A white woman's photographic travel journal

• Main Author: Bacos, Nina
• Published: Glasgow School of Art 2013
• Subjects: 700
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.700293

How might a photographic travelogue based upon personal first-hand experience and dialogic modes of self-representation actively embody and engage with the implications of whiteness as it impacts on racial hierarchies? And what ethical considerations should be taken into consideration when it is a white woman undertaking such research? The research was constructed through a field trip that followed loosely in the footsteps of an African man (Tete-Michel Kpomassie) from West Africa to Greenland. While undertaking this research, I made a visual diary of self-portraiture, documentary and auteur-style snapshots and portraits that mirrored points of encounter through the subjective gaze of my photographic practice and my own white female body. The photographic travelogue and the dialogue with Kpomassie framed the circumstances of the research, thus implicating my complicity as a white subject in a system organized by racial tenets. The methodology, which reflects my subjective as well as my categorical identity in different activities, such as middle-aged sex tourism, begs the question of what kinds of ethical factors and limitations need to be considered or transgressed when it is a white woman that is performing or conducting such research. These issues are examined in a discussion that juxtaposes the imagery with a selection of work around questions about racial/gendered and sexual identity, that has been carried out by other artists and academics in photographic, artistic and theoretical discourses, particularly Adrian Piper and Judith Butler.