Maurice Berger sees visual literacy as a means to achieve racial literacy

For a decade, critic and educator Maurice Berger wrote a column for The New York Times. new york times It’s titled “Race Stories.” In writing about the photo, he wanted to teach visual literacy and then “racial literacy through visual literacy.” The column championed the work of photographers such as Jamel Shabazz, Zanele Muholi, Carrie Mae Weems, Nona Faustine and Gordon Parks, whose projects—whether social documentary or artistic exploration—left a deep impression on Berger.

This month, Aperture has partnered with Aperture to publish a collection of nearly 70 essays. New York Times, The first in the Vision and Justice series edited by Sarah Lewis, Deborah Willis, and Leigh Redford. Berger, who died of COVID-19 early in the pandemic, loved “writing about photographers who were telling big stories — not just about the fires… but about what was happening every day in other people’s lives,” as he writes in the book As said. 2018. Edited by Marvin Heiferman, author, curator and Berger’s widow, Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images Themes are woven along the threads of Berger’s ideology, carefully arranged into five sections: Revisiting Images, Visibility, History and Memory, Witness and Community.

Berger’s columns over the years possess an ongoing visceral audacity that will be especially striking to anyone who has written professionally and consistently about the arts for a long time. Dizzying press releases, word-count limits, the need to balance personal and in-house style: he has to juggle at least three considerations, month after month. He continues to deliver the message with obvious dedication. It must be helpful to always have materials available.

In almost every article, Berger looks at photographers and their work in a flattering light. This is worth noting. Is this because, as he says in the preface, his “greatest passion is to be an educator”? It would be strange if he criticized the work of black, Indian, Chicana, or Japanese photographers while asking white readers to sympathize with their views. But praise doesn’t mean there’s a lack of accountability, and Berger excels at that. One should only consider how he writes about characters or images that readers may be familiar with—JoAnn Wilson in front of the “Colored Entrance” sign, Malcolm X reading a newspaper, Martin Luther King Jr. with his daughter Britta N.B. Newsom takes down a Confederate flag as she talks, then revisits important photographs, carefully gathering cultural and historical data. In “Faces of Paranoia,” for example, he included Samuel Corum’s 2017 photograph of Peter Cvjetanovic, who was among others participating in a campaign by neo-Nazis , white supremacists, and counter-protests led by the alt-right at the University of Virginia; a 1957 photo by Will Counts shows Elizabeth Eckford as she Students shouted insults at her while trying to fit in at an Arkansas high school.

However, he didn’t let the punishment slip when he wrote about Dana Schutz’s painterly interpretation of Emmett Till’s open casket. Body. His interest in Schutz’s cross-cultural work—and indeed in the work of other white photographers he wrote about, such as Lee Friedlander and Florence Mars—is, notably, How he sees himself as a Jewish American, writing primarily about black photographers. “Working across cultures requires insight, respect, sensitivity, and rigor. It also requires honesty and self-exploration about one’s own racial attitudes,” he wrote in a 2017 article about Thiel’s image.

I talk about Berger’s identity because his work examines race and its visualization in photography. His essay, as a work, makes two key propositions: First, writing is about exploring your inner reserves of empathy, revealing what you think or feel about those whose experiences you need to understand. Second, writing about photography is especially helpful because the author is necessarily an interviewee—a secondary character rather than a primary witness—thinking through the photographs taken by others and seeing others through the way they see themselves.

A second idea is implicit in Berger’s devotion to photography. Historically, it is a medium that cannot escape its unsavory credentials, being used to shape imperial or stereotypical narratives about non-white subjects. Berger’s investment, however, is to accommodate those who object to the media’s inherited baggage. Berger quotes Anthony Barboza in the book’s final essay on the African-American photography collective Kamoinge, leaving us with a resonant idea: photographers “absorb themselves and the world Feel, and reflect what we see”.