THOUGHTS ON FRAMING

 Question: How does framing (camera, screen, exhibition, i.e.) shape power?
PORTFOLIO REFERENCE: OUTSTANDING UNIVERSAL VALUE - CENTRAL HISTORIC DISTRICT, PUEBLA, MX

This question sits at the vey intersection of aesthetics, power, and colonial visuality. The subconscious act of framing may actually be where the imperial and the intimate meet.  Framing is never neutral. It is a disciplinary gesture, a move that enforces or reinforces the norms, values, and logics of a dominant system. Framing a subtle choreography of control. In visual culture theory (Mirzoeff, Harney & Moten), disciplinary gestures are the micro-technologies (micro-aggressions) of power. They structure visibility: what is seen, how it is seen, and who is authorized to see it. Whether it’s through the viewfinder, the exhibition wall, or a website gallery, framing: Includes and excludes; Directs attention; Normalizes or estranges.

Mirzoeff reminds us that colonial visuality “naturalizes the right to look” only for those already positioned as the seers, not the seen (The Right to Look, 2011). My photographs of Puebla are formal, meticulous, painterly. I am conscious to resist the extractive, touristic gaze, but also revel in surface—facades, textures, chromatic intensity. This raises a tension:

Am I capturing pigment, or is pigment capturing me?

Framing from a distance often echoes colonial architectural photography: the façade-as-evidence. But the intimacy in my photographs disrupts that—the colours bleed, crack, decay. They point not to mastery, but to material histories: What labour, what erasure, what soil made that wall?

Can framing move from composition to entanglement?

There’s an underlying spatial logic at play with this series: verticality, symmetry, control. Many of my frames adopt architectural regularity—grids within grids. This very compositional order echos the colonial order—not by inheritance, but by intent.

These images are intended to seduce the viewer. But what histories made those seductive pigments possible? Cochineal, indigo, lime-wash are all deeply colonial substances, freighted with global circuits of violence and extraction. Each pigment is a material archive—a colour that remembers. Their histories reveal the commodification of the natural world via colonial trade routes; the discipline of vision through aesthetics of power; the racialization of labour, where certain bodies were made to work, produce, and vanish behind the hues they extracted. To photograph pigment is to touch empire, even if obliquely.

Can beauty be a site of responsibility, not just reverence?