative responses or refusals of recognition that
black people have often experienced.100 What participants in these popu-
lar expressions strive for is the reification provided by the moment of
photographability itself, and the witnessing of that moment by present
and future audiences. This offers reification through a different image, a
memory image or an ideality achieved through that which is always fleet-
ing, in the now, in the moment, complete in its ephemeral form.
Contemporary Art and the Aesthetics of Bling
Several contemporary artists describe African diasporic urban visual ex-

pressions as formative in their artistic approaches to representation.
They came of age using and consuming popular photographic and video-
graphic technologies, as in the case of Wiley’s and Nelson’s experiences
with street photography and Patterson’s engagement with dancehall.
Many grew up in what Mark Anthony Neal describes as the postsoul
era in the 1980s, when televisual representations of black culture were
omnipresent for the first time and many globally marketed consumer
products were branded through blackness. These artists’ formative teen
years took place in front of television screens beaming mtv and the
cable channel Black Entertainment Television (bet) (founded in 1981
and 1980, respectively). Artists across the circum-Caribbean, including
Ras Kassa, Rashaad Newsome, and Wiley, cite the influence of music
video director Hype Williams (Harold Williams), known for his flashy
hip-hop and r&b music videos and his film Belly.101 Williams came to be
recognized for a form of music video shot with a fish-eye lens that satu-
rated its subjects with bright lights and emphasized reflective surfaces
(fig. I.13). This was also the era when hip-hop in the 1980s and dance-
hall in the early 1990s achieved global visibility through visual media
like the music video.
The contemporary artists examined here create figurative work, often
centered on the black male body, in an era when black male subjects ap-
pear ubiquitously and in hypervisualized form in advertising, hip-hop,
34 Introduction
I.13. Hype Williams, video still from Feel So Good by Mase, 1997. Bad Boy
Entertainment, New York. © Harold [Hype] Williams.
dancehall, and other forms of popular culture. They do so by using aspects

of popular practices to stage their subjects. Many draw their models from
the streets, highlight the process of being seen as its own form of image,
create work at the interstices of photography and painting, and examine
the effect of light and its relation to beauty, prestige, objecthood, sub-
jectivity, race, blackness, the modern, and the representable. They vari-
ously highlight the haptic, opaque, performative, and luminous charac-
ter of their photographs. They present their subjects in ways that call
attention to notions of surface—the embellished surface, the reflective
surface, the surface of the body, the surface of the photograph or screen,
the backdrop and green screen. While modern artists working globally
since the early twentieth century have long emphasized the surface of
their canvases or sculptures in their artistic practice, these creators who
draw on African diasporic practices call attention to what might be de-
scribed as the surface of the surface—the effect of light reflecting off of
surfaces—as the representational space for figuring black subjects.

I.14. Kori Newkirk, video still from Bixel, 2005. Single-
channel video. Courtesy of the artist.
Kori Newkirk highlights this attention to surfaces in his single-

channel video art piece Bixel (2005) (fig. I.14). In this five-minute work,
the artist pictures himself partially clad, and eventually covered in a
glittery silver substance, whirling in a lush green landscape. One scene
presents a close-up showing the glimmering silver gushing from his
mouth. It covers his upper torso, creating a sparkling second skin, a
surface that reflects lights and appears to pixelate across the video’s
screen. The artist chose glitter as central medium of figuration, visi-
bility, and concealment in his first excursion into video work and into
self-portraiture.102
Newkirk explains that he was compelled by the word Bixel because it
sounded “like a lot of other things.”103 While for the artist the term is
indeterminate, the word and the subject and media of the video simul-
taneously evoke the ideas of pixel and the black body. What might it
mean to bring the pixel, the discrete unit of representation that com-
poses the surface of an image on a digital television or computer screen,
into proximity with blackness, which has long been so intrinsically de-
fined through the surface, through black skin? “Bixel”—if understood
as a composite of pixel and black—would seem to foreground the par-
tiality of vision and visual representation. It frames blackness as a frag-
ment that often comes to stand for the whole and insists that black-
ness be understood as a surface constructed through vision and visual
36 Introduction
technologies. Bringing together the constitutive elements of images
or highlighting the pixelated composition of video and foregrounding
the black body as another sparkling pixelated surface, bixel connotes a
form of blackness that remains unsettled—suspended in the represen-
tational possibilities of bits and bytes. Bixel also captures how African
diasporic urban culture often circulates through visual forms that call
attention to the material makeup of visual technologies; the subject pre-
sented is marked by the bytes and pixels that bring it into being.
Bixel hints at the representational processes through which many
urban African diasporic subjects bring themselves into visibility through
visual technology, joining prosthetically with photographic and video
media. Through their engagement with photography and video they be-
come part technology and part flesh, inorganic and organic, a subject
partially revealed and concealed within multiple skins, surfaces, and
screens. Anne Cheng’s insightful discussion of light and sheen in photo-
graphs of Josephine Baker seems generative for a discussion of bixel.104
Cheng makes the case that the harsh shine of Baker’s body made her ap-
pear almost inorganic and inconsumable in some ways. The focus on her
gleaming skin did not simply objectify her but rendered her visually im-
penetrable: “Baker’s ability to escape into surfaces paradoxically allows
her image to deflect misogynist and racist logic.”105 Newkirk’s literal acts
of consumption and the silvery substance that issues from his mouth,
the artist stresses, “from the inside” and covers a part of his body seem
another act of escape, of slipping into and out of surfaces that might
overdetermine, hypervisualize, and visually consume blackness and
obscure any sense of an interior life. I want to suggest more broadly
that through the bixel, by merging always partially with the matter of
the screen or photographic surface, black urban subjects in the circum-
Caribbean come into visibility but seek to remain unfixed, indetermi-
nate, sparkling in the transformative possibilities of visual technologies.
The emphasis on the surface in contemporary African diasporic
popular and studio art may be seen as part of a long artistic and schol-
arly engagement with the surface in the history of art. Scholars study-
ing a range of artistic genres, from seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas
paintings to African studio photography from the 1950s to 1970s, have
analyzed how attention to representing the surface often coincided with
global changes in the market economy and modern life. Some have been
attentive to how slavery, imperialism, and responses to colonialism in-
formed an emphasis on surface aesthetics or “surfacism.”106 This term,
as delineated by Christopher Pinney, refers to an emphasis on the ma-

