The Othering Gaze

The goal I pursued while creating this set of images, by using original text prompts and a free-to-use artificial intelligence image generator called “Dall-e 2”, was to find out if it is possible to use tools created by dominant culture to turn the “othering gaze” of empire back onto itself. Safiya Umoja Noble writes that “White American identity functions as an invisible ‘norm’ or ‘nothingness’ on which all others are made aberrant” (71). This ‘nothingness’ also manifests as that which measures, examines, and creates representations of the ‘Other”. One of my goals in attempting to turn this gaze back on itself is to expose its deployment as not simply being scientific, academic, or anthropological, but directly implying an unequal power relationship between subject and photographer, within a context that inherently renders the subject as different from and less-than the ‘neutral’ observer. In other words, subjective rather than objective, as we are willed to believe within empire.

My inspiration for these images comes from the long history, from colonial European powers to modern forms of media, of dominant white patriarchal culture using representations to categorize, dehumanize, scrutinize, and control non-white bodies. Edward Curtis, an ethnologist, and photographer, provides a salient example of this kind of colonial ideology made manifest in artistic works. At the time of Curtis’ photographic career in the late 19th century, Native American communities and cultures were widely held by dominant culture to inevitably be vanishing due to their perceived inferiority and lack of civilized lifestyle. Curtis’ famous photographs documenting the allegedly ‘vanishing race’ of Native Americans reinforced narratives of white supremacy such as Manifest Destiny, using an anthropological lens of documentation to normalize acts of colonization, enslavement, and theft of land from Indigenous people.

In creating these images I was also interested in exploring the idea of ‘problematized meanings’ in “Decoding Cultural Oppression”. According to the authors, “meanings become problematized through unexpected events, events that break the social frame, when powerful interests are involved, or when a striking ideological conflict becomes apparent” (5). By depicting racial and cultural markers in humans that are associated with the aforementioned ‘nothingness’ and ‘norm’ of American whiteness, such as business wear, the nuclear family, and white skin, with depictions of people engaging in activities commonly seen in historical anthropological photographs of the studied and cataloged ‘Other’, such as gathering and cooking around a fire, or posing in a family home with cultural objects, I wanted to problematize the relationship between the subjects’ perceived identity and the implied othering of their setting and activities. By placing some of the subjects in an environment that could be perceived as post-apocalyptic, I attempt to call back to ways in which Indigenous people all over the world have been living, in a sense, in a post-apocalyptic world since the 15th century. Dominant culture’s ‘norm’ is the attempted erasure of this history of colonization and genocide. Like Edward Curtis’ photographs of Native Americans at the turn of the 20th century, these subjects are facing the sudden loss of their way of life, the former bounty of their store shelves and economic production of their businesses now simply fading away as an inevitable result of its inferior nature. In their place, perhaps an alien race of interstellar colonizers has appeared to document the fading glory of Western civilization.