Skin colour and its social implications are particularly relevant to political questions in the “Melanin Millennium” (Hall, Russel, Wilson). Photographic images have played and continue to play a significant role in many different ways in various discourses on skin colour, be it as instruments of (pseudo-)scientific knowledge production, police surveillance, or emancipatory artistic criticism and political protest.
This research project, however, focusses less on the iconographic elements of these discourses and more on the particular technical conditions under which photographs are produced. In addition to their production by means of electromagnetic waves, the media specificity of photographic images bears further description: there is a small moment in the act of their production that is beyond human control because it takes place automatically according to optical, chemical, or electronic laws. This leads to images whose relationship to the world is not necessarily characterized by formal similarity to what is depicted, but by a certain causality of reference. Nevertheless, this referentiality is not free from cultural conditioning and historical contingencies, even if the promise of reality and the affective power of the photographic often suggest the opposite. Particularly when human bodies come into the photographic gaze, this is problematic. For these reasons, the epistemic, aesthetic, and political power of such products will be considered from the point of view of their production, or more precisely, the production of the conditions of production. The photographic apparatus will be addressed as a powerful, historical dispositive that “co-produces” (Jasanoff) technological and cultural concepts of socio-political normality. The power relationship between the automatic but human-made apparatus and the human user is characterized by an interplay of technical affordances and social performativities that stabilize, dialectically complement, and undermine each other. Thus, the dispositive of digital photographic production, processing, and reception of skin colour is called into question both in terms of its social configuration and its political implications.
My investigation into image theory and media studies ties in with research on the early colonial history of photography and emulsions of colour film, as well as current analyses of facial recognition technologies, thus closing a research gap for digital photographic technology. Based on cultural-historical case studies, I examine various aspects of the dispositive of the apparatus using a discourse-theoretical approach and qualitative methods of analysis. Finally, I explore various discourses of photographic technology criticism as equally powerful, collective narratives of technology. In the interests of critical image literacy, the project further aims to contribute to a more precise understanding of the technological framing of our interactions with and use of digital media, as this understanding is a prerequisite for the responsible development of new digital technologies.