If we look closely, photographs often reveal a more complicated story than first meets the eye. In the fall 2021 semester, students in the social work course “Power, Privilege, and Oppression” curated More Than You Notice: Photographic Reflections of Humanity and Socialization as part of a final project in which they applied course concepts to photographs from the Tang collection. Students distinguished factors such as race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender, sexual orientation, and national origin, considered these various aspects of identity, interrogated points of inequality, and examined multicultural and intersectional strategies to respond to the works.
More Than You Notice presents varied representations of the ways in which systems of power, privilege, and oppression may be challenged or upheld. It invites visitors to consider, explore, and discuss multiple and complex ways in which generations of communities, historically and today, experience these systems as a part of socialization in the United States. It asks: what more is there to see?