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The ‘Human Rights, Human Wrongs’ gallery interrogates the processes of cultural production and consumption displaying a vast selection from the Black Star Photo Agency archives

Everyone has the right to representation as a person before the law. Article 6. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This article hovers over the ‘Human Rights, Human Wrongs’ gallery in gold shiny letters against a regal purple backdrop in merciless, authoritative glory.

The selection of over 300 photos curated by Mark Sealy explores the Black Star Photo Agency archives beginning from 1945 up until the early 1990s. It takes viewers through a period of graphic brutality and change in which the old world order was being dismantled and old colonial powers were losing sight of their possessions. Although universal declarations were being introduced, the incompatibility of sovereign domination and human rights was becoming glaringly evident.

Amid these pivotal changes emerged the iconic photos of the 20th century – but certainly not by accident. The lighting, angles and sharpness of the photos are thoroughly calculated and would have appeared in Life Magazine and other publications under the instruction of an editor, hand-picked to suit the required narrative. You’d be hard-pressed to separate the majority of these from stills of a West End stage due to their theatrical studio-like quality.

Very much a Eurocentric conversation during this time, the rhetoric of esteemed and valuable photography did not transcend a great deal beyond France, Germany, Britain and the United States. As such, images from agency leaders in corporate assignment photography would have been a one-sided discussion carrying huge political bearing, reflecting the narrow dialogue of power dynamics that was happening globally. Stemming from this background, the gallery invites the viewer to question the historical accounts in the stock photographs produced for mass western consumption during key historical shifts. Mark Sealy explains that he is less concerned with the photographers, as much as the ideas or forces in which they operated.

“Any enquiry into photojournalistic practice and its impact on humanitarian objectives, has to necessarily interrogate not only the kind of images we are presented with, but where, when and how they are distributed.”

State violence is a powerful reoccurring theme of the exhibition, underpinned by racial segregation in the case of the USA, with photos of protests, hunger strikes and riots. This includes a photo from 1968 of the sanitation worker’s strike in Memphis, Tennessee, by Cleatis Ray Keisling, which shows a row of policemen crouching with their guns pointed towards a row of visibly unarmed black men, who, in stark contrast, stand tall holding placards which read “I Am A Man”. The words are echoed aptly (and sadly) in the message “Black Lives Matter” which emerged internationally in the past few months as a response to police aggressions and acquittals in the USA, placing the images firmly in living memory and at the forefront of current struggles.

Several sequences of Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s life and activism are highlighted in the collection, including a succession of frames by Charles Moore, depicting Dr King’s arrest in Montgomery, Alabama in 1958. There’s also a photo of the Selma to Montgomery rally in 1965 and the first public use of the “black power” fist by students at the Mississippi Meredith March evening rally in 1966.

The pictures are embedded within the wider context of Pan-African unity taking hold of the African continent, with 17 countries being liberated in 1960 alone, including the Republic of Congo, Somalia and Kenya. However, these huge changes and celebrations are simplified to an “infinite, reproducible” handful of stock images, often depicting the African with hands out, begging, at the European camera – or otherwise, weak, broken and incompetent. This is loudly exemplified in photos by Carlo Bavagnoli and Ray Bellisario, one of which shows an overcrowded row of unclothed, seemingly malnourished, mourning mothers breastfeeding their babies in the Republic of Biafra (now the Federal Republic of Nigeria) in 1967. That being said, in one rare and amusing series by Robert Lebeck, a young man is shown tactfully stealing the sword of the Belgian King Baudouin I during a procession which took place the day before the liberation of the Republic of Congo highlighting colonial transition most vividly.

Moments of strife in Morocco and of the joy of independence in Tunisia are also on display in this gallery, as well as the fight for justice in Santiago, Chile, 1983, with women demanding to know where their loved ones have been taken (director Patricio Guzmán shows how this search is still ongoing in his extraordinary 2010 documentary film, Nostalgia for the Light). The political and military role of women is further explored in photos from Somalia to Vietnam.

Yet, with all the momentous milestones in this latter 20th century story, come images of the slow, long wait, the observers who stand in the background of pictures witnessing the violence, accustomed and silent. The barren warzones and burnt forests are inhabited by soldiers watching time go by. This seeming irrelevance of war is accentuated by the facade of peace with winners and rejectors of the Nobel Peace Prize overlooking different sections of the gallery. Journalistic stamps and notes at the back of photos of the most heinous crimes are put together in a collage to visually demonstrate the thought processes that led the images into glossy markets.

As the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X fast approaches, the gallery also points to the cost of acting for peace. Several leaders of the period covered in this gallery paid the ultimate price in challenging the status quo: X was eliminated at the point in which he campaigned to change the discourse from ‘civil’ to ‘human’ rights; Dr King was murdered when he began to address social and economic equality; and beyond the USA, Thomas Sankara was killed mere months after he appealed to the west to stop sending aid and to allow Burkina Faso to flourish on its own merit.

While in some ways our cultural focus has turned to Hollywood and YouTube, cultural production and consumption remains caught up in global power dynamics. The ‘Human Rights, Human Wrongs’ gallery prompts us to examine the given narrative, and understand the interconnectivity of events and the legacies we have inherited. It also forces us to question, over and over, how we have wronged each other in our confined interpretation of human rights.

The ‘Human Rights, Human Wrongs’ gallery runs until 6 April 2015 at The Photographers’ Gallery. Entry is free. Please see website for further details.

Photo Credits: Charles Moore / Birmingham, Alabama, United States of America, May 3 1963 / The Black Star Collection, Ryerson Image Centre.