Chapter Four

Oversight

How the visual enacts control (and enables refusal)

A black and white photograph of two bullet surveillance cameras attached to a concrete and brick wall.

Figure 8. Two bullet security cameras. June 1, 2017. Photograph. Unsplash. Scott Webb.

“What is Polaroid doing in South Africa?” This question is not one that Polaroid chemist Caroline Hunter expected to be asking herself on her way to meet her colleague, Ken Williams, for lunch one October afternoon in 1970. While passing through the photography department, however, her eye had caught on a bulletin board where a mocked-up image hung. In it, they recognized the face of someone they knew: another Black Polaroid worker. However, his name was now South African, and his face was on an ID badge for the South African Department of the Mines. Hunter thought it looked like a mock-up for a Polaroid ID product, but what would Polaroid be doing in South Africa?1

This question led Hunter and Williams to investigate and ultimately find that Polaroid was more involved in South Africa than was widely known. Poloroid, along with several other companies, sold film and cameras to private companies, and those materials sometimes ended up in the “passbooks” that controlled Black people’s movement under apartheid. Discovering Polaroid’s involvement in South Africa led Hunter and Williams to risk their jobs (and lose them) in founding the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (PRWM).2 They met with executives, took out ads in newspapers, and circulated leaflets around the Polaroid office building, including the below sketch, with the message: “Polaroid imprisons black people in sixty seconds. They sold this I.D. system to South Africa.”3

Black and white sketch of a Polaroid camera photographing a phenotypically Black couple. In the camera’s film, the couple appears in chains.

Figure 46. Sketch from the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement pamphlet. Illustration. Caroline Hunter.

Although a specific camera is not named in this image, there was one device that the PRWM focused on in their activism: the ID-2, a full color instant film camera that could produce a printed image in about sixty seconds. The pictures produced by the ID-2 were actually a composite of two images—one of the subject and one of the surrounding ID, which were composited together, making a nearly unforgeable seal between them. And the ID-2 had one other special feature—a “boost” button for increasing the camera’s flash by 42 percent, which increased the range of dark tones that could be captured in the final photograph. That special flash, alongside the camera’s portability, strong metal design, and quick photo development, led the PRWM as well as subsequent scholars and artists to speculate that the ID-2 was not only intended for domestic (US) use but was also “Polaroid's answer to South Africa's very specific need.”4 As another pamphlet from the PRWM asserts:

Identification is a basic tool in population control. Every totalitarian government has devised some means of subjugating its poeple [sic] through identity cards. In the past, these systems has been weak: they have been difficult to administer; cards could be tampered with and altered. Now Polaroid has put an end to all that. It has used its sophisticated technological know-how to create an almost foul-proof system of citizen identification. Known as the ID 2, Polaroid’s system takes your picture, develops it in two minutes, seals it in unbreakable plastic, and registers your name and other information in computers. Zap, you’re identified! Once you have the ID card, there is no way of destroying the record. Remember, the ID 2 takes two pictures. You get one. Who gets the other one?5

We open this chapter with the Polaroid Workers Revolutionary Movement and the ID-2 because it demonstrates how oversight is a ubiquitous, powerful, and persistent rhetorical function of the visual that is distinct from the more familiar functions outlined in part I. Visual rhetoricians have sometimes recognized this oversight function, but typically only implicitly. To the extent that visual rhetoric scholarship has been influenced by Nicolas Mirzoeff’s The Right to Look,6 we have taken up the presumption that hegemonic control is partly a matter of vision and have therefore tracked power through technologies of sight. And yet, even as rhetoricians cite Mirzoeff, for the most part we have continued to use the word “visuality” as a synonym for “pertaining to the visual,” rather than incorporating the word’s more structural and racialized meaning developed in The Right to Look. Etymologically, Mirzoeff explains, “visuality” begins as the capacity of a commander to envision the entirety of a battlefield and the role of the literal “Overseer” of enslaved workers on a plantation. It is, in other words, a term not merely for invoking what is seen but for recognizing the hegemonic work done by sight.

