Lubaina Himid

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In 2007 Lubaina Himid began a series of works she later called Negative Positives: The Guardian Archive (2007-2017). What started out as a one-year project, in the year celebrating the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in the UK, continued for a decade. Taking a page or a spread of The Guardian (the most liberal newspaper in the UK and her newspaper of choice), Himid sought to expose the unconscious bias manifested in a paper that prides itself on its non-discriminatory policies. In these excerpts, Himid paints over certain elements of the page and on occasion adds words in order to draw attention to racialized content. What Himid’s project highlights is that through unconscious, or sometimes conscious, juxtapositions the newspaper contributes not only to racial stereotyping by association, but shows a stark lack of awareness to the possibilities of such issues. In fact, one of the reasons why Himid has continued the series for a decade is that in the first year she only found one image of a black person in The Guardian. Himid’s work critically engages with the newspaper’s seemingly ‘harmless’ editorializations, exposing their blindness to the potential layers of visual meaning. 

In Gay Blows Powell Away, the excerpt from The Guardian features an image of the US athlete Tyson Gay running like a man possessed. He is portrayed as the racist stereotype, often promoted in film and other popular media, that people of African descent are animalistic or less civilized. In addition, the phrasing “Gay blows Powell away” can be interpreted as a reference to homosexual activity. In this work, Himid paints a pattern around the top and the side of the page that suggest a crowd of people of color with racist depictions of stereotypical Black lips, as represented in blackface films of the 20th century.