If I were a racist (Photographer’s Cut)

Dr Nathan Holder’s If I Were a Racist, asks what racism looks like when it becomes ordinary: embedded in assumptions, institutions and habits rather than announced as hostility.

This is a photographic response to that idea. It borrows Holder’s structure to ask what racism might look like when it is built into the ways photography teaches us to look, value, preserve and remember.

If I were a racist,
I'd teach children that photography is about
Aperture, ISO and shutter speed.
Everything else is politics.

If I were a racist,
I'd teach photography as a universal language,
Then make sure only certain voices
Were fluent.

If I were a racist,
I'd call photography neutral,
Then decide
What neutrality looks like.

If I were a racist,
I'd teach the Masters as though they appeared fully formed,
Without asking
Who named them.

If I were a racist,
I'd praise the canon,
But never discuss
How it was built.

If I were a racist,
I'd teach "African photography"
As a category,
And European photography as photography.

If I were a racist,
I'd celebrate one photographer from the continent,
Then spend the rest of the semester
Looking somewhere else.

If I were a racist,
I'd call work from Europe timeless,
And work from everywhere else
Cultural.

If I were a racist,
I'd describe photographs of white life
As universal,
And photographs of Black life as niche.

If I were a racist,
I'd say documentary photography tells the truth,
Without asking
Who was allowed to speak.

If I were a racist,
I'd teach photographs of empire,
Without teaching
How empire used photography.

If I were a racist,
I'd discuss archives as though they were neutral,
Not collections of choices
And exclusions.

If I were a racist,
I'd call it preservation
When I saved my history,
And ephemera when I saved yours.

If I were a racist,
I'd write the history of photography
As though everyone else
Arrived late.

If I were a racist,
I'd fund projects about Black communities,
Provided the photographer
Came from somewhere else.

If I were a racist,
I'd photograph struggle endlessly,
Then wonder why
That's all I could see.

If I were a racist,
I'd commission stories about resilience,
As long as they remained
Comfortably distant.

If I were a racist,
I'd invite photographers into the room,
After deciding
What the room was for.

If I were a racist,
I'd hire diverse talent,
Then ask them to fit
An existing vision.

If I were a racist,
I'd believe access meant invitation,
Not participation,
Ownership or influence.

If I were a racist,
I'd teach lighting for every skin tone,
Then design every example
Around one.

If I were a racist,
I'd teach composition as balance,
Without asking
Who gets centred.

If I were a racist,
I'd crop out context,
Then call the image
Objective.

If I were a racist,
I'd never revisit my syllabus,
My collection,
My assumptions.

If I were a racist,
I wouldn't need to exclude people.
I'd simply teach generations
What belonged.

If I were a racist,
The frame wouldn't look white.
It would look
Normal.

The difficult thing about racism in photography is that it does not always look like exclusion.

Sometimes it looks like a syllabus. Sometimes it looks like a collection, a commissioning decision, a gallery wall or a definition of what counts as universal. Sometimes it looks like good practice that nobody has thought to question.

This is why changing who appears in the photograph is not enough. A photograph can become more diverse while the terms by which photography decides what matters remain intact.

The frame is larger than the rectangle. It includes the histories that taught us what to notice, the institutions that decide what is worth keeping, the language we use to describe photographs and the assumptions we stop noticing because they have become familiar.

That is what makes “normal” such a difficult word. It can describe what feels natural when, in fact, it is simply what we have encountered often enough to stop questioning.

The frame doesn't have to look white to carry the history of whiteness. It only has to make one way of seeing feel normal.