teriality or visual texture of objects within or of the picture plane: “the
elaborately wrought and highly finished representations of objects that
are themselves elaborately wrought and highly finished.”107 Several of
the contemporary artists discussed in this book re-create paintings
from the history of Western art and place black subjects at their center
(at times choosing work from periods when surfacist aesthetics were
prevalent). These subjects underscore how the representation of black
figures and modern slavery at times literally provided the background
and formed the flesh against which the surfacist aesthetics could be
staged. Such approaches, whether manifest in the representations of
black subjects or slaves as accessories in Dutch landscape painting or
in Baker’s influence on the surfacist aesthetic in the work of Adolf Loos
and Le Corbusier, underscore the historical relation between the surface
in modern art and blackness. The contemporary studio practices that
I explore here emphasize the bounce of light off the reflective surface,
the space where visibility and invisibility come together, the edge of that
which is representable and unrepresentable in modern art.108
While considering works of art in the context of urban popular
photographic forms, this book also addresses where such practices come
together and diverge, the tensions and critiques generated when they
are brought into proximity in artworks and art-historical scholarship.
Notably, studio artists have frequently turned to black popular culture
as a subject in the last decade, even as opportunities for the public pre-
sentation of black popular expressions in the public sphere have dimin-
ished in places like Jamaica and the Bahamas. The issue of gender and
sexuality is another aspect that comes to light at the interstices of these
artistic and popular practices. As a gay black male, Wiley describes feel-
ing cast out of the performances of masculinity or hyperheterosexual
bravado common in expressions for the camera and in public space and
seeks to highlight forms of visibility and subjectivity that are occluded.
Nelson, too, in his backdrops put pressure on misogynistic images of
the black female bodies that often circulate in backdrops and music
videos. And Patterson explores new performances of masculinity that
have come to light in dancehalls. These practices, which use or address
issues of public space, underscore how urban popular photographic
forms are often sites where conservative conventions of gender and
sexuality manifest throughout society meet the transformative space
of the bixel, where gender identities are constantly being reframed.
38 Introduction
Un-visibility and a New Politics of Spectatorship
Importantly, we can see the investment in the spectacularized visibility

evident in popular practices as offering a new take on an approach to
politics widely espoused since the 1960s–1970s: the long-standing faith
placed in visibility as a proxy for or path to political representation.
Peggy Phelan’s observation that we need to interrogate the “implicit
assumptions about the connections between representational visi-
bility and political power which have been a dominant force in cultural
theory” is relevant here.109 Investments in representational visibility
have been mainstays of modern black politics since the early twentieth
century. One may interpret W. E. B. Du Bois’s belief that artistic repre-
sentations of blacks would bring political rights or British-born Jamai-
can artist Edna Manley’s insistence on making blackness representable
in Jamaican art in the 1920s as early manifestations of the equation of
black visibility and representability with political uplift.110
Such strategies increased in the lead-up to the civil rights and in-
dependence eras, when the racially denigrated presence and histories
of black citizens gained new visibility.111 Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible
Man (1952), the prologue to which centers on a protagonist illuminated
by siphoned electricity and 1,369 lightbulbs, has been seen as a pre-
cursor to and emblem of the ways visibility delineated a black political
agenda in the mid-twentieth century. It may also be interpreted, for
present purposes, as an early precursor to the contemporary emphasis
on the technology and effect of light. The incessant focus on claiming
visibility that is manifest in black popular practices captures a more
long-standing emphasis on visibility as a mode of social and political
representation. The case could be made, however, that the orchestra-
tion of contemporary cultural practices in which those who continue to
find themselves on the social and economic margins seem to demand
visibility more than anything else points to the limited effectiveness of
strategies of visibility—their failure to produce the political power they
were supposed to assure and secure.
But these twenty-first-century practices nevertheless reveal much
about the possibilities of the politics of visibility for different constitu-
ents in postcolonial, postblack, circum-Caribbean societies. In par-
ticular, different social groups have been rendered “un-visible” within
the structures of visibility forged since the 1960s–1970s and in an era
in which media and technology have facilitated what some refer to
as a state of “hypervisibility.” The term “un-visible” comes from Elli-

son’s introduction to the 1981 edition of Invisible Man.112 He describes
blacks in US society as so hypervisible that they have been rendered
un-visible—a phenomenon that has increased exponentially since the
1980s. Un-visibility describes the state of not being seen or not being
recognized, as well as the “moral blindness” toward the “predicament
of blacks.”
The contemporary performances and photographic practices ex-
amined here not only address efforts to be visible but create new com-
munities and communal public spaces through forms of viewership.113
These practices produce sites of visibility, where spectators are active
and engaged.114 Through these expressions different groups negoti-
ate what Gerard Aching refers to as the “degrees of recognition, mis-
recognition, and nonrecognition” in these post–civil rights and post-
colonial societies. Popular visual practices are particularly significant,
given that some of the cultural expressions and sites that the popular
classes once used to attain a level of visibility in the Caribbean, like
Carnival, have rendered certain “native subjects invisible today in the
islands that have assumed various modes of political autonomy.”115 The
representational practices studied here forge spaces of visibility outside
the domains used historically by the popular classes, many of which are
now those claimed and celebrated by the nation-state and by the middle
classes who have emerged since the 1960s–1970s. Black urban commu-
nities in Nassau, for instance, create prom spectacles that incorporate
aesthetic and musical aspects of Junkanoo but do so outside the desig-
nated space and time of that celebrated festival.116 Street photography
studios offer another mode of costuming and performance at Mardi
Gras, taking place in close proximity to the masking traditions of New
Orleans (fig. I.15). I make the case that traditional masking practices
have been reconstituted and relocated in these popular performances
of visibility.117
But these practices are not simply alternate strategies of visibility
aimed at creating greater representation in postcolonial societies.
These expressions, with their emphasis on effecting a blinding, bright
white light, may produce modes of visibility quite distinct from politi-
cal investments in being socially visible. Indeed, we might see the black
urban expressive practices as constituting what Phelan characterizes
as an “active vanishing, a deliberate and conscious refusal to take the
payoff of visibility.”118 In other words, the production of blinding visi-
bility may be interpreted precisely as not investing in existing “repre-
sentational economies” tied to certain investments in visibility. It is
40 Introduction
I.15. Sthaddeus Terrell, photograph of Terrell and a Mardi Gras
Indian chief posing before Terrell’s backdrops, New Orleans,
n.d. Courtesy of the photographer.
not clear what the payoffs of un-visibility are. They may be in line with
Richard Iton’s description of the fantastic possibilities of popular cul-
ture, with their “willingness to embrace disturbance, to engage the ap-
parently mad and maddening, to sustain often slippery frameworks of
intention that act subliminally, if not explicitly, on distinct and overlap-
ping cognitive registers, and to acknowledge meaning in those spaces
where speechlessness [and, I would add, illegibility] is the common cur-
rency.”119 These practices are political in that they refuse existing struc-
tures that define more formal political activity, highlighting the limits
of these structures. Further, we might see the production of represen-
tational disappearance in these black urban practices as performing a
state of un-visibility, as tacitly producing the state of being unseen, or of
making the un-visible’s disappearance seen. In sum, these expressions
highlight a certain visual opacity that emphasizes the spectacle of the
un-visible as a mode of representation in postcolonial societies.

Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1 analyzes the genre of street photography. In street photogra-

phy, as in video light, clients place a premium on the process of posing,
so much so that some commission dozens of photographs so as to pro-
long the spectacle of their picture-taking. This response highlights how,
as photographer Darrin Clark describes it, “being at a picture booth is
definitely . . . a status thing. . . . To be at the picture booth you definitely
will be recognized and be seen.”120 Posing and being seen inhabiting
sites where one is photographed are significant aspects of the genre. In
this genre, the Polaroid remains a favored photographic technology. This
photographic form involves capturing the now, the moment, but facili-
tates a temporal return to the 1960s–1970s and the unfinished project
of civil rights. Indeed, in the 1970s a group calling themselves the Polar-
oid Revolutionary Workers Movement, in their black-revolutionary and
diasporic efforts to actualize civil rights, targeted the Polaroid Corpo-
ration.
This chapter also focuses on the contemporary art of the late Charles
Nelson, who was based in Atlanta. One of the first artists to take up the
form, in 1999 he started creating his own backdrops, placing them out-
doors in highly trafficked black urban locations from Atlanta to New
York (fig. I.16).121 His Backdrop Project series investigates the form and
function of street photography, as well as notions of pictorial realism in
Western painting and photography.
Chapter 2 focuses on the use of video light in Jamaica’s dancehalls,
allowing further consideration of a place where street photography re-
sides but where video predominates. This discussion moves from con-
sidering more recognizable and conventional forms of photography to
examining the afterimage and bleached skin as types of photographs.
It centers on Jack Sowah, the first videographer to introduce video light
and screens into dance venues, and on the circulation of his footage as
well as instances in which his images did not circulate. In part by ana-
lyzing the photography-based, multimedia art of Ebony G. Patterson, I
explore a broader set of visual practices—from queer sartorial styles to
skin bleaching—engaged in by dancehall-goers who seek to be “inna da
light.” Patterson’s critically acclaimed work has extended the visibility
and global circulation of dancehall’s visual economy. This chapter makes
the claim that video light has democratized access to being on-screen
and serves as a mode of claiming visibility as citizens in contemporary
Jamaica.
42 Introduction
I.16. Charles H. Nelson, Y’all Niggas Ain’t Ready, from the
Backdrop Project series, December 1999. Public artwork,
Atlanta. Courtesy of the family of Charles H. Nelson, Jr.
Chapter 3 shifts to the Bahamas to discuss a local practice in which

performing for the camera is central and as valued as the physical
photograph: proms. Here, young people stage elaborate entrances that
are projected onto screens within the prom venue. One famed prom
entrance in 2004 featured a young woman who arranged for faux papa-
razzi to line the red carpet for the event. She did not hire the photog-
raphers to produce photographs (and in fact she did not retain a single
photograph of the entrance) but instead to highlight her own visibility
and representability. Such prom practices draw on and reconfigure
other diasporic cultures, local masquerade traditions, and global cul-
tures of celebrity.
Chapter 4 focuses squarely on how black urban aesthetic and repre-
sentational practices reverberate in contemporary art. It considers the
work of Kehinde Wiley and Luis Gispert, two artists who explore the
nexus between urban popular expressive practices, photography, and