In this chapter

Taking up that definition of “visuality” and extending it, this chapter suggests that oversight isn’t simply a metaphor for control but rather a defining rhetorical function of the visual. Moreover, in the spirit of Lisa Flores's call for rhetoricians to recognize that all rhetorical criticism is racial rhetorical criticism,7 this chapter emphasizes that oversight, racialization, and colonialization—though distinct—are entangled with Western (and particularly US) visual contexts. Oversight, historically and in the present, is a profoundly racialized rhetorical function. Likewise, racialization has been and continues to be carried out through oversight—the rhetorical function of the visual most concerned with parameters, ordering, and control. Recent rhetorical scholarship—including books by Lisa Corrigan, Annie Hill, Ersula Ore, and Dave Tell8—make clear these links among race, violence, rhetoric, and oversight. As Simone Browne puts it, "The historical formation of surveillance is not outside of the historical formation of slavery" and its aftermaths9. Thus, attention to oversight demands that scholarship in visual rhetoric take race—and particularly Blackness—seriously as a constitutive factor, whether initially obvious or not.

Though oversight is a neglected rhetorical function in visual rhetoric scholarship, it has not been entirely absent, especially from rhetorical studies more broadly. Work addressing surveillance, biopower, and the quantified self, for example, all treat oversight as a rhetorical function.10 Likewise, scholars across rhetorical studies have treated vision and race in tandem. Typically, the scholars who most deeply engage matters of oversight and race have been less explicitly engaged with visual rhetoric while visual rhetoric scholarship about race has paid attention to power structures but rarely linked them to visuality as a rhetorical function.11 Our purpose, then, is to connect those lineages in order to position oversight as ubiquitous and distinct enough to demand its own place in any overarching treatment of visual rhetoric.

Etymologically, “surveillance” means “oversight.” It comes, as Browne explains, from “the French prefix sur- meaning ‘from above’ and the root word -veillance deriving from the French verb veiller and taken to mean observing or watching.”12 Of course, in the contemporary United States, surveillance is not always about the visible. It is, however, always about establishing control over the field of play. Surveillance may not, in other words, involve taking pictures, but it is nevertheless a practice of visuality. That practice of visuality, in its many forms, is what we term “oversight.” It includes these factors, all inseparable from race: concern for ordering and control; the creation and maintenance of power structures; and hegemonic organization of bodies and their positioning in space. Oversight names those rhetorical functions of the visual that enact social control through mediation of data, bodies, spaces, images, and affects. In the remainder of this chapter, we treat three scenes that illustrate oversight as a rhetorical function of the visual: the racial presumptions built into visual technologies, the history and present of policing, and the practices of refusal that inevitably accompany oversight. The Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement and the ID-2 accompany us along the way.

Visual Technologies


Three Shirley cards depicting headshots of white women in formal dress surrounded by color blocks for balancing.

Figure 47. Shirley Cards for color balance from 1974, 1978, 1960. Photographs. Eastman Kodak Company.

Meet Shirley. She is the pale-skinned white woman on the right. And in the center. And on the left. While the women pictured in these photographs are (probably) not all actually named “Shirley,” this name was used to refer to these, and many other, models whose pictures were used for color balancing in film photography for decades: the eponymous “Shirley Cards.” As one photo lab professional put it, “She was the standard…If Shirley looked good, everything else was OK.”13But everything was only “OK” if you looked a lot like Shirley. By comparing developed prints to Shirley cards, technicians could adjust color print settings to match the ideal tones of the picture. Because Shirely was the model, however, some people (and products) looked better than others. The texture and depth of darker skin tones were obliterated in photographs that had been "corrected" based on Shirley Cards, and even if an individual technician had used a different model, portraits of Black- and Brown-skinned people often lacked nuance. Color film, and the processes by which it was developed, presumed whiteness by design.14 Shirley’s whiteness (and thus the presumed whiteness of all photographic subjects) meant that anyone proactively wanting to capture darker tones—including skin tones—couldn't rely on the most readily available film or, if they did, would need to supplement existing photographic technology with a “boost” of light. The ID-2’s “boost button” offered one such feature to capture darker tones without designing new film and, in the process, reveals the link between white-washed visual technologies and the rhetorical function of oversight.

