Racism as Style: The Return of Blackface
It’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to overlook the tremendously casual manner in which #fashion photographs repeat the ghoulish visual history of racism as style. The unarguable popularity of the work of photographers like Viviane Sassen, or the unblinking publication of photographs of models in blackface by Greg Kadel or Steven Klein would seem to underscore the resurgent appetite for an imagery that rehearses some of the most profoundly derogatory aspects of orientalist and racist visual history. The issue is further complicated by the fact that this kind of imagery regurgitates old pejorative sexist tropes as well as racist ones. In a sense, sexism overlays racism in this kind of imagery to produce not incrementally but exponentially worse results.
http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/files/2013/11/1-p442_tropical_08.jpg 
http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/files/2013/11/3-p442_tropical_04-600x400.jpg 
http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/files/2013/11/7-tumblr_me38snlEA61qzvy5uo1_1280-600x403.jpg 
http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/files/2013/11/Kadel21.jpg ▻http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/2013/11/racism-as-style-the-return-of-blackface