bell hooks
[Educator and writer, b. 1952, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, lives in New York.]
For black folks, the camera provided a means to document a reality that could, if necessary, be packed, stored, moved from place to place... [Photography] offered a way to contain memories, to overcome loss, to keep history.
When we concentrate on photography, we make it possible to see the walls of photographs in black homes as a critical intervention, a disruption of white control over black images.
Representation is a crucial location of struggle for any exploited and oppressed people asserting subjectivity and decolonization of the mind.
The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.