Looking Past

From 'Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures 1941 - 1943', Maren Stange, NY, The New Press, 2003

Russell Lee, Family On Relief, 1941

Jack Delano - Ida B. Wells Housing Project, 1942

“'looking past’ suggests a complexity of perspectival positions or a multiplicity of layers that endow photographs with an enormously greater complexity than that which they are usually credited. The photograph ceases to be a univocal, flat, and uncontestable indexical trace of what was, and becomes instead a complexly textured artefact (concealing many different depths) inviting the viewer to assume many possible different stand-points – both spatial and temporal – in respect to it” Christopher Pinney, introduction to 'Photography's Other Histories', Durham, NC,  Duke University Press, 2003.

Russel Lee - Girl listening to music at a dance, 1941