Fade to White: Constructions of Racial Subjectivity in (Digital) Photography

Abstract

This dissertation draws on scholarship from Critical Discourse Studies, Digital Media Studies, Critical Race/Black/Postcolonial Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Visual Culture and Photography Studies to demonstrate how photography is a primary medium for producing racial discourse. The aims of my research are twofold. I analyze how photographs operate as discourse by identifying the specific frames of racial subjectivity that were formed during Western modernity. I also examine how the particular camera technologies and dominant visualization practices of select historical moments have affected the production of racial knowledge using analogue and digital photography.

In Chapter One, I trace the early establishment of vision and epistemology, and more formally ocularcentrism, in Western culture. I outline this history to locate photography’s authority in producing visual racial discourse in Europe and America. I argue that photography, while an ostensible tool of objective representation, worked closely with the White European and American imagination to construct a racially coded image of ideal modern subjectivity. Building on Allan Sekula’s theory of bourgeois portrait photography and criminal mugshot photography as two poles of representation, I locate these dichotomous frames in three key photographic moments in Western history from the mid-19th to 20th centuries: colonial photography, eugenics photography, and lynching photography.

In Chapter Two, I focus on productions of countervisual photographs from the same period as Chapter One. I specifically analyze exemplary photographs that depict unconventional images of Blackness, such as those linked to Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as representations of Blackness from American World War II propaganda posters and the Civil Rights movement. Building on Evelyn Higginbotham’s theory of respectability politics, I consider the interplay of these images with prevailing visual frames of White respectability and racialized deviancy. I argue that because these photographs replicate established codes and conventions of modern subjectivity, they struggle to introduce representations of racial heterogeneity into mainstream discourse. I propose that a shift is needed in photography’s accessibility and viewership to unlock its counter-discursive potential.

The third chapter in this dissertation explores a genealogy of digital photography to situate shifts in photographic practice from analogue to digital photography. I assess how the development of increasingly mobile and networked photographic tools—that is, the integration of digital cameras with smartphones—led to the rise of social media photography as a new vernacular that allows personal photos, including previously unseen marginalized representations, to be seen by mainstream publics. Expanding on the works of Black Studies scholar Saidiya V. Hartman and postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, I identify photographs from the Black hashtag movements #IfTheyGunnedMeDown on Twitter and #BlackoutDay on Tumblr as examples of countervisual racial discourse using digital photography.

In contrast, Chapter Four considers how White visuality has become coded into the algorithmic logic of social media, especially with the rise of augmented reality beauty (ARB) filters from 2015 to 2025. ARB filters are pre-set photographic templates that use a combination of camera and computer vision technologies to edit and ostensibly beautify a user’s digital image in real-time. Using feminist media theorist Anne Balsamo’s methodology of hermeneutic reverse engineering and Amanda K. Greene’s notion of glitchy vision, I identify how race is intertwined with and positioned within ARB filtering technologies and practices. I analyze 15 ARB filters from across Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok to identify their specific areas of “augmentation.” I argue that ARB filters disguise their reproductions of Whiteness as a neoliberal tool of self-optimization, and thus produce forms of visual racial discourse that extend modernity’s racial ideologies into the algorithmic age.

I end this dissertation with a reflection on work that remains to be done in examining photographs as racial discourse, especially as we navigate social media environments that are increasingly algorithmic in nature. I invite future discussions that will engage culturally informed uses of digital photography and its role in constructing racial subjectivity and ideology online.