When viewing images of Shirley, visual rhetoricians might first think about representation (who gets to appear and participate in the polis) in ways connected with the pedagogical-deliberative and epideictic functions outlined in part I. Through this lens of representation, we might notice how Shirley cards—like much other mainstream photojournalism, film, TV, and stock photography—frame the world on white terms, an epideictic function with deliberative implications. A more recent, and annual, example of this problem of visual representation is succinctly captured in the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, which started in 2015 when every acting nomination was given to white actors—for the second year in a row.15 However, those paying closer attention likely also know that racial representation is only one of many ways that white supremacy is sustained through vision. Since at least 2013, when Twelve Years a Slave appeared, the white supremacist assumptions built into visual technology--which go well beyond the question of who appears on the screen or page—have been widely discussed in mainstream media, particularly with regard to cinematic and photographic film.16 And these assumptions point us toward rhetorical functions other than representation.

For those who work with photographic technologies every day, the material effects of white supremacy have been an ongoing subject of discussion and reworking. Hunter and Williams knew about the problem in the early 1970s. In 1977, Jean Luc Goddard refused to use Kodak film stock to shoot in Mozambique, declaring the material itself “racist” because it so completely failed to capture the shades and nuance of Black skin.17 Shifting attention from film to lighting—another crucial visual technology—contemporary filmmaker Ava Duvernay regularly addresses the importance of properly and artistically illuminating scenes with dark-skinned actors.18 And, as visual culture scholar Sarah Lewis explains, the nature and practice of visual technologies themselves have implications for how people are “recognized” in public.19

Lewis, in invoking the white supremacy built into common technologies, directs attention back to representation and participation—the familiar terms of democracy and deliberation. However, oversight, and the role that visual technologies play in visuality, is not merely matter of who gets recognized to speak or participate in the public sphere. It is also, and more crucially, about the underlying rhetorical workings of state power and the terrains on which that power is differentially played out. Representation may well lay the groundwork for a more just society, but it is equally important to grasp the rhetorical theories and practices that preexist the possibility of representation and pervade the technologies through which that representation might happen.

Three photographs of the Polaroid ID-2 at different angles.

Figure 48. Polaroid ID-2 Camera. Photographs. eBay. @Robert6305.

To think about the role visual technologies play in oversight, let’s return to the PRWM and the ID-2. As a chemist, Caroline Hunter knew why the ID-2’s “boost” button was such a standout feature. She worked on the instant film technology that gave the Polaroid company its breakthrough in the 1940s. Instant film contains a chemical packet at one end. When the image is captured, the camera’s rollers spread these chemicals evenly across the film, allowing the image to develop in minutes. Though this may sound like a simple, even familiar, process, photo development is as much art as science. Different chemical layers in the packets responded differently to varying light levels and were sensitive to different length light waves (i.e. what is processed in photography as contrast, saturation, and color). The chemicals chosen to successfully render a “normal”—read,"white"—subject were ill-equipped to register non-white faces. Without the boost button and the burst of additional light it provided, the instant film technology would not render darker tones with any or much detail. Although beliefs that “physics was physics” have been commonplace in the technological history of photo development, the images produced by this film–and the methods used to ensure they were consistent, such as Shirley cards–reveal how visual technologies reflect the investments and norms of the societies that produce them and, therefore, participate in oversight by defining what can be seen, what must be made visible, and what can be obscured.20

An up-close photograph of the button labelled “Face brightener” on the back of the Polaroid ID-2.

Figure 49. "Face brightener" button on the back of a Polaroid ID-2. Photograph. eBay. Weclowskiantiquesandhomes.

What has been generally referred to as a “boost” button on the ID-2, but is labeled as a “face brightener” on at least one version of this camera, drives home this argument–you only need to brighten faces if you assume that a significant portion of the faces to be captured on identification cards will be darker than an arbitrarily assigned white normal. Thus, even if Polaroid wasn’t designing the ID-2 specifically for South Africa, they did have in mind a multiracial society in which you would want to make visible and keep track of people with darker skin.