visual constructions of status, prestige, and personhood in the history
of art. This chapter analyzes Wiley’s paintings and his photographic
series Black Light (2010), which foreground issues of black visibility and
technologies of light (fig. I.17). For this series, Wiley sought black male
models on the streets of urban communities across the United States
using a small contingent of photographers and videographers—his own
team of “paparazzi.” Further, he looked for men who moved through
public space as if they were on a runway, as if they possessed a sense
of their own prephotographic photographability. These models assume
poses from paintings found in art history books. I contrast this series
with earlier efforts by African American artists in the 1970s to give black
light visual form.
This chapter also considers the work of the Miami-born, New York–
based artist Luis Gispert, who focuses on what he describes as the
“urban baroque” aesthetic of black and Latino urban populations in
his photographs and video art. These works drive home the point that
some of the aesthetic practices in the African diaspora are shared with
other groups who tune in to the same visual technologies and share the
same urban landscapes. Finally, this chapter discusses works by Hank
Willis Thomas and Paul Pfeiffer, who engage photography, light, and
the spectacularity of blackness in global consumer culture. This chap-
ter emphasizes that popular representational practices and ways of see-
ing offer an optic on a range of representational practices at the center
of Western culture, from globalized consumer-oriented media to Euro-
pean portraiture.122
African Diasporic Art History in a New Light
I locate this project within the field of African diasporic art history. I ac-
knowledge that the visual economy of light in contemporary diasporic
cultures has many sources and is related to broader artistic, visual, cul-
tural, and political histories in and beyond the diaspora. Robert Farris
Thompson in his often-cited Flash of the Spirit as well as Henry J. Drewal
and John Mason in Beads, Body, and Soul: Art and Light in the Yoruba Uni-
verse (1998) have understood light in part as representative of the spirit
of Africa that remained ignited in the diaspora. Although multiple his-
torical influences and modes of circulation and translation of the visual
economy of light are often difficult to trace precisely, this book does not
outline a flash of something intuitively or innately diasporic but high-
lights how African diasporic communities are created through networks
44 Introduction
I.17. Kehinde Wiley, The Annunciation, from the Black Light series, 2009. Archival
inkjet print on Hahnemühle fine art paper, 30 × 24.531 in., edition of six. Courtesy
of the artist and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California.
of shared visual media and visual technologies and consumer culture
that inform ways of seeing at specific historical junctures. In the case of
the expressions examined here, photographic and videographic cultures
that emphasize light begat cultural forms invested in being on camera,
on the screen, and in the light. This book envisions African diasporic art
history more broadly as a field that explores how African diasporic com-
munities are, and have been, constituted through a shared attentive-
ness to how they are seen and how they respond to the ever-changing
states and stakes of visibility and disappearance that inform the histo-
ries and contemporary realities of these communities.
The aesthetic practices and visual networks explored here often go
undocumented and unarchived.123 One of the challenges and opportu-
nities that art historians of the African diaspora might take up is to
put pressure on the forces, institutions, and disciplinary structures
that might erase, discount, and render certain African diasporic prac-
tices un-visible in academia. This having been said, the project does not
make the claim that an archival or institutional visibility is needed or
necessary. This institutional illusiveness (that is, that these forms are
often not archived in institutions) and the ephemerality of these forms
and their documentation are also parts of what these practices are and
enact.
Finally, this book tries to move away from an investment in the poli-
tics of visibility evident in the field of African diasporic art history,
which has strategically been invested in inclusion and recognition in
more conventional art-historical paradigms, to explore the possible
alternative formations of image- and art-making in the diaspora. In
addition to charting an art history that responds to popular types of
creative expression in parts of the diaspora, analyzing Western modes
of visuality from a diasporic perspective, and looking at contemporary
representational spaces available for the figuration of the modern black
subject, this book highlights how the objects and subjects of study in
this field may take unique forms. It brings studio art into conversation
with popular representational practices and considers a variety of media
from still photography to video across a range of practitioners and cre-
ators to create a shared space of visibility within the pages of the book.
In doing so, it offers one possible model of African diasporic art history.
46 Introduction
NOTES
Introduction
1. Google, for instance, describes African Americans in the United States as
in “the vanguard of digital consumption.” Google’s report notes that “lower in-
come African Americans are willing to cut back on other things in order to af-
ford the latest technology.” See Google, “5 Truths of the Digital African Ameri-
can Consumer,” 12. See also Rideout et al., Children, Media, and Race, 1–20, and
Forbes, Music, Media and Adolescent Sexuality in Jamaica.
2. I use the characterization of “black public sphere” offered by the edi-
tors of Public Culture. “The Black public sphere is primarily concerned with
modernity and its relation to Black people through culture, politics, law and
economics. Modernists, from W. E. B. Du Bois to the present, have been con-
cerned with how to adopt modernism and modernization to Black ways of
life. They have sought to make Blackness new and remove it from the patho-
logical spaces reserved for it in Western culture, to define their own version
of modernity so as to provide a quality of life for Black people and to legit-
imize Black ways of life as modernist expressions.” Moreover, commodities
and their circulation and their relationship to markets, freedom, identity,
property, and pleasure are key in the articulation of the black public sphere.
I am using “black public spheres” here to denote public spheres across differ-
ent black urban communities. Appadurai et al., “Editorial Comment,” xii–xiii.
3. Silverman describes photography as a representational system and a
network of material practices, Threshold of the Visible World, 136.
4. Studies on the circum-Caribbean analyze the movement of people
(from loyalists to laborers), material goods, performance practices, and po-
litical ideologies across the transnational circuit in the United States (par-
ticularly the southern United States) and Caribbean. Such intraregional travel
often rendered local, colonial, and national configurations of race (or raceless-
ness) legible. Examples of this scholarship include Patterson, “Emerging West
Atlantic System”; Adams et al., Just below South; Cartwright, Sacral Grooves,
Limbo Gateways; and Regis, Caribbean and S outhern.
5. Un-visible describes a state of being unrecognized and unseen by main-
stream society and comes from Ellison, “Introduction,” xv. A more detailed
explanation of the term comes later in the chapter.
6. Both The World Stage: Jamaica and Illuminated Presence took place as this
book went to press and therefore will not be described at length here.
7. I examine this in chapter 2. On skin bleaching as a form of prepara-
tion for the video light, see McDonald, “Skin Bleaching and the Dancehall”;
Athaliah Reynolds, “ ‘Proud a Mi Bleaching’: ‘Skin-Bleachers’ Defend Their
Action Despite Health and Cultural Warnings,” Sunday Gleaner, November 15,
2009, A6; Claude Mills, “Heat in the City: The Layers of the Dancehall Queen,”
Gleaner Flair Magazine, April 22, 2002, 8–9; and Stanley Niahh, interview with
author, Kingston, Jamaica, August 15, 2011.
8. mob dancers, interview with author, Kingston, Jamaica, June 6, 2009;
Ian Dice Charger, interview with author, Kingston, Jamaica, August 19, 2011;
and Hodges, interview with author, Kingston, Jamaica, August 19, 2011.
9. Michael Graham, “Crazy Hype,” interview with author. Kingston,
Jamaica, June 6, 2009.
10. Jack Sowah, interview with author, Kingston, Jamaica, August 21, 2011.
11. People have been gathering in the outdoor arenas to dance since the
1950s. Hope, Inna di Dancehall, 10.
12. Sonny (whose last name is unknown to me) is the owner of Sonny’s
Video and Photography. The sign he uses at his photography studios displays
the name “Photo Sonny.”
13. The modern African diaspora characterizes people of African descent
brought to the Americas in transatlantic slavery, the generations that came
after them, and the secondary diasporas produced through contemporary mi-
gration. A sampling of the scholarship on the centrality of music or sound
within African diasporic formation includes Baucom, “Frantz Fanon’s Radio”;
Best, Culture @ the Cutting Edge; Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World;
Gilroy, Black Atlantic; Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic; and Weheliye, Pho-
nographies. On the centrality of print media, see Edwards, Practice of Diaspora.
On the circulation of black intellectuals, see James, Holding Aloft the Banner of
Ethiopia, as well as the Gilroy and Edwards citations earlier. On visual cultural
expressions like fashion, minstrelsy, or “black ephemera,” see Chude-Sokei,
Last “Darky”; Gilroy, “Wearing Your Art on Your Sleeve”; Neptune, Caliban and
the Yankees; and Thompson, Developing Blackness. For Wallace’s incisive cri-
tique of the privileging of the study of music in African American studies, see
Wallace, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-
American Culture,” 40–41.
14. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, and Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 66.
15. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.”
16. This study is indebted to the “encoding and decoding” methodology
that British cultural theorist Stuart Hall espoused for analyzing the influ-
ence of mass media. His work offers a prescient model, given the book’s focus
on how black populations interpret and often reconfigure visual media and
photographic and videographic technologies. I am especially interested in
how the visual intercedes and intervenes into the linked but distinctive mo-
272 Notes to Introduction
ments of production, circulation, distribution, and consumption, impacting
the production of popular cultural forms and studio art practices, as well as
encoding broader approaches to representation and visibility among black
urban populations. Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” and “Reflections upon the
Encoding/Decoding Model.”
17. On the unfinished qualities of music, see Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 104–105.
Elaborating on the “black fantastic,” Iton explains, “Popular culture thrives
on, and indeed demands, nuance, dadaesque ambiguity, and contrapuntality
as it resists fixedness in its moves between the grounded and the fantastic.”
He continues, “My suggestive reference to a black fantastic, then, is meant
to refer to the minor-key sensibilities generated from the experiences of the
underground, the vagabond, and those constituencies marked as deviant—
notions of being that are inevitably aligned within, in conversation with,
against, and articulated beyond the boundaries of the modern.” Iton, In Search
of the Black Fantastic, 11, 16.
18. On the joints and gaps as intrinsic to African diasporic formation, see
Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 13–15.
19. Meyer, Aesthetic Formations.
20. Gilroy, “Get Free or Die Tryin’,” 34.
21. The “practice of diaspora” comes from Edwards, Practice of Diaspora. On
the use of photography to create broader communities, geographies, and cul-
tures in the African diaspora, see Campt, Image Matters; Diawara, “1960s in
Bamako”; Raiford, “Photography and the Practices of Critical Black Memory.”
22. The hand-painted photographic ground was also the product of geo-
graphic distance, rendered pictorially even as from afar. Featuring a reversed
American flag in its corner, the artist created the image with a sense that
proximity, attainment of an imagined and allusive site of diasporic belonging,
came through the photographic technology. Conversely, in the United States,
patrons pose before photographic backgrounds depicting “tropical” Caribbean
landscapes. On the iconography of the picturesque tropical Caribbean land-
scape, see Thompson, Eye for the Tropics.
23. Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” 84.
24. As Saidiya V. Hartman describes it, African diasporic communities are
formed in part through “a sentient recollection of connectedness experienced
at the site of rupture, where the very consciousness of disconnectedness acts
as mode of testimony and memory.” Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 73–74.
25. In the 1980s, music videos would circulate through vhs tapes, which
were physically carried between the United States, Jamaica, and the Bahamas.
Hip-hop and r&b music videos from the United States later had widespread
visibility in the Caribbean, through stations like Black Entertainment Tele-
vision, the most popular station among youth in Jamaica. The performers
in Jamaica, like the mob dancers, and some of the prom participants who
play music videos during their entrances all describe the influence of music
videos on their performances. mob dancers, interview. On the early circula-
Notes to Introduction 273
tion of the music video in Jamaica, see Batson-Savage, “Here Come the ‘Hot-
steppers,’” Gleaner, January 16, 2005, E1.
26. Jack Sowah, interview with author, Kingston, Jamaica, August 21, 2011.
27. On how the process of compression to facilitate the speedy circulation
of information leads to loss of digital data and its parallels in contemporary
art, see Griffin, “Compression,” 3–20.
28. Hope, “Passa Passa,” 134.
29. While the circulation of media has the potential to disrupt conven-
tional strictures of gender and sexuality, more often than not the visualiza-
tion of nonheteronormative displays of gender and sexuality has provoked
debate, censure, and calls for censorship.
30. See Roach’s concept of “surrogation” and Stanley Niaah and her analy-
sis of how groups across Africa and the African diaspora to create a transna-
tional sense of community through performance geographies: Roach, Cities of
the Dead, 2, and Stanley Niaah, Dancehall, 32–33.
31. Roach, Cities of the Dead.
32. The camera revealed much about participants’ investment in photo-
graphic and videographic technologies as well as what was unphotographable
in each setting. But perhaps most important, my use of these devices allowed
me to develop a clearer sense of the presumed gender of the camera in these
contexts and about the heteronormativity of relations between cameramen
(male in every instance) and their subjects. Many of the illustrations in the
book are the product of my research; the video stills capture the in-between
state of representation that I see as characteristic of many of these forms.
33. Oxford English Dictionary (British ed.; Oxford University Press, 2003)
defines “after-image” as “an impression of a vivid image retained by the eye
after the stimulus has ceased.”
34. See Cadava’s study of Walter Benjamin, Words of Light, 43.
35. Lorde, “Afterimages,” 102–105. Afterimages, as Lorde describes them,
are close to what German cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer termed “memory-
images.” Kracauer distinguishes photographic images from memory-images.
He argues that while the latter can mechanically record across space and time,
memory-images are formed in the subjective consciousness according to their
significance. They represent a truth that the camera cannot capture. After-
images, to extrapolate from Lorde, are forms of memory-images and knowl-
edge produced through the photograph, the process of its production and its
phenomenological effects that are created in the body. Kracauer, “Photogra-
phy,” 425.
36. Since Frenchman Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre announced the de-
velopment of a photographic process he called the daguerreotype in 1838,
Englishman Henry Fox Talbot patented a form of image-making called the
calotype in 1841, and other inventers developed photographic processes glob-
ally in the early nineteenth century, photography has been associated with
the fixing of the impressions of light, directed through a camera obscura,
on a metal plate or on chemically treated paper. Talbot’s calotype photo-
graphic process also helped to popularize the production of multiple prints
from a negative. For an examination of these early forms of photography, see
Batchen, Burning with Desire, 24–53.
37. These characteristics reflect what Hall identifies as a quintessential
trait of diasporic formation: the process of becoming, the always unfinished
work of cultural formation and identity in the African diaspora. Hall, “Cul-
tural Identity and Diaspora.”
38. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5.
39. This is evident in the daguerreotypes taken by Joseph T. Zealy of en-
slaved Africans in North Carolina in 1850 and in Brazil, which polygenists,
like Louis Agassiz, likely used to forward theories of the distinct origins of
the races and inferiority of black people. The postcards of picturesque black
Caribbean inhabitants in Jamaica and the Bahamas from the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century taken by a host of photographers in the employ
of the colonial governments offered testaments, by the very appearance of
black inhabitants as picturesque photographable subjects, to the primitive yet
disciplined character of blacks in the islands. The daguerreotypes, which re-
vealed too much particular detail to denote racial types, and the staged Carib-
bean postcards, which were often painted over to hide unwanted details, high-
light some of the historically changing, and always contested and unstable,
ways that different constituencies sought to use photography to fix notions of
blackness and black people, to render blackness seemingly legible through the
photographic medium, and in doing so to deny blacks rights. On the Agassiz
images, see Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science”; Young, “Still Standing”; and
Smith, “Art of Scientific Propaganda.” On colonial photography in the Carib-
bean, see Thompson, Eye for the Tropics.
40. Willis, Posing Beauty.
41. Thaggert makes the apt point that photography and understandings
of the black racial stereotypes often functioned in similar ways. Both the sur-
face of the photograph and the skin of black individuals were “deictic,” point-
ing to something else, the former pointing to the subject of the photograph,
the latter to the surface of black bodies, signifying a host of “inherent” racial
traits. Thaggert, Images of Black Modernism, 146. For other compelling ana-
lyses of black skin and photographic surfaces, see Grigsby, “Negative-Positive
Truths”; Cheng, Second Skin; and Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual.
42. Sekula, “Body and the Archive,” 3–64.
43. Mirzoeff, Right to Look.
44. Kehinde Wiley, telephone interview with author, January 7, 2009.
45. Campt, Image Matters, 33.
46. I am using opacity here as Édouard Glissant does. See Glissant, “For
Opacity,” 252–257.
47. Boorstin, Image, 63.
48. Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 553.
49. Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 553.
50. Some of the central scholarly critiques of celebrity culture include
Boone and Vickers, “Special Topic: Celebrity”; Boorstin, Image; Braudy, Frenzy
of Renown; Debord, Society of the Spectacle; Dyer, Stars; Gamson, Claims to
Fame; Lowenthal, “Triumph of Mass Idols”; Marshall, Celebrity and Power. On
celebrity in the Caribbean, see Stanley Niaah, “‘I’m Bigger Than Broadway.’”
