Visual Politics: The Power of Imagery in American Presidential Campaigns
I wrote this story before election results were announced, but feels even more relevant now.
Gordon Park's profound image, "American Gothic, Washington, DC, 1942," is one of many of his images that reshapes the public perception of Black Americans by including their daily lives in the narrative of who matters in America. Parks used his camera as a "weapon" against racial inequality. Sarah Lewis, a professor at Harvard University, founder of the Vision & Justice project, and writer of The Unseen Truth (2024), argues that Parks used images to redefine representation, challenging the racist perceptions of Black people. As Americans prepare to vote for two candidates with vastly different appearances, one who wants to end democracy and one who aims to uphold it, we must consider the importance of how our interpretation of photographs affects how we see both the candidates and ourselves.
“Politics are controlled by narrative, and today, the headline is rivaled by the image. I think in the United States, images are critical in modern politics because so much of America culture is built around what can’t be said” Sarah Lewis says.
Schools and public discourse have fatally taught Americans to see each other in a false racialized context. The term "Caucasian," coined by Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anatomist physiologist, linked the white race to racial superiority in his book, On the Natural Variety of Mankind (1795). Blumenbach formed the word "Caucasian" to name those who are from the Caucasus region. He argued that they were the purest and superior race. His argument became continually taught in schools as factual. However, on a trip to the Caucasus region, Langston Hughes noticed that the people were not what he had been taught to expect; some people were "brown as russet pears" or "dark as chocolate," he noted in his journal. Images have been used to uphold Blumenbach’s inaccurate notations on race.
