Through the Lens of Renee Cox
Presentation Type
Event
Start Date
8-3-2026 5:34 PM
Description
Since its inception, photography has been used as a documentary tool, providing visual proof of scientific ideas and theories. Some of the earliest photographs of enslaved people were taken on a South Carolina plantation in 1850 to support racist pseudo-scientific theories. Photographer Reneé Cox has insisted that history is her work, and throughout her partly autobiographical body of work, she confronts historical racist perceptions of Black womanhood. Recasting the visual image of Black women has been a priority in Cox’s photographs. This paper considers Cox's disruptions of images from the past and the ways in which she uses her camera as if it were a time machine to revise undesirable histories of women of African descent. Cox’s oeuvre portrays a counter-history to the representations of Black womanhood as pathological or deviant. By performing in her photographs as her various alter egos—Saartjie Baartman, Yo Mama, Raje, and Queen Nanny—Cox rewrites history, thus remaking the visual field as a site of radical possibility and justice.
Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at Fort Valley State University and art historian whose research focuses on visual culture of the African diaspora, feminism, and Afrofuturism. Her first book is Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art: The Black Female Fantastic (Routledge), which is the winner of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant. Dr. Hamilton has published research in Nka: The Journal of Contemporary African Art, African Arts, the International Review of African American Art, Harper's Bazaar, Smithsonian Voices, and CAA Reviews. She was awarded funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to work on her next book, Black Womanhood through the Figurative in the Oeuvre of Alison Saar.
Relational Format
Conference proceeding
Recommended Citation
Hamilton, Elizabeth Carmel, "Through the Lens of Renee Cox" (2026). Women of Photography: A 24-Hour Conference-a-thon Celebrating International Women’s Day. 43.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/womenofphotography/2026/schedule/43
Through the Lens of Renee Cox
Since its inception, photography has been used as a documentary tool, providing visual proof of scientific ideas and theories. Some of the earliest photographs of enslaved people were taken on a South Carolina plantation in 1850 to support racist pseudo-scientific theories. Photographer Reneé Cox has insisted that history is her work, and throughout her partly autobiographical body of work, she confronts historical racist perceptions of Black womanhood. Recasting the visual image of Black women has been a priority in Cox’s photographs. This paper considers Cox's disruptions of images from the past and the ways in which she uses her camera as if it were a time machine to revise undesirable histories of women of African descent. Cox’s oeuvre portrays a counter-history to the representations of Black womanhood as pathological or deviant. By performing in her photographs as her various alter egos—Saartjie Baartman, Yo Mama, Raje, and Queen Nanny—Cox rewrites history, thus remaking the visual field as a site of radical possibility and justice.
Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at Fort Valley State University and art historian whose research focuses on visual culture of the African diaspora, feminism, and Afrofuturism. Her first book is Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art: The Black Female Fantastic (Routledge), which is the winner of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant. Dr. Hamilton has published research in Nka: The Journal of Contemporary African Art, African Arts, the International Review of African American Art, Harper's Bazaar, Smithsonian Voices, and CAA Reviews. She was awarded funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to work on her next book, Black Womanhood through the Figurative in the Oeuvre of Alison Saar.