On simulated reality or simulacra, the substitution of symbols or signs of the
real for the real, see Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations.”
51. Quotation from Best and Kellner, “Debord and the Postmodern Turn,”
n.p.
52. As Braudy stresses, “The urge to fame is not so much a cause as a causal
nexus through which more generalized forces—political, theological, artistic,
economic, sociological—flow to mediate the shape of individual lives.” Frenzy
of Renown, 585.
53. Dyer, White, 109.
54. Dyer, White, 84–144.
55. Dyer, White, 83, and Grigsby, “Negative-Positive Truths,” 16–38.
56. See Roth, “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm,” and Winston,
“Whole Technology of Dyeing.” For an assessment of how recent digital tech-
nologies are transforming the filmic representation of black skin, see Ann
Hornaday, “Filmmaking Takes New Tone,” Washington Post, October 18, 2013,
C01.
57. Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, 29.
58. See the full discussion of this in chapter 2.
59. Products ranged from manufactured ones, like Ambi, Nadinola, and
Neoprosone, to homemade recipes, composed of toothpaste, bleach, corn
meal, curry powder, or milk powder. Hope, “From Browning to Cake Soap,” 41,
and Reynolds, “‘Proud a Mi Bleaching,’” A6.
60. Thanks to Hannah Feldman for her insightful suggestion of this term.
61. Pinney and Peterson, “Introduction.”
62. Edwards and Hart, Photographies, Objects, Histories, 1–15.
63. Roland Barthes describes the process of posing as “instantaneously
mak[ing] another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an
image.” Barthes is attentive to posing but lays emphasis on the material pro-
duction of the image as central to defining what photography is. I want to
embrace the shift in the temporality and physical makeup of photography ex-
hibited in some of the forms of photography examined here, seeing the pose
and process of being seen being photographed as an intrinsic part of photog-
raphy. Camera Lucida, 10.
64. Mercer, “Hew Locke’s Post-colonial Baroque,” 4.
65. Deborah Poole used the term “visual economy” to describe how the
field of vision is organized in some systematic ways, that have “as much to do
with social relationships, inequality, and power as with shared meanings and
community.” The term also captures a sense of the global channels through
which images flow. Poole, Vision, Race, Modernity, 8.
66. Marx, “Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret,” 165.
67. Such investments in the visual economy of light abound in the world
of hip-hop, where rappers often boast of the blinding effects of their bling or
the status they accrue through the effect of light. For a broader history of the
wearing of flashy jewelry in black performance, see chapter 3. But it was in
the late 1990s, I would suggest, when rappers highlighted their jewelry not
just as accessories but as products that affected vision. See, for instance, Lil
Wayne’s “Shine,” Lights Out album, Cash Money Records, 2000; Big Pun’s “Sex,
Money, & Drugs,” Mr Peter Parker—Happy Birthday Big Pun album, 2009; and
Jay-Z’s “Allure,” The Black Album, Roc-A-Fella Records, 2003. In Lupe Fiasco’s
lyrics for the single “The Cool,” a man digs himself out of his grave with his
gold chains, like a “reverse archaeologist.” “Except . . . his buried treasure was
sunshine. So when some [sunshine] shined through a hole that he drove, it
reflected off the gold and almost made his son blind.” Food & Liquor, Record
Plant Studios, 2006. On the way that “black shine” counters the fact that “the
sun never shines in the ghetto,” see State Property’s “Sun Don’t Shine,” State
Property album, Roc-A-Fella and Def Jam records, 2002.
68. B.G. as quoted in Bok, Little Book of Bling, 5. Or, as New York Times critic
Kelefa Sanneh put it, B.G.’s saying mimicked “the imaginary sound of light
hitting diamonds.” “Loving, Rapping, Snuggling And . . . ,” New York Times,
January 3, 2005, E1. See also the definition of “bling bling” by Nicole Hodges
Persley in “Bling, Bling,” 468: “When pronounced, the phrase is supposed to
imitate the sound of the gleam coming from high-quality diamonds when the
light hits them.”
69. Oxford English Dictionary.
70. In this way bling can be distinguished from other forms of “conspicu-
ous consumption” as defined by Thorstein Veblen, who first used the term
(1931). Public displays of wealth evident in hip-hop do evince “pecuniary emu-
lation,” to use Veblen’s characterization, when persons who are members of
the working classes consume conspicuously so that they appear of higher so-
cial standing. However, the expense or accumulation of luxurious goods in
hip-hop culture is directly related to the specific visual qualities of these pos-
sessions, which must shine, floss, or bling in order to convey prestige. In this
instance commodities accrue worth not only for their exchange-value, as Karl
Marx recognized and critiqued, but for their visual production (1990). Veblen,
Theory of the Leisure Class, 68–101; Marx, “Fetishism of the Commodity and
Its Secret.”
71. On pecuniary emulation in African American culture, see Rucker et al.,
“Power and Consumer Behavior,” 352–68.
72. In this vast literature several scholars have been pivotal. See Gell, Art
and Agency; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory
of Practice; Miller, Materiality; and Appadurai, Social Life of Things. For more re-
cent engagements with this literature, see Bennett, Vibrant Matter, and Coole
and Frost, New Materialisms.
73. See, for instance, Robinson, Black Marxism; Moten, In the Break; Judy,
“On the Question of Nigga Authenticity”; Williams, Capitalism and Slavery;
Kelley, Race Rebels; Copeland, Bound to Appear.
74. Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson argue that many contempo-
rary black males model themselves after “badmen” like John Henry, Stagalee
[Railroad Bill], Shine, or boxer Jack Johnson. Cool Pose, 33.
75. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 427.
76. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 427.
77. See, for instance, West, “Nihilism in Black America,” and Gilroy, “Dias-
pora, Utopia and the Critique of Capitalism,” 153–222. On the anxieties over
the “popular” in postcolonial Jamaica, consult Scott, Refashioning Futures.
The geographically specific configurations of critics and defenders of these
displays of conspicuous consumption in each context are laid out across the
chapters.
78. Curtailments of urban popular culture extend to the radio airwaves
and television bandwidths. The Jamaica Broadcasting Commission in Jamaica
banned some forms of dancehall music from the radio airwaves and public
broadcasting that animated public space on the island in 2009. Music related
to daggering, a sexually explicit lyrical and performance genre, was banned.
See discussion in chapter 2. In the Bahamas, the cable company removed
Black Entertainment Television from local basic cable offerings, seeking to
prevent the perceived corrupting influence of music video programming (tar-
geting a station that played hip-hop and r&b specifically and not rock music).
The Bahamian government has also hindered the staging of live concerts by
Jamaican and African American musicians, as well as the movement of the
street photographers who travel with them. Photographer John Jones ex-
plained that he was denied a visa to work in the Bahamas when he sought to
bring his street photography studio to the islands. Jones, interview with au-
thor, Kingston, Jamaica, July 6, 2008. In 2004 and 2009, the ministries of edu-
cation in the Bahamas and Jamaica, respectively, even sought to curtail the
spectacles surrounding prom and graduation ceremonies. Raymond Kongwa,
“Sears to Parents: ‘Be Temperate in Prom Spending,’ ” Nassau Guardian, Au-
gust 9, 2004, A1. In the past, Jamaica’s Constabulary Force have shot and
injured dancehall participants as they attempted “to lock down the dance.”
Stanley Niaah, Dancehall, 9, 63.
79. Scott, Refashioning Futures.
80. The chapters explore these discourses through an analysis of criticisms
published in local newspapers.
81. Rose, Black Noise, and Neal, What the Music Said.
82. Patterson, “Condition of the Low Income Population in the Kingston
Metropolitan Area,” and Horace, They Cry Respect.
83. Natasha Barnes succinctly characterizes “Jamaica’s ‘brown’ caste” as
follows: “Although no anthropological description of the group exists . . .
to be a Jamaican ‘brown’ is to have membership in a small, privileged mu-
latto oligarchy that was the result of generations of careful mulatto breeding,
which was socially distinct from other mixed-race communities. Phenotypi-
cally light-skinned and curly-haired, ‘browns’ symbolized an ideally creolized
configuration of Afro-Anglo moral, social, and aesthetic registers. ‘Brown’
men, like those of the famous Manley dynasty, were the inheritors of the
emergent nation’s political and mercantile institutions, while ‘brown’ women
the staple choices for the island beauty queens.” Barnes, Cultural Conundrums,
110–111.
84. Thompson, Economic History of the Bahamas, and Craton, “Bay Street,
Black Power and the Conchy Joes.”
85. In hip-hop culture, a grill is a removable piece of jewelry worn over the
teeth.
86. Ebony G. Patterson’s photography-based textiles also cut back to repre-
sentations associated with the 1960s and 1970s. In her series Gangstas for Life
(2010) she used paintings from the era of black nationalism or independence
by Jamaican artists like Albert Huie and Barrington Watson and posed men
dressed in the flashy stylings of dancehall, like the figures that inhabit these
artists’ iconic works. Charles H. Nelson also makes explicit the ways contem-
porary black urban expressions stood in contrast to the political ambitions of
the 1970s. He painted backdrops based on photographs of fallen black politi-
cal leaders, like Martin Luther King Jr. (see fig. 1.38). He used these canvases
in his own version of the street photography studios.
87. Canclini, Consumers and Citizens, 5.
88. Further, Manthia Diawara argues that in African nations where Inter-
national Monetary Fund policies have greatly controlled and constrained the