This relationship between color films’ designed presumption of whiteness and the Polaroid ID2’s built-in, adjustable flash that better captured dark skin is particularly generative for understanding the multiple levels at which oversight functions—it both contributes to the everyday administration of normalcy and appears in the surplus of overt control. Visual technologies concerned with oversight simultaneously produce the unmarked and provide the tools necessary to emphasize the marked. Instant film technology, through its design presuming white skin, shaped who could be seen. Like many more recent digital technologies, such as webcams, AI, and facial recognition, visual technologies can quite literally invisibilize or refuse to see Black people.21However, as the ID-2 and its use in South Africa shows, the very same visual technologies that invisibilize also provide a powerful means of ordering and controlling. While such invisibilizing and the hypervisibilizing of the ID-2 may seem contradictory outcomes of the same technologies, they are actually both functions of oversight. Oversight, in this sense, functions through both the unacknowledged whiteness of the Shirley card and the race-highlighting boost button of the ID-2, through both the panopticon and the pillory.

Like the PRWM, we bring attention here to the technology itself because doing so draws attention to the rhetorical functions at work that exceed the more comforting frames of rhetorical democracy. It shows how oversight is more than a function of how technology is used, but is built into technological design at many levels. This is especially important to recognize because technology companies, including Polaroid, often position themselves as neutral or even progressive, further obfuscating the role that technologies themselves play in oversight. As Ruha Benjamin warns, the fact “that new tools are encoded with old biases is surprising only if we equate technological innovation with social progress.”22 Thus, considering technologies themselves is critical work for understanding the rhetorical functions of the visual, especially concerning those tied to oversight. As we explore in the rest of this chapter, the technologies and rhetorical practices of oversight extend far beyond photography, film, and other familiar visual technologies.

Policing


Oversight is the rhetorical function at work in all forms of policing. And, here again, it is impossible to separate oversight and race. Attending to oversight reminds us that race is also created, sustained, and given consequence through visual means. Soon after photography became an available means, slave holders began photographing the people they enslaved.23 Louis Agassiz, in the 1850s, turned daguerreotypes to the task of scientific racism.24Frederick Douglass was well aware of this fact and pushed back, using photography to refuse those racializing, surveilling processes while also explicitly recognizing that his presence—in photographs or in person—was always already racialized.25

A black and white woodcut of four white men attacking a Black man, captioned “A Northern Freeman Enslaved by Northern Hands.”

Figure 50. Illustration in the Anti-Slavery Almanac, July 1839. Illustration.

Just as the ID-2 camera, so useful for policing apartheid in South Africa, piqued interest among police forces in other places and was used in as many as twenty-one U.S. states for creating licenses, the history of policing as oversight in the United States is practically and ideologically grounded in anti-Blackness. “Blackness,” Bryan Wagner writes, “is an adjunct to racial slavery,” and both visuality and policing are too.26 Plantation oversight extended into public power and “slave codes” and “slave patrols” laid the institutional and ideological frameworks for subsequent policing. That history of anti-Blackness, as many have noted, continues to infuse policing as oversight, through control of movement, of bodies, and of racialized space.27

Police visuality has extended state control over Black bodies in ways both explicitly and implicitly violent—not only slave patrols, lynching, Jim Crow laws, and police violence, but also anti-miscegenation laws, redlining, school funding, and gerrymandering. Each of these forms of social control does its rhetorical work—shaping values, beliefs, and possibilities for action—through oversight. It identifies, maps, and tracks bodies—predicting and constraining where particular bodies will be seen. Even though political contexts and legal frameworks have shifted, oversight structures racialize public life today just as it did the plantation of the antebellum period.

