Race, photography and resistance, three books by Mark Sealy
Over the last three decades Mark Sealy has played a central role as a curator, theorist and champion of black photography. He has been the executive director of Autograph since 1991, and during this time has curated and organised a wide variety of exhibitions and commissioned many new works. As well as making visible the work of many marginalised artists and subjects, he has also developed an important theoretical critique of dominant visual framings, both in photography and in the wider landscape. In his critical writings, he often reads works against the grain, as a way of destabilising their colonial framing, and analysing the colonial visual regimes that continue to haunt dominant ways of seeing. He is Professor of Photography – Rights and Representation at University of the Arts London, and the artistic director of the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2026.
The first of this three-book series is an extensively researched critique of Western photographic practice. The second two books bring together Sealy’s writings on specific exhibitions and artists, as well his ongoing conversations and interviews with theorists and photographers.
Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time
£18.00, paperback, Lawrence Wishart 2019, ISBN 9781912064755
This book documents the use of photography as a tool for the creation of violent and Eurocentric visual regimes through detailed analysis of a series of images over different time periods. It seeks to extract new meanings from these photographic moments in racial time, and to develop new ways of seeing that bring marginalised and dehumanised subjects into focus.
In exploring the historical and political conjunctures of racial politics at work within photography, and their effects – in terms of cultural erasure, lives made invisible, and subjects constructed as less than human – the book challenges established orthodoxies of colonial thought concerning the racialised body, the subaltern and the politics of human recognition.
To read chapter three of this book, ‘Violence of the Image’, download the chapter here.
With 20-page plate section
Photography: Race, Rights and Representation
£18.00, paperback, Lawrence Wishart 2022, ISBN: 9781913546335
Bringing together reflections on key moments in his long career as a curator, theorist and champion of black photography, Sealy engages with the work of some of the key players in this world – including through conversations with critics such as Stuart Hall and Sunil Gupta, and reflections on artists such as Wendy Ewald, Rotimi Fani-Koyode, Early Hudnall, Délio Jasse, Max Kandhola, Masterji, Aïda Muluneh, Roy Mehta, Oscar Muñoz, Eustáquio Neves, Dana Popa, Maud Sulter, Wilfred Ukpong, James VanDerSee and Nontsikelo Veleko.
With 16-page plate section
Lens on liberation
£15, paperback, Lawrence Wishart 2025, ISBN 9781912064786
This collection weaves together further strands of Sealy’s 40-year career. It brings a spotlight to bear on a number of important exhibitions, and engages with the work of a range of photographers and artists, including Hélène Amouzou, Peter Brathwaite, Sandra Brewster, Vanley Burke, Ernest Cole, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Samuel Fosso, Armet Francis, Thompson Hall, Zora J. Murff.
With 14-page plate selection
Praise for Mark Sealy:
‘In this deft deconstruction of what is simultaneously before, behind and beyond the lens, Sealy teaches us how to understand photography within a broader system of social, and more specifically, racial control. His incisive critique challenges our understanding of what was, what might have been, and what could be.’
– Gary Younge
‘A vital contribution to the field, in which Sealy unpacks notions of power, alterity, the margin, and the construction of black subjectivity in the face of visual cultures built upon colonialist legacies. Decolonising the camera is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of race, identity, and photography’
– Steven Evans, FotoFest Executive Director
‘Decolonising the Camera is an extraordinary contribution to the histories of photography and representation of the Other. Mark Sealy analyses a range of photographic practice, from the work of missionary-turned-documentary-photographer Alice Seeley Harris in the Congo at the turn of the 20th century to Wayne Miller’s portraits of black communities in Chicago after the Second World War. He reminds us that photography is an inherently racialized medium. The book presents a critical methodology for developing ‘other ways of seeing’ at a time of increasing divisions in society’ – Yasufumi Nakamori, Senior Curator of International Art (Photography), Tate
‘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’
– 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
‘photography, as a field, and African and diasporic thought, as a set of discourses, have benefited mightily from Sealy’s unwavering commitment: to optimism at what may yet come to be, and, just as important, to angry protest at the suffering visited on most of humanity by those in power, historically and in the present day’
– Matthew S. Witkovsky, The Art Institute of Chicago, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Photography and Media, and Vice President for Strategic Art Initiative
‘In his always generous voice, Mark Sealy delivers an expanded and inclusive lens on photography – not only through the conversations he continues to have with key black artists and filmmakers, but also through the spaces where his curatorial work takes place. Be it in London, Houston, Bamako or Toronto, at festivals, on juries, and not least in exhibitions staged at Autograph, Sealy makes the real the commitment, joy and dedication of a life lived in service to liberation’
– Sophie Hackett, Curator, Photography, Art Gallery of Ontari