Photography, Self-Image, and the Ongoing Re-Creation of Identity
How Do We Inhabit the Histories We Inherit?
When Donna Haraway asks, “how do we inhabit the histories we inherit?” she’s pointing toward the ways our personal and collective pasts shape who we are and how we see ourselves and others. This doesn’t just mean remembering history — it means living with its influences, contradictions, silences, and stories in every moment of identity and perception.
Photography is one of the central forms through which many of us experience history today. It doesn’t just show what something looked like; it carries layers of social meaning, cultural memory, and personal narratives. Photographs are traces — they are records of events, people, places — but their meanings aren’t fixed. They are shaped by who made them, who views them, and what histories surround them.
The photographic image has a unique relationship with time. Philosophers like Roland Barthes have noted that a photograph doesn’t just show what is — it shows what was, which means every photo inherently contains a sense of history and presence that is already slipping away. This ties the act of looking at a photograph to the experience of memory itself, making the photograph a portal between past and present.
To inhabit the histories we inherit is, in part, to engage with images that have shaped our sense of self and culture. Family photos, archival portraits, public images of ancestors and community figures — all of these are part of how visual history enters our consciousness. But this inheritance isn’t neutral. What has been photographed, collected, and preserved reflects power structures, cultural priorities, and the very biases of history itself.
Photography doesn’t just reflect reality; it also frames it. Images carry the social codes of their time — the contexts of colonialism, patriarchy, race, class, and gender — and these codes influence how people see themselves and others. The taken-for-granted “normal” image of a body, a face, an identity is often a product of histories that have repeatedly been visualized and reinforced.
But here’s where creative photographic practice becomes especially powerful: in the act of making images, we aren’t just recording a self — we are participating in the ongoing construction of self-image. When a photographer collaborates with a subject, those images become part of how that person sees themselves, and how they want to be seen by others. In this way, photography becomes both a reflective and a projective space: a place where inherited histories meet present-moment identity creation.
This practice resembles what scholars describe as visual autoethnography, where creators use images to explore and express personal experience while connecting to larger cultural narratives. In other words, through self-portraiture and intentional image making, people rewrite and reframe the histories that shape them, rather than simply inherit them passively.
Some contemporary artists do exactly this. For example, Lebohang Kganye stages and re-photographs her mother’s old images, placing her present self in dialogue with her family’s past to negotiate memory, loss, and continuity. By merging past and present, these works show how photographic practice can let inherited history become part of a living, evolving identity.
Thus, inhabiting inherited histories through photography isn’t passive. It is an active dialogue — a negotiation between what was recorded before and what we choose to express now. It acknowledges that photographs are not neutral windows onto truth, but interpretive acts shaped by cultural meaning, personal intention, and viewer context.
Every portrait, every self-image, every edited visual narrative participates in this ongoing conversation between past and present. In this sense, to inhabit history through photography is to participate in reshaping it — to acknowledge what we have received, and to add ourselves back into the story.
Explore this subject further by clicking here to read on Self-Portrait Photography!
Written by Shamin Z. on April 05, 2026