"Seeing about Race" offers a series of interwoven interviews in which viewers describe their reactions to and answer questions about individual photographs in the Mirror of Race project. Interviewees are encouraged to interpret the images and to construct stories about their meaning.
The stories they tell serve as a mirror to reflect back to themselves their thoughts and feelings about the "other," both historically and now, as they experience the other today. How do we understand and change our feelings regarding the other in our history, in our private lives, and in our community?
Before we can overcome the divisions engendered by the perception of difference, we have to understand and accept how we make sense of how we perceive others and, at the same time, ourselves.
Further videos will include a number of interviews, discussions, and performance pieces that begin as meditations on specific images and that evolve to challenge the audience to reflect upon its own ways of seeing and interpreting the other. Eventually, we plan to have video commentary on each of the images in the online exhibition, as well as a compilation of interviews in "Seeing about Race" as a unitary film.
Derek Burrows, August 2009
