Photography: Race, rights and representation

Sealy’s mode of ethical looking decisively disrupts any Eurocentric frame, recovering hidden narratives and marginalised practices that blast apart the tattered edifice of colonial time. The book argues for the right of recognition – before the law, before the camera, and, more so now than ever, within the institutions that guard a fractured mainstream culture … Whether in the images of Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Maud Sulter, Eustáquio Neves, or through the voice of Stuart Hall, the author pursues the affective power of decolonial vision for the understanding of being.
Duncan Forbes, Head of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Mark Sealy’s Photography: Race, Rights and Representation is essential reading for all of us rethinking images in the twenty-first century. Sealy narrates three decades of ‘looking’ by revisiting his own archive and gathering not only the ghosts of the photographic past but the voices of our future. This remarkable collection is everlasting as it brings the aesthetic and the political in at a critical time in our history.
Deborah Willis, Chair, Department of Photography & Imaging, New York University