This is a must-read visual essay (subtitle: “How the Camera Was Used to Justify Black Racial Inferiority”) in Sacred Footsteps (“an online publication dedicated to spiritual & alternative travel, history & culture from a Muslim perspective”); it was one of the readings from Week 6 of Karen Attiah’s Resistance Summer School:

The myth of the ‘dark continent’, already well established in Europe by this point, was further cemented through photography, allowing existing stereotypes to be represented visually. If we look at a broad spectrum of colonial photographs produced in Africa (and this also applies to the Middle East and elsewhere), a visual vocabulary emerges.

Photography was used to emphasise the contrast between ‘light’ (civilised) and ‘dark’ (uncivilised). This ‘light’ was shown by contrasting skin colour and by emphasising power dynamics through dress and pose. […]

Meanwhile, at a sewing class in the Mission of the Daughters of Charity in the Belgian Congo (1910), the position of the white women, again dressed in white, with their hands placed on shoulders of those seated, emphasises their dominant status over the young women. Their manner is parental, infantilising those seated; the ‘white saviour’ trope captured on camera.

(The photo essay also references “lynching postcards” from the United States during the early 20th century, which were printed “for distribution, collection or kept as souvenirs.” These images show smiling men, women, and children who showed up to witness the murder of Black people the way you and I might enjoy an outdoor concert.)

The images, and the context behind them, are deeply disturbing, yet immediately recognizable for what they are:

The purpose of these images was, quite simply, to dehumanise Black people and proclaim the superiority of the white race.

Even today, photographs continue to shape a narrative of Black inferiority and white superiority. The images in the essay call to mind the stark disparity between photographs of Black suspects and white ones, and the often inadequate portraits of Black celebrities from photographers like Annie Leibovitz, including her portraits of Viola Davis and Lupita Nyong’o—both depicted nude, both evoking slave.

I was especially struck by Leibovitz’s 2022 photo of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at the Lincoln Memorial, which completely de-centers Jackson while emphasizing Lincoln—she’s literally in the shadows, looking up at him. This was for a story about Jackson’s Supreme Court ascension, yet Lincoln hovered in the background.

See also: Contessa Kellogg-Winters’s article in The Grio (“What can be learned from America’s history of racist images and ads”), which references Leibovitz’s infamous LeBron James/Gisele Bündchen Vogue cover, and a deeply disturbing 2017 Dove ad showing a Black woman turning herself white.