(Re)viewing race, the marketplace, and public space through the lens of photography

ABSTRACT

This collaborative piece focuses on insights, personal experiences, and conceptual considerations about race, identity, and Black lives in different marketplace and public space settings in Britain (Glasgow, Scotland and Cardiff, Wales). We draw on the power of photography to illuminate issues regarding the relationship between race, antiblackness, intersecting oppressions, activism, marketing, media, and the aesthetics of public spaces. The discussion explores questions concerning who and what is (un)seen and (re)presented in images of marketplace and public space contexts. Utilising critical reflexivity, we observe and (re)view the myriad ways that the practice of photography – the framing of the lens as well as the (re)production and distribution of photos – captures, capitulates, and counters hegemonic understandings of (y)ourselves and other Black and racialised people in spaces of ‘consumption’.

KEYWORDS:

• Black lives
• Blackness
• race
• representation
• photography
• visual

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Permission to reuse Figures 1 and 2 in this article was sought and granted afterwards.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

layla-roxanne hill

layla-roxanne hill is a writer/curator-artist/activist-organiser. She advocates for non-commodifiable collective liberation and is also active within the trade union movement, holding positions within the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and the Scottish TUC Black Workers’ Committee. She has curated-exhibited at shows and has been a public speaker at a range of events, including Glasgow International and Edinburgh International Festivals, as well as leading and contributing to other international multi-media, collective-organising and creative activities. layla-roxanne currently writes for Bella Caledonia and tweets at: @lrh151

Francesca Sobande

Francesca Sobande is a lecturer in digital media studies at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture (Cardiff University). Francesca’s research focuses on digital remix culture, Black diaspora and feminism, and the politics of power and popular culture. She is author of The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and co-editor with Professor Akwugo Emejulu of To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (Pluto Press, 2019). She tweets at: @chess_ess