possibility of some forms of consumption, access to goods and their control in
traditional markets have become a means of exercising forms of sovereignty
from the imf and nation-state. Diawara, “Toward a Regional Imaginary in
Africa,” 103–124.
89. Holt, Problem of Freedom, 76–78. On an early form of conspicuous con-
sumption among slaves, see Tobin, “Taxonomy and Agency in Brunias’s West
Indian Paintings.”
90. Kwass, “Ordering the World of Goods.”
91. Gilroy, “Get Free or Die Tryin’,” 8–9.
93. Gilroy, “Get Free or Die Tryin’,” 9. See also Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 1–25.
95. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 25.
96. Rucker et al., “Power and Consumer Behavior,” 352–368.
97. Oxford English Dictionary (British ed.; Oxford University Press, 2003).
98. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 91–122, and Silver-
man, Threshold of the Visible World.
99. Kaja Silverman cites the example of Fanon as a black moviegoer in
France waiting hesitantly for menial black characters to appear on the cine-
matic screen as a literal example of the way black subjects see themselves in
discordant and deidealized ways through the screen, which normalizes and
privileges whiteness. Silverman elaborates: “But at least within French cul-
ture of the 1950s, the ego-ideal can only entertain a highly disjunctive relation
to the proprioceptive body, since, in order for the black subject to misrecog-
nize himself within the image of a dazzling ‘whiteness,’ he must also be ‘seen’
through it, and that is impossible.” Silverman uses “screen” in this context to
refer to the screen where the projected image swims in a darkened cinema and
in the sense of the term as employed in psychoanalysis to describe a broader
societal ideal of whiteness, “the repertoire of representations by means of
which our culture figures all of those many varieties of ‘difference’ through
which social identity is inscribed.” Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World,
19, 29.
100. Thanks to Huey Copeland for this insightful reading.
101. Ras Kassa, interview with author, Kingston, Jamaica, June 11, 2009;
Kehinde Wiley, telephone interview with author, January 8, 2009, and Ra-
shaad Newsome, interview with author, New York, February 3, 2012.
102. Newkirk explains, “In my previous and earlier works [before Bixel], in
all of the self-portraits . . . I wasn’t so interested in painting myself as an indi-
vidual. . . . I was really interested in the idea of what this specific black body
represented, what my body could represent; it wasn’t about the individual.”
Kori Newkirk, telephone interview with author, September 13, 2013.
103. Newkirk, interview.
104. Cheng, Second Skin, 101–131.
105. Cheng, Second Skin, 119.
106. Alpers, Art of Describing; Barthes, “World as Object”; Best and Marcus,
“Surface Reading”; Carpentier, “Baroque and the Marvelous Real”; Clark,
Painting of Modern Life; Ford, “People as Property”; Foster, “Art of Fetishism”;
Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”; Hochstrasser, “Slaves”; Jay, “Scopic
Regimes of Modernity”; Jameson, “Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”; Jose-
lit, “Notes on Surface”; MacGaffey, “Complexity, Astonishment and Power”;
Pietz, “Problem of the Fetish, Part 1”; Pinney, “Notes from the Surface of the
Image”; and Schama, “Perishable Commodities.”
107. “Surfacism” derives here from Pinney, “Notes from the Surface of the
Image,” 204. This concept is discussed more fully in chapter 4.
108. None other than Clement Greenberg in his often-cited account of
modernism, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in calling for the maintenance of aris-
tocratic values in the evaluation of modern art, would observe in a footnote
“that the culture of slave-owning tribes is generally much superior to that of
the tribes that possess no slaves,” linking systems of slavery to modern art.
Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 19.
109. Phelan makes her argument in regard to the era of multiculturalism
in the 1980s. Phelan, Unmarked.
110. Du Bois, “Opinion—In Black”; Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art.” On
Manley, see Thompson, “‘Black Skin, Blue Eyes.’”
111. Similarly, the novel The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979), by Trinidadian
author Earl Lovelace, set in the immediate postcolonial era in Trinidad and
focused on local carnival traditions, centered on the politics of visibility,
highlighting its centrality within the changing political landscape in the
Anglophone Caribbean of the 1960s and 1970s. Lovelace, Dragon Can’t Dance.
112. Ellison, “Introduction,” xv. Ellison writes, “Thus, despite the bland
assertions of sociologists, ‘high visibility’ actually rendered one un-visible—
whether at high noon in Macy’s window or illuminated by flaming torches
and flashbulbs while undergoing the ritual sacrifice that was dedicated to the
ideal of white supremacy.” For a discussion of African American writer Ralph
Ellison’s use of the term “un-visible,” see Gordon, Ghostly Matters. Thanks to
Tina Campt for this reference.
113. I am influenced here by Azoulay, Civil Contract of Photography; Ran-
cière, Emancipated Spectator; and Feldman, From a Nation Torn.
114. This recalls Rancière’s description of the “emancipated spectator,” who
blurs “the boundary between those who act and those who look; between indi-
viduals and members of a collective body.” Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 19.
115. Many people, as Gerard Aching points out, have “diminish[ed] demo-
cratic access to visible sites and means of celebration and social critique.”
Aching, Masking and Power, 8.
116. Junkanoo is a centuries-old costuming tradition of the black popu-
lations of the circum-Caribbean. “Junkanoo” is the spelling for the masquer-
ade most commonly used in the Bahamas. “Jonkonnu” is used in Jamaica.
Historically it was referred to as “John Canoe.” For more information on this
celebration, see Judith Bettelheim’s formative research on the subject, “Afro-
Jamaican Jonkonnu Festival.”
117. Thompson, “On Masking and Performance Art in the Postcolonial
Caribbean,” 284–303.
118. Phelan, Unmarked, 19.
119. Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 11.
120. Clark said:
Pictures—being at a picture booth is definitely—it’s definitely like a
status thing. I have been in situations where . . . guys may have come up
to take one or two pictures, but then they will see some other guys come
up and be waiting to take their picture, and it’s almost like a status thing
for them to say that, well, we are going to be here for a while. Here, give
me ten more pictures. And they will actually come out their pocket and
pay for ten more pictures and have it—I mean, it’s—I don’t know how I
can explain it . . . to be at the picture booth you definitely will be recog-
nized and be seen.
Darrin Clark, interview with author, New Orleans, July 4, 2008.
121. Artist Gary Simmons also did a series on these photographic back-
drops in 1993.
122. These chapters are based in part on an analysis of interviews with
creators and consumers of black urban visual culture, including music video
producers, owners of media outlets aimed at black urban audiences, photog-
raphers and photography-studio backdrop artists, cinematographers, light-
ing designers, and studio artists, as well as the participants who engage in
and view these forms. I was especially attentive to how creators and users de-
scribed what they aimed to visually affect and what they thought their clients
desired to see. Interviewees spoke at length about strategies of being visible
and of the crucial role of light in their work. They sometimes spotlighted par-
ticular sources that became models for thinking about and reproducing light
in popular cultural expressions and contemporary art. In addition, my analy-
sis is based on formal and phenomenological theories of what objects and
photographic technologies do within specific cultural and spatial contexts.
Given my interest in the broader post–civil rights and postcolonial contexts
in which these practices take place, the book also examines local media dis-
courses, whether in print media or on local radio stations, that surround
urban cultures and their photographic practices.
123. The practices are undocumented for many reasons. Some of the prac-
tices studied here circulate in underground economies, and those that par-
ticipate in these markets sometimes have an interest in not being tracked,
and some of these practices involve performances that resist visual documen-
tation and recovery. Photographers, for instance, often were concerned also
about having their cash economy businesses written about, and many media
and cable outlets are secretive about information regarding viewership.
Some of these cultural practices are so widely disregarded that local insti-
tutions do not collect information on these forms. The National Library of
Jamaica, an institution with research files on newspaper articles on numerous
subject areas, for instance, as of 2008, collected no information on dancehall.
1. “Keep It Real”
1. A photographer known as Sonny or Photo Sonny, who had seen street
photographs in the United States, brought the practice to Jamaica by the early
1990s.
2. V. Thacker, interview with author, Atlanta, July 4, 2008; Sthaddeus Ter-
rell, interview with author, February 25, 2009.
3. Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity,” 247.
6. As in Field of Dreams, photographer John Davis notes: “Once they
[people who are familiar with street photography] notice what you do, they
will come. It’s like what the big man said, if you build it they will come once
they know.” He said that if he set up the studios outside black communities,
Caucasian passersby would ask, “What is that? Are you selling those back-
drops?” John Davis, interview with author, May 10, 2008.
7. Alan Feuer, “Polaroids, Bedsheets and Backdrops,” Lens (blog), New York
Times, August 27, 2011, http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/27/a-singular
-moment-in-new-york-street-portraiture/, accessed August 27, 2011.
8. My use of the term “social lives” here is inspired by Appadurai, Social
Life of Things.
9. V. Thacker, interview.

