The camera has a history
- Photography is not neutral.
- There is no single way to see.
- Proximity is not the same as knowledge.
- Representation is not the measure of Black photography.
- Blackness does not need to be explained before it can be photographed.
- What was preserved is not everything that mattered.
- Ordinary Black life does not need struggle to become significant.
- The camera is not an unquestioned authority.
So does the person behind it
- Looking is a position.
- Experience is photographic knowledge.
- Relationship changes what becomes visible.
- A photograph carries knowledge that cannot always be separated from its maker.
- Black photographers have expanded what photography can see and know.
- Archives shape history through what they preserve and what they lose.
- The canon is an account, not the whole story.
- A photograph can be evidence, memory, invention, intimacy and refusal at once.
- Photography should be unsettled by what it has not yet learned to see.
- There is always more than one way to look.