This inseparability of oversight from policing is particularly apparent when looking at different approaches to policing, all of which depend on oversight. Whether we’re looking at body cameras that track police activity from police perspective, “Broken Windows” policing that aggressively prosecutes low-level crime, “Community Policing” that emphasizes non-enforcement-oriented relationships, or militarized police departments using SWAT methods in residential neighborhoods, we’re dealing with oversight—again, the panopticon and the pillory. Depending on our ideological inclinations, we might describe some forms of oversight as better or worse, but each carries presumptions of control and hegemony. And, in most cases, how they function rhetorically—structuring arguments and shaping attitudes—is determined by the regimes of visuality involved. A shift from “broken windows” policing to “community policing,” for example, does not move away from oversight. Both forms privilege police power as a hegemonic right to look. They simply approach it differently. “Community Policing” focuses on officers building relationships and facilitating positive encounters. It gives officers and departments a sense of the community that includes school events and coffee klatches as well as crime. It gives community members a sense of the police that includes mentorship as well as enforcement and emergency response. It means that police officers and community members see each other, and not just in the pressure cooker of sirens and flashing lights. Evidence suggests that community policing results in improved relations between officers and communities.28 But, attending to oversight reminds us that community policing is still a practice of surveillance.29 Part of why it “works” is that it gives police departments greater access to communities, and thus more extensive visuality. And yet, the community’s “right to look” is no more guaranteed in community policing than in “broken windows,” even if community policing builds in potential opportunities for public looking-back.

Some responses to the PRWM efforts, both at the moment and in subsequent scholarship, emphasize that there is no evidence that Polaroid was working directly with the South African government. Indeed, Polaroid publicly announced that it would not do business with the apartheid regime. However, others point out that privately held businesses in South Africa doing business with Polaroid may well have been serving as intermediaries. And even if the ID-2 in South Africa was primarily used outside the official purview of the state, even if the ID-2 hadn’t ever been used to enforce apartheid as enacted by the South African government, its circulation in the South African market and its larger circulation as a tool for identification and control aligns it with that broader history of policing and visuality. In private or public hands, it captured and cataloged subjects, ensuring that they could be seen and their movements tracked. It is therefore ironic but not the slightest bit surprising that when Caroline Hunter and Ken Williams arrived to work on a Monday after circulating PRWM flyers in the Polaroid building over the weekend, they were greeted by Polaroid security and Cambridge police. They had been identified as the source of the flyers because they had used their employee ID cards to access the building over the weekend.30

Refusal


Though we have treated oversight as a rhetorical function of the visual specifically useful for hegemonic state power, its force is not absolute. Oversight also invites and is subject to counter-hegemonic practices. Such counter-hegemonic visual rhetorics have been well documented when they are organized, visible, public actions, like those outlined in chapter 2 or those taken by the PRWM. Protests, flyers, buttons, boycotts, and demonstrations are well known and widely studied visual means of resistance to state power. Indeed, the PRWM did make visible the sales of Polaroid products in South Africa, provoke the company to respond (at least on the surface, such as in advertisements), and raise $10,000 for South African liberation movements. However, treating oversight as a rhetorical function also directs our attention toward other means of resistance—including the refusal to be seen.

A cartoon sketch of a gigantic Polaroid camera with a photographer holding a “birdie” over his head.

Figure 51. "ID2: I See You," 1971. Illustration. Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement. Caroline Hunter.

Visual rhetoric has gotten closest to acknowledging the possibilities for resistance that are specific to oversight—possibilities that we refer to as “refusal”—by addressing visibility politics. Dan Brower’s work on self-stigmatization, for example, acknowledges the risks of being visible and the relative civic power required to wield visibility.31 And yet, such scholarship still, typically, engages the forensic frame. It is interested in those who make themselves visible and the risks they negotiate as part of their efforts to catalyze change. And the PRWM is still an excellent example of this counter-hegemonic, catalytic function. Hunter and Williams both made a lasting point through their organizing, and they lost their jobs by making themselves visible through resistance.

Alongside such catalytic modes of visual resistance, however, lie tactics of refusal that are the flip side of the oversight functions of the visual. To illuminate those tactics, we need to move beyond the ID-2 as our primary case study. While it provides an ideal model of how oversight works, we can’t use its story to theorize broader practices of refusal, partially because the story of the PRWM draws so fully on catalytic functions rather than turning oversight against itself. The PRWM may have indeed engaged in the types of refusal we describe here, but because those practices involve strategies of not being seen and avoiding oversight, they are also not generally visible in the archival materials that have been seen, saved, and cataloged.

