Humanae

This week’s Photogenie theme is titled "Colour Code". Through visual stories, our curators concern themselves with topics such as race and skin colour.

‘We still live in a world where the colour of your skin not only gives a first impression, but a lasting impression that remains’. With these words, photographer Angélica Dass immediately captivates the attention of her audience during her TEDTalks presentation.

Dass, born in Brazil, comes from a family of a wide variety of colours. Her dark skinned father was adopted by a ‘white’ couple and her mother had a rather ‘coffee’ skin tone. In this diverse environment, she was initially unaware of all the indirect meanings associated with the colour of someone’s skin. However, growing up this quickly changed.

When she married a Spaniard with a rather uncommon reddish skin tone people around her asked ‘what will be the colour of your children you think?’. This speculation about what her children would look like, made her realize the infinite range of different skin tones and in 2012 she started photographing all kinds of people from all over the world in her project ‘humanae’.

Angélica took the skin tone of the subjects’ noses and used this colour as the background for their portraits. ‘Using this scale, I am sure that nobody is ‘black,’ and absolutely nobody is ‘white’… these kinds of concepts that we used in the past are completely nonsense’.

She now has photographed around 4000 people in 17 different countries and 27 different cities. By looking at all the portraits combined you can clearly see people are not simply ‘white’, ‘black’ or ‘yellow’ but a wide range of beautiful different colours.

Humanae quickly gained a lot of popularity and praise from all over the world, her portraits have been displayed in galleries, on the streets in various cities and have been picked up by news outlets like Human Affairs and Vogue, looking at all these beautiful images you can easily understand why!

About the artist: Angélica Dass was born in 1979 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and is currently based in Madrid. She is most notably known by her project Humanae that has since then been picked up by various museums and even organizations like UNESCO, World Economic Forum and National Geographic. In addition, she has given lectures at institutions like the University of Salamanca, the University of Bologna, and the UERJ. This success has allowed her to fund the Humanae Institute, a non-profit aimed to praise and honour diversity through education.

Let us know what you think in the comments!

Our weekly themes always include three photo series by different photographers.

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Written by Max Zarzoso Hueck

What even is “Race”?

This week’s Photogenie theme is titled "Colour Code".

Through visual stories, our curators concern themselves with topics such as race and skin colour.

We as humans share almost all of our genes. There are only a few genes that differ from person to person. One has genes that account for blue eyes, the other for curly hair and the third could have a specific gene pattern that makes them allergic to cats. For a long time, specific genes developed in certain parts of the world, as a part of evolution. For example; some people needed genes that could account for the breaking down of lactose (because a lot of cows lived in the area) whereas on other continents this wasn’t the case. This way, territorial specific genetic contexts were created.

However, people have been traveling this planet from the moment they could, and from that moment DNA started mixing. In the past centuries, human traffic around the world increased tremendously and so did the spread of territorial specific genetics. We often tend to categorise the people we meet by social labels, such as culture, race, religion, nationality and other groups to which we “belong”. Although many people seem to think that certain facial features correspond with nationality or race, the opposite is often true. Our identities shift and overlap. If we all share most of our genes, and even the kind of genes that appear more often in a certain local context start spreading, the question arises: ‘What even is “race”?’

Photographer Tomoko Sawada demonstrated the flexibility of nationality and race by transforming herself to look like over 300 different Asian women. In her artist statement for her solo exhibition in the Rose Gallery in Santa Monica, California in 2015, she states: “I was told at various times that I looked Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Singaporean, Mongolian, et cetera (and only occasionally Japanese). This made me consider the intuitive process by which people achieve cognition of true or false archetypes”.

By portraying herself multiple times, Sawada explores in what ways she “could” or “could not” fit certain socially constructed labels. She found that, by changing her facial features, her facial signature could match all kinds of Asian identities, showing how facial features are not necessarily an indicator for identity, and how identity can be a fluid, dynamic concept in itself.

Nobody is 100% a certain race. You would be surprised how much you have in common with someone from the other side of the world! Momondo, the global comparison site for flights, made a video about the subject of fluid identity and the social construct of race. They asked 67 people to do a DNA-test to see what country-specific genes they had. Many turned out to have a lot more in common with their perceived ‘others’ than they initially thought. It changes their perspective completely! In the end of the video, after finding out the variety of country-specific genes she had, one lady states: ‘There would be no such thing as extremism in the world if people knew their heritage like that, I mean, who would be stupid enough to think in terms of “a pure race”?’. Of course, regardless of our genetic similarities, people differentiate between groups of people on the basis of trivial things such as appearance.

What do you think terms of race, nationality, and culture are all about? Do you believe “pure race” exists in a globalised world like the one we live in today? Do people ever group you with certain nationalities and areas of the world without any knowledge of your actual life and heritage? Tell us in the comments!

About the artist: Tomoko Sawada (1977) is a Japanese photographer, born in Kobe. She specialises in contemporary feminist photography and performance art, with a great body of work on identity and gender roles (in Japanese culture). Among others awards, she won the New York International Centre of Photography’s Infinity Award for Young Photographers in 2004 and The Kyoto Perfect Culture Prize in 2007. Her artwork is part of the permanent collection of a significant amount of museums around the world.

Let us know what you think in the comments!

Our weekly themes always include three photo series by different photographers.

Are you interested and do you want to stay posted? Make sure to follow us on Instagram @wearecurators.

Written by Myrthe Peek