Photographic Truths & Racialized Bodies

Mulling over Dyer’s article led me to some far-flung but (I hope) interesting thoughts about the photograph’s claim to truth and how they situate the black body. It seems to me that most of the readings thus far have leaned heavily on one or the other claim that photography makes to reality—one noted by Dyer as the “belief that the apparatus could reveal the inner being,” and the other one, not addressed head-on in this essay but certainly present in this and other readings, the claim that photography (and video-recording technology, notably television) depicts true moments in time. Thus, photography makes a claim to both “inner being” and the historical reality of the subject’s context, to both person-as-individual and person-in-moment. Both these truth-claims operate to varying extents in different types of photography. While the out-of-focus portraiture popularized in the mid-19^th c. capitalizes on the “inner being” truth, the photography-as-spectacle images of lynchings certainly rely more heavily on the claim to capture a moment in time, rather than the essence of any person. Fanon’s discussion of the black’s imprisonment within the closed circuit of continual reassertion of colonial history seems to attest to this as well. To what extent are black bodies predominantly considered in line with this time-related photographic truth (rather than the other, “inner truth” claim)—to what extent are black bodies not just imprisoned in history by an economy of affective habits, but imprisoned “immediately,” as immediacy? To what extent might the black image be thought of not as imprisoned by history but as an attestation to the use of technology (the truth of the ‘moment of reveal’) itself?