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Title
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When Colors Whisper: The Ethics of Looking
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Description
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This image of muddy hands gathered in a circle reflects my research on care, silence, and the representation of people of color. The scene visualizes a form of collective care, harmony, and unity.
By presenting the hands in a single, mud-smeared unified color and omitting faces, the image suspends the visual hierarchies through which bodies are normally categorized, compared, and valued. Color here whispers rather than shouts, refusing the racialized legibility that often structures attention and value. The mud blurs boundaries between bodies, creating a moment of care and fairness that is non-hierarchical and shared, inviting the ethics of looking rather than spectacle.
In relation to my research on Saidiya Hartman’s practice of critical fabulation, this image does not attempt to make a spectacle or bold resistance; there is a lingering silence. It emphasizes attention as a form of care—one that lingers with material presence, honors what cannot be fully expressed, and resists the normalization of certain assumptions that come with colors that categorize us.
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Date
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2026-01-24
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Creator
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Afrin, Sanjida
