Blake Stimson publishes “A Very Strange Comparison” in History of Photography
Introduction
Abstract
Building on what Étienne Balibar calls the ‘very strange’ comparison of wage labour with chattel slavery ‘central’ to Marx’s writing and animating of the work of mid-century Black communists like W. E. B. DuBois, Harry Haywood and Claudia Jones, this article considers the relationship of blackness as a socially constructed category to the freedom and unfreedom of labour through two different white gazes: that of the manager (in the photography of Stephen Shore) and the organiser (in the photography of Paul Strand). In the first, blackness is funnelled into the anthropologists’ and economists’ ever-proliferating ‘patterns of culture’ or, as Shore puts it, into the ‘complexity’ of ‘cultural forces’ visible through ‘an economic study of society’. In the second, blackness as an attribute of humanity more broadly plays a role fundamental to creative work and political being in Strand’s account of the artist who ‘only grows by being compelled to do certain things, whether he wants to do them or not’. Freedom, Strand’s mature work reminds us, is won rather than given; it arises only from solidarity, or hammering out a common moral vision and political strategy. Unfreedom, as we can see in Shore’s work, arises from the cultivated production, recognition, maintenance, exchange and management of cultural differences.