Not the Light

A critical history and philosophical exploration of photography’s relationship with the violent project of racial whiteness.

Not the Light: The Image in the White Racial Frame is an unsettling and formally inventive investigation into photography’s entanglement with and complicity in racial whiteness.

Arguing that systems of white supremacy have historically been constructed and bolstered by photography’s white image-schema, the book draws on the concept of the “white racial frame,” reworking the idea of the frame as both a photographic device and a governing structure of knowledge and power.

Interweaving essays and photography, Not the Light considers photography as “light writing,” as colonial technology, and as racialised gaze. Turning away from the historically accepted metaphor of illumination as revelation, Blight instead looks toward the conditions that produce a seeing that is often paradoxically obscured – the habits, desires, blind spots, and violences of white vision.

While photography has long been implicated in colonial forms of domination and the perpetuation of white supremacy by scholars such as bell hooks and Edward Said, this is the first book-length project to address this issue head-on. It includes 50 images, from the 1850s to the present day, functioning as visual metaphors that represent established modes of looking, seeing, gazing, imaging, picturing, framing and counter-framing. Across chapters that move between colonial archives, contemporary art, family portraiture, and border technologies, Blight interrogates how whiteness is protected, and reproduced. Drawing on approaches including critical race studies, cultural studies and psychoanalysis, and foregrounding writers and artists of colour to disrupt the white system of representation, the book proposes an anti-racist and de-colonial method of reading images that de-centres whiteness.