Massified Illusions of Difference: Photography and the Mystique of the American Historically Black Colleges and Universities HBCUs

Year 2015, Issue: 41, 69 - 94, 01.04.2015

Bruce Makoto Arnold Roland W. Mitchell Noelle Arnold

Abstract

The focus of this research centers on the public personas presented by American Historically Black Colleges and Universities HBCUs through photographs. HBCUs often chose to present themselves in a manner likely to advance their stature to benefactors, donors, philanthropists, government officials, and potential faculty and students. The types of photographs employed by the HBCU promoted them as an institution that offered hope and promise to African Americans as depicted through the dominant visual tropes employed by white society. As such, the use of photography in this manner was an attempt to join the dominant white social and political structure through the medium’s democratizing characteristics. However, what has been consistently left out of these images is the HBCU’s mission to promote and accentuate its specific alignment toward African American students

Keywords

Historically Black College and University, African-American students, photography, massification, corporate identity

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