Therefore, we now turn to scholars such as Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, and Simone Browne who have specifically theorized refusal as a visual tactic that responds to oversight by undercutting, sidestepping, and evading it. For Campt, refusal is “a rejection of the status quo and the creation of possibility in the face of negation.”32 When faced with “a system that renders you fundamentally illegible and unintelligible,” refusal uses this “negation as a generative and creative source of disorderly power to embrace the possibility of living otherwise.”33 Campt and Hartman, through their Practicing Refusal Collective, have further theorized “black visuality” as a particular practice of refusal through the work of Black contemporary artists who enact “radical modalities of witnessing that refuse authoritative forms of visuality which function to refuse blackness itself.”34

These notions of refusal are not unknown to rhetorical scholars. Rubén Casas and Mira Shimabukuro, for example, though they do not specifically invoke “refusal,” highlight parallel practices engaged by undocumented immigrants and incarcerated Japanese-Americans, respectively.35 Casas and Shimabukuro each recognize tactics of omission, getting-by, and invisibility as productive rhetorics with individual and communal implications. We see the tactics they outline as practices of refusal that directly respond to state oversight. The skepticism of undocumented migrants offered tell-tale identification cards, for Casas, points to survival strategies that are not predicated on recognition by the state and, indeed, would be threatened by acquiescence to identification. Shimabukuro, likewise, in her reformulation of “Writing-to-Gaman,” tracks rhetorical practices aimed at individual and community survival which cannot register as resistance to the state—or more traditional scholars—but that nevertheless refuse the conditions of incarceration.36 Even as the state and other power-brokers pursue an all-encompassing visuality as their fundamental prerogative, these resistant rhetors refuse to be seen. Working in a different vein from activist publics that assert their own, counter-hegemonic, right to look, such tactics preserve public and private space by blocking vision and evading oversight.

Photograph of green and fuschia laser beams being pointed from a crowd of protestors.

Figure 52. Protestors in Hong Kong point laser beams during a demonstration. Photograph. AP News.

From rhetors living with dignity in desert concentration camps and immigrants refusing to accept state identification to protesters blocking security cameras and subverting facial recognition technologies—refusal is ubiquitous but often, by definition, unseen. Such tactics are neither micro-level forensic rhetorics nor passively a-rhetorical. Instead, they enact a completely different rhetorical function of the visual: the always inevitable counter-hegemonic response to oversight. Simone Browne defines this counter-hegemonic refusal as “undersight” or “dark sousveillance.” It is, she explains, “a way to situate the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight.”37 Refusal, then, turns our attention from the exceptional to the “quotidian,” the everyday practices and struggles of disrupting hegemonic gazes.38

As we worked on this chapter in 2019, one such tactic of refusal was used by protestors in Hong Kong, who not only hid their faces with masks, scarves, and helmets but also used laser pointers to confuse facial recognition technologies. These refusal tactics supported more traditional rhetorical practices by allowing protesters to continue to demonstrate in the face of powerful surveillance, but they are also indicative of a larger body of refusal tactics that merit attention from visual rhetoricians.

To further investigate refusal, rhetoricians might turn to the evolving (and escalating) project of evading facial recognition technology. Moving from camouflage-based practices like masks and CV Dazzle, or “Computer Vision Dazzle,” to more advanced, algorithm-based strategies that make personal data unlearnable, the visual technologies of refusal are constantly evolving, responding to increasingly refined means of oversight.39 They have in common a commitment to remaining unseen by pervasive facial recognition technologies, refusing the hegemonic terms of engagement that have, as CV Dazzle user Maud Acheampong notes, fundamentally white supremacist purposes.40 Facial recognition technologies are pervasive, persistent, and ubiquitous, and their algorithms notoriously participate in the functions of oversight, not only in their use but in their design. Like the ID-2 and photo technology, facial recognition algorithms both create and administer normalcy while providing the conditions for control.41 Digital refusals to be seen, in turn, join longstanding practices of fugitivity in evading and undermining the hegemonic normal. As Acheampong illustrates through use of CV Dazzle and Browne theorizes through the concepts of “dark sousveillance,” refusal is not merely a negative—a stepping out of sight—but also a means of world-making. Dark sousveillance “plots imaginaries that are oppositional and that are hopeful for another way of being.”42

Instagram post showing CV Dazzle makeup.

