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Myra Greene

Character Recognition
2006 - 2007

Confronted with an up swell of bigotry both


personal and public, I was forced to ask myself,
what do people see when they look at me.
Am I nothing but black? Is that skin tone enough
to describe my nature and expectation in life?
Do my strong teeth make me a strong worker?
Does my character resonate louder than my skin
tone?
Using a photographic process linked to the times
of ethnographic classification, I repeatedly
explore my ethnic features in Character
Recognition. The lessons learned are haunting
and frightening in these modern times.

What is the main focal point drawing your attention?


Why is the shot captured in high contrast black and
white?
What do you think these photographs are exploring?

Why has the photographer hidden details?


Why are there blurred areas?
Why would a sinister and dark mood be created?

How has the photographer positioned their


viewpoint?
How is the artificial or natural light used effectively?

Myra Greene(American, b. 1975; resides in Chicago, IL)Myra Greene


writes, throughout my artistic practice, I have returned to the body
to explore issues of difference, beauty, physical and emotional
recollections as they play out on the surface of the skin. In her two
recent series,Character RecognitionandMy White Friends, Greene
uses portraiture to investigate the construction of racial identity and
focus on the ways her own body relates to others.InCharacter
Recognition, Greene adopts the wet-plate collodion process, a 19thcentury photographic method that was implicated in the history of
colonialism and slavery and used as tool for ethnographic
classification. If ethnographic photography was at times aimed at
creating a typological record of racial physiognomy, Greene amplifies
and examines these preoccupations by photographing her own nose,
lips, ears, and skinwhich she describes as the features of race
as if dismembered from the rest of her body. Although Greene is
working with a highly-coded historical process, one that evokes a
complicated and disconcerting past, her photographic studies
reorient it in a number ways. She uses a black glass plate, instead of
the conventional transparent glass, which results in a unique positive
image instead of a negative that could be used to make endless
reproductions. Moreover, in making self-portraits, she willingly stands
before the camera and controls the process. Her photographs capture
not only parts of the body but their small expressive gestures.
Effectively allowing the body to speak back in this manner, Greene

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