Seeing White exhibitions:

• August 2003, Cape Town
• January 2004, Johannesburg
• March 2004, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Read the reviews

Please be part of the debate and share your ideas, thoughts and feelings. Others have said this:

Thank you for being brave enough to challenge our norms and forcing me to act and approach being white differently.

As a black person you have affirmed me in talking about what we often voice.

"Seeing White" is a conceptual photographic exhibition by Cape Town artist Michelle Booth. Michelle believes that the issue of race is far from resolved and that it is mostly white people who do not want to engage with the presence and consequences of race in all our lives. The exhibition shows how whiteness - as a system of power relations - remains invisible to those who are white because it is seen as normal and consequently white privilege is largely taken for granted.

"Seeing White" consists of 15 black and white photographs that were taken using an old plastic Kodak brownie camera. The subject matter is ordinary scenes of white people taking part in daily activities: a woman leaving a café, people eating at a restaurant, a man standing beneath a bra advert. The intention of using the brownie camera that has very limited technical abilities, is to further emphasise the ordinariness of the scenes by making them photographs that anyone could have taken.

Each image is framed behind glass that is sand-blasted with quotations from writings by various authors on whiteness. These quotations force the viewer to re-think the normality of the images and question what it is to be white.