Hank Willis Thomas will speak about his most significant body of work B®ANDED and Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America. Thomas focuses on photography and how it has distorted Black American culture, and fuelled the corporate propagation of a false utopia.
Thomas’ work explores the genesis of the still image in the creation of cultural identity. Advertising and branding has disconnected the public from cultural reality and has produced a new visual vocabulary that defines our relationship to objects. Perhaps the concept that “the medium is the message” has never been better exemplified than in how advertising and branding have shaped issues of race, class and culture.