Figure 53. CV Dazzle makeup, 2019. Instagram post. Maud Acheampong.

Rhetoricians need to understand oversight as a rhetorical function of the visual because it allows us to recognize visual rhetoric as always thoroughly racialized, because it draws our attention to the non- and anti-democratic ways that hegemonic power wields the visual and visuality, and because it, ironically, makes powerful modes of resistance more recognizable in their full rhetorical complexity. Oversight and its refusal help us see the visual at work in contexts where the polis and the people are not the primary sources of power, where popular sovereignty is constrained or non-existent, and yet where people continue to act in defense of a better world for themselves and their neighbors.



Footnotes

  1. Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement, “What Is Polaroid Doing in South Africa?” n.d., about 1971. African Activist Archive. https://africanactivist.msu.edu/document_metadata.php?objectid=210-808-4096; Aaron Schacter, “Polaroid Worker Who Protested Company’s Ties To Apartheid South Africa Reflects On Wayfair Walkout,” GBH News, June 30, 2019. ↩

  2. Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement, Reg September, and Ken Williams, “Polaroid and South Africa,” 1971, African Activist Archive.https://africanactivist.msu.edu/document_metadata.php?objectid=210-808-3865 ↩

  3. Schacter,“Polaroid Worker." ↩

  4. David Smith, “‘Racism’ of Early Colour Photography Explored in Art Exhibition,” The Guardian, January 25, 2013, sec. Art and Design. ↩

  5. Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement and Africa Research Group, “Polaroid and South Africa,” March 21, 1971, 12. African Activist Archive.https://africanactivist.msu.edu/document_metadata.php?objectid=210-808-8084 ↩

  6. Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). ↩

  7. Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 4–24. ↩

  8. Lisa M. Corrigan, Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020); Ersula J. Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019); Dave Tell, Remembering Emmett Till (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019). ↩

  9. Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 50. ↩

  10. See, for example, Eli B. Mangold and Charles Goehring, “The Visual Rhetoric of the Aerial View: From Surveillance to Resistance," Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 1 (January 2, 2019): 25–41; Jessy J. Ohl, “Nothing to See or Fear: Light War and the Boring Visual Rhetoric of U.S. Drone Imagery,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 4 (October 2, 2015): 612–32; Brian L. Ott, Hamilton Bean, and Kellie Marin, “On the Aesthetic Production of Atmospheres: The Rhetorical Workings of Biopower at The CELL,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 4 (October 2016): 346–62; Marnie Ritchie, “Feeling for the State: Affective Labor and Anti-Terrorism Training in US Hotels,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (June 2015): 179–97. ↩

  11. For the former, see Lisa A. Flores, “Stoppage and the Racialized Rhetorics of Mobility,” Western Journal of Communication (October 16, 2019): 1–17; Kristiana L. Báez and Ersula Ore, “The Moral Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: On Civility and Walking-in-White in Academe,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 331–36; For the latter, see Davi Johnson, “Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 Birmingham Campaign as Image Event,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10, no. 1 (2007): 1–26; Victoria J. Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (1999): 303–20; Jessy J. Ohl and Jennifer E. Potter, “United We Lynch: Post-Racism and the (Re)Membering of Racial Violence in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,” Southern Communication Journal 78, no. 3 (August 2013): 185–201; For an exception, see Brenton J. Malin, “Looking White and Middle-Class: Stereoscopic Imagery and Technology in the Early Twentieth-Century United States,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 4 (November 2007): 403–24. ↩

