The camera as a colonial tool

In her essay, “Regarding the Pain of the Other: Photography, Famine, and the Transference of Affect,” Kimberly Juanita Brown traces the colonial legacies of the camera and ethnographic filmmaking practices. Through the example of South African photographer Kevin Carter and his Pulitzer Prize winning photography depicting the 1993 famine in Sudan, Brown exemplifies the affective process of Eurocentric image-making and the ways in which the camera can at once invite and repel viewers. She writes:

“there are occasions of entrance—moments of civic magnitude when the communal iris opens to allow more bodies touched by light to be perceived; other moments are marked by closed shutters of blind recognition, where it is nearly impossible for a visual constituency to signal its connection to humanity.” (Brown 191)

I bring this here to deepen our understanding of how the camera has come to use within contemporary film practices. The representational violences brought forth via the introduction of the camera instructs us to be mindful of the magnitude of negative imagery, disproportionately affecting black and indigenous communities, and the hand of those who create it. At the same time, it offers an affective possibility of reclaiming the very tool and images that have been used to alienate, exotify, and ostracize.

Works Cited:

Brown, Kimberly Juanita. “Regarding the Pain of the Other: Photography, Famine, and the Transference of Affect.” Feeling Photography, edited by ELSPETH H. BROWN and THY PHU, Duke University Press, 2014, pp. 181–203, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11319fq.13. Accessed 15 May 2022.