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What is the book about?

What is the book about?

What practices does the author examine?

What practices does the author examine?

SHINE

the visual economy of light in

Duke University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Duke University Press also gratefully acknowledges the support of the

For Ella, Chaz, Xavier, and Gabriella,

for the next show and tell

INTRODUCTION: Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 1

3 SHINE, SHIMMER, AND SPLENDOR

4 THE SOUND OF LIGHT

I.1 Bashment, a public bus in Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica, 2009 2

I began to document street photography studios set up on the streets

Genealogies of performance attend not only to “the body,” as Foucault suggests,

This is not counter-­discourse but a counterculture that defiantly reconstructs

It is eleven o’clock at night, and a bus christened Bashment careens

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 3

Performing Visibility and Popular Photography in

The social significance and even predominance of the camera in con-

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 5

visible—­to be made spectacularly present in the lens of the video cam-

Photography, Cultural Identity, and the Practice of Diaspora

This book focuses on several photographic and videographic genres in

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 7

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 9

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 11

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 13

On Photographic Becoming: The In-­Between State

These popular African diasporic expressions take specific forms that

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 17

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 19

Light and the Culture of Celebrity

Some participants in the circum-­Caribbean incessantly and narcissisti-

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 21

The Visual Life of Things: Materialism Reconfigured

Photographic and videographic expressions created by black urban

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 23

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 25

In every local context considered here, populations who engage in the

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 27

island’s market to global capital. To deal with steep cuts mandated by

Several contemporary artists draw on urban practices in their work

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 29

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 31

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 33

Contemporary Art and the Aesthetics of Bling

Several contemporary artists describe African diasporic urban visual ex-

dancehall, and other forms of popular culture. They do so by using aspects

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 35

Kori Newkirk highlights this attention to surfaces in his single-­

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 37

Importantly, we can see the investment in the spectacularized visibility

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 39

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 41

Chapter 1 analyzes the genre of street photography. In street photogra-

Chapter 3 shifts to the Bahamas to discuss a local practice in which

Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels 43

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

This is not counter-discourse but a counterculture that defiantly reconstructs

visible—to be made spectacularly present in the lens of the video cam-

On Photographic Becoming: The In-Between State

Some participants in the circum-Caribbean incessantly and narcissisti-

Kori Newkirk highlights this attention to surfaces in his single-