Tomorrow: Photography and the Surveillance of Blackness with Simone Browne & Drew Thompson
"Drew Thompson explores the Polaroid as an object of Black material culture. In this conversation, Thompson is joined by Simone Browne, author of Dark Matter: On the Surveillance of Blackness"
Hi all,
Photography and the Surveillance of Blackness at the Bard Graduate Center (38 W. 86th St.)
Tomorrow 2/7, 6pm-7:30pm
I wanted to share this significant conversation happening tomorrow at the Bard Graduate Center on the Upper West Side between my former professor Drew Thompson and the phenomenal sociologist, artist and author Simone Browne. This will certainly be a meaningful investigation of the way images exist and are actively politicized and racialized.
I first learned of Browne’s writing in Thompson’s Radio Africa class as I learned about Foucault’s panopticon and other surveillance systems that were designed to criminalize and Blackness. I took two courses taught by Professor Thompson including Radio Africa in my freshman year which examined the role radio played in Africa and ultimately its colonial power through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In my senior year, I took his class Historical and Documentary Photography in Africa and the Diaspora which was an extensive art-history course following the role photography played in Africa but also in its very surveillance as shown through the 1970s Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement formed by two Black employees at Polaroid to protest the sale and use of Polaroid cameras to South Africa’s apartheid government for passbook identification photographs. Looking forward to seeing the two in conversation and their individual ideas and concepts fleshed out together. Free for students and museum employees, $15 for everyone else.