Andres Serrano is a controversial photographer and artist. He has photographed everything from dead bodies in the morgue to bodily fluids of all kinds and couples getting kinky but an article in the Guardian brought to light one of his photographs, originally from 2001 entitled “White N*gger” and depicting a friend of his in black face.

This photo makes me very uneasy indeed but I don’t know if it can be considered racist.

Serrano is half Honduran, half Afro-Cuban so to call him outright racist would be wrong in this case… It doesn’t mean his decision to produce this image was right though and for the Guardian to single it out as his best picture is a little surprising.

The Guardian interviewed Serrano and published the following:

This is my friend Aaron. He begged me to take his picture. I couldn’t do it – everyone knew him in the art world – but I wondered if I could turn him into something else. He said: “OK, turn me into a woman.” He wouldn’t make a good woman. But Aaron was desperate to get in the show, and so three weeks before the deadline he called me up and said: “I’ve got another idea: why don’t you turn me into a black slave?”

I said, I don’t know about a slave, but I’ll turn you black, and I’ll call the picture White Nigger. He said: “That’s perfect – as a teenager I hung around black friends, and that was my nickname.” There’s no post-production or digital changes in this image, it’s all the work of a makeup artist. But I made sure you would see there was a white man under this black skin, because prejudice is only skin deep.

When I did a photo series in a morgue there was a black woman whose skin was deteriorating, and she had white skin underneath. I pointed this out to the morgue manager, who replied that when he was a student in medical school, his teacher took a very thin piece of skin off a corpse, and said: “This is the thickness of racism.”

What do you think of these comments and what do you think of the image below? Is he making a point, is he off the mark, do you like it, hate it?

Image via: http://www.nathalieobadia.com/slide_show.php?ar=139&in_show=0