During the first half of the twentieth century,
against a backdrop of blackness as degenerate,
criminal, poor, oversexed, and intellectually infe-
rior, photographers as varied as James VanDerZee,
Richard Samuel Roberts, and Charles ‘‘Teenie’’
Harris posited likenesses of dignified African Amer-
icans, many of them well-to-do, thereby exposing
the racist bias of mainstream imagery produced by
and for white people. Their pictures lent evidence to
the existence of vibrant, multifaceted urban com-
munities engaged in social gatherings, political pro-
tests, entrepreneurial ventures, intellectual pursuits,
and recreational activities—the face of black Amer-
ica otherwise often denied. In the 1980s and 1990s,
Santu Mofokeng similarly turned his camera away
from images of perpetual struggle in South African
townships to focus on the everyday aspects, both
joyous and sad, of residents’ lives in order to pro-
vide a more complete rendition of their situation.
And Briton David Hevey draws on his own experi-
ences to help present people with disabilities as
active participants in the public realm, rather than
as helpless victims of their afflictions.
Simply filling a previous absence of photo-
graphic representation can already prove highly
transgressive. In order to counter the social invisi-
bility of gay men in India, where homosexuality
remains illegal, Sunil Gupta devised his 1987Exiles
series to subtly bring into view the plight of secrecy
and stigma attendant on queer male culture on the
subcontinent. Drawing the boundaries of intimate
knowledge even more closely, contemporary artist
Yurie Nagashima focuses, visual diary–style, on
her own family and friends in an attempt to fathom
the daily workings of Tokyo life from a female
perspective. Taking a different approach, Wendy
Ewald, an American, honors the possibility of
divergent visions between insiders and outsiders in
I Dreamed I Had a Girl in My Pocket(1996), where
she combines her own photographs of Vichya,
India, with those taken of village affairs by her
young local students.
Not only professionals, of course, can produce
insider photographs. What photo historian Geoffrey
Batchen has called ‘‘vernacular photographies,’’ pop-
ular snapshots taken by lay photographers, have
recently gained acceptance as valuable examples of
social representation due to the, sometimes inadver-
tent, sights they offer of particular communities’
experiences. They can also, as cultural critic bell
hooks has emphasized, function as powerful coun-
ter-narratives to demeaning depictions in the society
at large. Yet even representational practice from the
inside raises important questions: What exactly,
given everyone’s multiple affinities, constitutes an
insider? What are the limits of photographer-subject
identification? And can the presence of the camera
itself, rather than just that of the person operating it,
alter the group portrayed?
Highly manipulated in nature, the controversial
photo-based works of Nikki Lee perhaps go to the
core of such and similarly difficult questions. Half
photographs, half performance pieces, her projects
show groups of friends—Latinas, yuppies, members
of the hip hop scene, Asian school girls, senior citi-
zens—doing what they usually do together, the
young Korean-born artist always in their midst, her
physical appearance radically transformed to fit with
the crowd surrounding her. Donning braids and
fitted dance club clothes for the Hip Hop Project,
and having darkened her skin, Lee highlights the
external markers of community membership. The
photographs, in fact snapshots taken by bystanders
at Lee’s request, refuse to offer a coherent narrative,
and the emphasis on exteriority provided through
Lee’s guises not only suggests the fluidity and situa-
tional character of identity and identification but
also the always possible undercurrent of the
(stereo)type and of reductionism in group represen-
tation. While Lee’s mimicry often reaches near per-
fection in the images, her figure also always stands
out to the viewer, infallibly identifying her as the
outsider, as the one artificially inserted into the por-
trait to subtly change its composition, as the one
who only temporarily has to bear the burden of
representation and who can, ultimately, walk away
from it with a change of makeup or dress.
Despite the high degree of design involved in
their making, Lee’s images can still give the impres-
sion of documentary photographs, or casual snaps,
at first glance. Yet manipulation made visible, even
accentuated, marks another strand of social repre-
sentation in photography. Following the dictum
that truth lies in uncovering the artifice that poses
as reality, many feminist and queer photographers,
as well as artists of color, have chosen to modify or
carefully construct the photographic surface in
order to refocus viewers’ perceptions of the group
depicted. Linn Underhill’s portraits of female sit-
ters, taken head-on without cropping or props,
reject the suggestions of earthiness and seduction
so frequent in representations of women, thereby
seeking to undermine conventional associations
between women and nature or women and eroti-
cism. Barbara Kruger has emphasized the con-
structed nature of gendered identities more
bluntly by superimposing bold block type over
her pictures, as in the 1983We Won’t Play Nature
to Your Culture, which shows a close-up of a
woman’s face, her eyes covered by leaves.SOCIAL REPRESENTATION