Unless doctored, a photograph records without bias. Unlike a painting or a novel, the unfavorable cannot be hidden away: what is captured is evident. Whole systems of operation can be gleaned, if one is willing to look honestly.
Through January 8, at Brandeis University’s Kniznick Gallery in the Women’s Studies Research Center, a showing of photographs by C. Rose Smith weaves a story of what cannot be hidden. “A Silent Rage” is comprised of 12 photographs, in which Smith — through carefully posed and captured images — charts the transatlantic cotton trade that propped up much of the American economy in its first 100-odd years.
“Serving as a conduit for the oppressed, my self-assertion reimagines and reinserts their existence in spaces where they were once unauthorized,” Smith said in their artist statement.
In a supple and rich black-and-white, Smith graces the interiors of southern plantation homes and wanders around the exteriors of New England textile mills, places where only the product of enslaved Black people’s labor could go, not the people themselves. While Smith is the sole human subject in these photographs, the historical environments around them — from weathered brick walls to gaudy Antebellum décor — elucidate as much as they provide backdrops.