Negatives, 2026

5 photographs, pigment ink print on Dibond

Mangalanayagam’s staged portraits of women with varying skin colours and appearances represent figures often absent from dominant imaginings of Sweden’s colonial history. Is our understanding of history affected by how we visualise the people it includes?

During the Swedish period on Saint Barthélemy, there were three different sets of laws for different groups of people: one for white people, one for ‘free Blacks’ and one for enslaved people. A ‘free Black’ person who could not prove their freedom risked being resold as a slave. Although whiteness as a category was important and highly prized in colonial society, people have often been categorised but not described in the archives. The category ‘free Blacks’ also included people with light skin.

Blond hair and blue eyes are often associated with notions of ethnic Swedishness. In visual culture, people with these features can mistakenly be assumed not to have mixed origins. In a society where whiteness occupies a dominant position, it is usually more advantageous to be light-skinned, to be perceived as white, and to have access to the benefits this brings. Choosing to pass for white can be viewed negatively, as a way of not standing up for those who cannot – or do not want to – pass. However, in a society such as Saint Barthélemy where people were treated very differently by the law, it is not difficult to understand that those who had the opportunity to pass for white chose to do so. To what extent does whiteness continue to shape Swedish society today?