"Photography at the Heart of Darkness" Nicholas Mieerzoff

One of the surprising things I'm finding with this course is how much a lot of the behavior exhibited by the colonists still exists today as pointed out at the end of this article. It really is of much distress to me , because growing up as a white women in Canada I lived in a bubble in which I saw everyone as equal and didn't know how much of a problem racism deeply rooted in colonialism was. Reading this article I couldn't help but thinking about how modern artists like Robert Mapplethorpe still see the African body as a source of excitement and mystery and set to document it as such.

By photographing black man nude Mapplethorpe's work is reminiscent of the taxonomic photographs of the early 1900's. He also really plays up racial stereotypes that exists in our society such as the black male being more muscular and having a larger penis than that of other races. He highlights what may been seen as the visual signs of difference. He marks his subjects just as Lang marked his with racial difference that is placed mostly onto the body .

I think like Lang he documents something that is more like a dream than reality. Lang talked about colonial mimicry making the people of the Congo happier, but in reality we have no real idea about how they fault about others taking their land. Mapplethorpe puts the African Male body as a sexual dream something that we all want , when in reality we don't. I think that both works can be seen as a form of subjectification.