Stripping away text reveals cultural assumptions about white women

The images that comprise Hank Willis Thomas’ exhibit, Unbranded: A Century of White Women, 1915-2015, piece together a complex narrative of their subject’s story through the past 100 years: increasing autonomy and idealized beauty set in opposition to racialized otherness.
Further complicating the story, a counter-narrative of backlash periodically pushes against the story of liberation, with images that suggest efforts to dominate and control women, subjugate them as objects of male