  12. Browne, Dark Matters, 18. ↩

  13. Mandalit del Barco, “How Kodak’s Shirley Cards Set Photography’s Skin-Tone Standard,” NPR, November 13, 2014, sec. Code Switch. ↩

  14. Lorna Roth, “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity," Canadian Journal of Communication 34 (March 28, 2009). ↩

  15. For more, see “The Hashtag That Changed the Oscars: An Oral History,” New York Times, accessed January 4, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/movies/oscarssowhite-history.html. ↩

  16. For more, see Ann Hornaday, “‘12 Years a Slave,’ ‘Mother of George’ and the Poetics and Politics of Filming Black Skin,” Washington Post, October 17, 2013, sec. Movies. ↩

  17. Syreeta McFadden, “Teaching The Camera To See My Skin,” BuzzFeed News, February 4, 2014. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/syreetamcfadden/teaching-the-camera-to-see-my-skin. ↩

  18. See Nichole Perkins, “Ava DuVernay’s Episode of ‘Scandal’ Starts Off with a Scream,” BuzzFeed, Nov 21, 2013. https://www.buzzfeed.com/tnwhiskeywoman/ava-duvernay-is-used-to-being-her-own-shonda-rhimes ↩

  19. Sarah Lewis, “The Racial Bias Built Into Photography,” New York Times, April 25, 2019, sec. Lens. ↩

  20. Roth, “Looking at.”; “Color Film was Built for White People. Here’s What it did to Dark Skin,” Vox, September 18, 2015. ↩

  21. Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, (New York: Polity, 2019). ↩

  22. Benjamin, Race After, 108. ↩

  23. Matthew Fox-Amato, Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). ↩

  24. Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 38–61. ↩

  25. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura,” Aperture (2019). ↩

  26. Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 1. ↩

  27. James M. Campbell, Slavery on Trial: Race, Class, and Criminal Justice in Antebellum Richmond, Virginia, (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2007); Corrigan, Prison Power; Tryon P. Woods, Blackhood Against the Police Power: Punishment and Disavowal in the 'Post-Racial' Era (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019). ↩

  28. On improved relationships, see, Kyle Peyton, Michael Sierra-Arévalo, and David G. Rand, “A Field Experiment on Community Policing and Police Legitimacy,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 40 (September 2019): 19894-98; Stephen Mastrovski, Roger B. Parks, and Robert E. Worden, “Community Policing in Action: Lessons from an Observational Study,” National Institute of Justice (June 1998); Kayla Preito-Hodge and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, “A Tale of Force: Examining Policy Proposals to Address Police Violence,” Social Currents 8, no. 5 (2021): 403-23. ↩

  29. On limitations, such as how US practices do not translate well into other contexts, see, Graeme Blair et al., “Community policing does not build citizen trust in police or reduce crime in the Global South,” Science 374, no. 6571 (2021). ↩

  30. Schacter, “Polaroid Worker.” ↩

  31. Dan Brouwer, “The Precarious Visibility Politics of Self‐stigmatization: The Case of HIV/AIDS Tattoos,” Text and Performance Quarterly 18, no. 2 (April 1998): 114–36. ↩

  32. Tina M. Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29, no. 1 (2019): 83. ↩

  33. Campt, “Black Visuality,” 83. ↩

  34. Campt, “Black Visuality,” 80. ↩

  35. Rúben Casas, “In/visibility, Mobility, and Making Do in Contemporary Latina/o Migraint Rhetorics" (PhD Diss., (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2016); Mira Shimabokuro, Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015). ↩

  36. Shimabukuro, Relocating, 87. ↩

  37. Browne, Dark Matters, 21. ↩

  38. Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 59. ↩

  39. Adam Harvey, “Computer Vision Dazzle Camouflage,” CV Dazzle, 2010. https://cvdazzle.com/ ↩

  40. Maud Acheampong (@daintyfunk), "CV Dazzle, the clown," Instagram post, May 30, 2020. ↩

  41. Benjamin, Race After; Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression; How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018); Cathy O’Neill, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown Books, 2016). ↩

  42. Browne, Dark Matters, 21. ↩