Kanye West premiered his song and video “New Slaves” by projecting it on the exterior walls of 66 buildings throughout the world. The shots in the video have only two angles: first, a close-up of West’s head in profile, and second, a frontal close-up of his face. These framings, combined with the metallic, high-contrast quality of the video image itself, resonate strongly with the visual conventions of both mugshots and the infamous “slave daguerreotypes” of racial typologist Louis Agassiz. I’ve been thinking through “New Slaves” by employing a media archaeological method called topos analysis. According to Erkki Huhtamo, a topos is a “persistent cultural formula that appears, disappears, and re-appears, gaining ever-new meanings in the process.”
West deploys and freshens many well-worn topoi to revise the relation between race, sex, profit, and power under the neoliberal order. “New Slaves” is not simply a misogynist rant (as many critics have concluded), but a dramatization of the dehumanizing effects of neoliberalism on subjects both imprisoned and “free.” “New Slaves” offers a powerful critique of both the prison-industrial complex and everyday consumption, and re-casts both as distinct, yet deeply related facets of subordination within a global structure of racial, economic, and sexual domination. I’m not going to try to prove all of this in a single post, but I am working on a larger essay that buttresses these claims. For now, I’ll introduce the constellation of artifacts that “New Slaves” resonates with or reflects.
First, there are the slave daguerreotypes of Louis Agassiz, taken in 1850 in Columbia, South Carolina. According to Brian Wallis, these daguerreotypes were meant to prove both the physical differences between black and white people, and the inherent racial superiority of whites. The high-contrast, almost silvery black and white tonal scheme of the New Slaves project, though digital, bears most similarity to the daguerreotype, the earliest photographic technologies, and those that also have a deep salience in the formation of racial discourses and their visual regimes. Shawn Michelle Smith has written about how daguerreotypes mediated a range of discourses of identity in the 19th century, and were used to present physical outward evidence of interior qualities, such as moral character, racial identity, and/or criminal nature. These semi-mystical uses of photography lend power to the mug shot, which was both an administrative tool in monitoring the dangerous classes of the industrial city, and an offshoot of work by scientists like Cesare Lombroso, who thought that criminality manifested itself in physiognomic features.
Second, the “New Slaves” projection operates in conversation with circulating topos in the world of high-art photography. Annie Leibovitz’s profile portrait of Michael Jordan from 1991, finds its way into Hank Willis Thomas’s ingenious series Branded in 2003. Though the head is reversed and anonymized, the Nike swoosh branded onto its bald head make it an undeniable reference to Jordan, who played a crucial role in consolidating Nike’s global brand of athletic excellence and cool that glitterized and obfuscated the enslavement of people making its products. Further, Jordan deeply shaped the concept of branding itself within the neoliberal order, providing the example for other companies to follow as they generated profits through cultural imperialism.
Third, hyperrealist painter and photographer Chuck Close revived the daguerreotype in a series from 2000, where he photographed fellow artists and models and consumers in the high-art world. Within this constellation of topoi and this actual social network and consumptive sphere that is the high-art world, “New Slaves” is a resonant and innovative instance of image design. When Chuck Close finished his daguerreotypes project, he digitized them and then hired a Swiss company to use a programmable Jacquard Loom to weave tapestries of the images—Jacquard Loom images are actually the first digital images, programmed through punchcards, first used in 1804. “New Slaves” renders a digital image more concrete, in a similar fashion, but does so by projecting it onto stone, brick, and steel–a graffiti written in light.