Framing Displacement, Forcing Perspective: Black Visual Geographies and the Crisis of Homelessness in Oakland

ABSTRACT

While Black and visual geographies have examined the image's racial and spatial power, more work is needed to analyze how racial frames of view become spatially embedded. This paper advances such a practice by analyzing news images of homelessness in Oakland. Methodologically, I analyze images for photographic techniques of depth of field, scale, color, and composition and how they construct subjects, race, and space. Empirically, I find that these images present homelessness as a (Black) problem to be solved in an otherwise unproblematic white visual order by: (1) rendering homeless people faceless yet over‐identified by their blackness; (2) visually portraying encampments as disruptive to logics of orderliness, market logics, and racial harmony; and (3) visually constructing encampments as out‐of‐place domestic spaces against norms of private social reproduction. I argue that these visual‐spatial strategies further a forced perspective that communicates an artificial sense of white spatial normativity and inevitable Black non‐belonging.