Theo Marboah, a student of medicine at Pavia University, has a passion for contemporary African and Afrodiasporic visual culture. I had the chance to hear Theo speak in Palermo at Resignifications: The Black Mediterranean, where he introduced “Echoes and Agreements” (“Echi and Accordi” in Italian), an ongoing digital experiment that uses diptychs to bring together archival images from the Black diaspora …

Last May, Florence hosted the annual edition of Black Portraitures, a convention that has already brought together some of the most eminent scholars of Africana and black visual studies in the world in five previous occasions. This year, the event focused on:  “exploring the impulses, ideas, and techniques undergirding the production of self-representation and desire, and the exchange of the gaze from the …

On March 6th, 2015 Tumblr and other social media hosted the first BlackOutDay to counter the notion that beauty is a whites-only affair. According to a statement published in the official page of the movement, on BlackOutDay black users “like and reblog selfies of each other and fill our dashboards with encouragement”. Since then, the day has been made seasonal, with the second event taking …

Today the Costume Institute of the African Diaspora (CIAD) in London remembers the mooring at Tilbury Docks of the first Empire Windrush ship to the United Kingdom in 1948 with some great pictures of Caribbean immigrants in their best clothes and a post on Tumblr. The clothes captured in the shots encapsulate the hopes and expectations of thousands of imperial subjects who left the West Indies in search …

This post contains theoretical annotations on photo-manipulation that I am collecting for a publication on retro-looking fashion photography. *** Digital photography is the main medium of dissemination of vernacular sartorialism and, by extension, of the afrosartorial aesthetic. Selfies are the currency of countless blogs that promote racial cool/beauty/pride (Pham 2015), while fashion blogging depends on digital photography to document emerging trends (Rocamora …