Decolonized Aesthetics reclaims the 19th-century platinum palladium printing process, historically associated with Pictorialism. Pictorialists used the process to elevate photography as fine art, producing idealized images shaped by Eurocentric standards of beauty and purity. Often centered on white participants, the movement also rendered colonized figures as exoticized and romanticized symbols of a vanishing world, reinforcing colonial hierarchies and stripping away context by reducing them to static forms of aesthetic consumption.
This series challenges that legacy by utilizing the same process to portray contemporary Americans of African descent with agency. The intentional use of platinum-palladium printing imparts permanence to a reinterpreted visual narrative. The work presents participants not as subjects to be observed but as individuals asserting their self-definition and cultural continuity.
Decolonized Aesthetics merges the history of unpaid labor with the economic foundation of the cotton industry. It rejects stereotypes and propaganda that defined Black bodies as inferior or solely laboring. Instead, it reframes the image of labor through ownership, positioning Americans of African descent as cultural producers. The series explores the roots and routes of the Atlantic slave trade, drawing on Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and Robin Cohen’s concept of creolization to understand how cultural hybridity emerges through conflict, movement, and convergence.
Creolization, both as a condition and a process, informs how participants reclaim their cultural agency. The attire draws on multiple cultures and features facial markings that reference African scarification, affirming cultural lineage and resisting colonial aesthetics through a new visual language. The work integrates Afrofuturist elements, linking ancestral knowledge with speculative possibility to imagine Black futures that are autonomous, self-authored, and liberated from imposed narratives.
Website
https://www.robinnorth.info/
Collaborating Artist
Robin North
