Conclusion

Two figures appear in a diptych, both highlighting the space between what was and what could have been. Photographer Dawoud Bey’s Birmingham Project features an African American adult and a child side by side in a photograph. The child represents the age of one of the four girls murdered in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. The adult represents the age the murdered girl would be had she survived. There is much imagistic control exhibited in the series. Each subject sits calmly, facing the viewer and marking the space of complicity—national, racial—that haunts the memory of the event. Four girls, aged eleven to fourteen, dead on a warm September morning. A series of black-and-white photographs, intimate in their construction, meditative in their presentation, and unyielding in their mission. On this subject, bell hooks writes, “Spaces of agency exist for black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see.”1 Noting the importance of the returned gaze, hooks is determined to locate the spaces of resistant looking that animate black subjectivities. What she calls an oppositional gaze allows those caught in a vortex of violent imagery a place of redress and response.

“The four girls are a kind of mystic and abstract presence,” Bey states in an interview. “I knew that I wanted to make work that gave them a more tangible, palpable presence.”2 This “more tangible palpable presence” allows for viewers to envelop a spatial realm without restricting the delicate work of healing from racial violence. The photographs offer a sliver of space, represented by the white line separating the two images in the diptych, where it is possible to bring black childhood and adulthood together without harm. But the nation, like the rest of the world, does not seem to be ready to imagine blackness outside of violence. Bey seeks to engender a visual enclosure that allows for recognition and indictment to coexist. The space between the two subjects is the burden of history and memory that should have been able to hold Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair within it. Instead, viewers are asked to grapple with their absence and the nation’s resistance to address domestic terrorism when the terror is white supremacist in nature.

As a student in high school, Jacquie Jones came across the lynching photograph from Indiana discussed in chapter 1. “I remember how long, how intently I looked at that photograph,” she writes. The image was, according to Jones, “reproduced carelessly . . . added as an afterthought to whatever the text was, no doubt . . . something about it was so matter of fact.”3 The choice to show black subjects in various states of injury and death is done both carelessly and with the full force of intention. Little is thought of what this exposure does to black viewers, who are not assumed to be embodied in the term viewer.4 Courtney R. Baker writes, “Considering the black body as a seeing body rather than a body to be seen is itself a significant move.”5 Jones is asked to process both the “seeing body” and the “body to be seen” in one visual exchange.

How do you evade capture when the containing apparatus is a photograph? Michael S. Harper tussles with this question in a series of poetic offerings I refer to as his darkroom poems. The suite of poems was first published in his 1972 collection Song: I Want a Witness. Beginning with “The Negatives,” Harper engenders a black enclosure that he likens to a womb—a dark space of creation imbued with its own logic of protection where black lives can be imagined as matter.6 In his attempt to mute the violence of photography’s repetitive relationship to antiblackness, Harper’s poems emphasize the violence inherent in any interaction with the external world, where white supremacy orients the way people are able to be seen. To hold blackness in its precise measure and to enclose it with care guarantees little. It is the effort, then, to render black subjectivity in all of its varied complexity that makes the gestural endeavor worthy of the pursuit. And yet, there is always the possibility that this will not ever be enough.

Although not exclusively its domain, the United States has a stranglehold on media images disseminated across the world. In this way, the United States structures the temperament of investment far beyond its borders. And because the nation’s history is intertwined with black enslavement, indigenous slaughter and removal, theft and unacknowledged violence, the land is haunted and so are its people. Images manage the visuality of order where before only chaos thrived. Photographs reinforce a national “we” that never was and never will be. Out of this chaos, black photographers and image makers worked to offer the viewer evidence of range of visual possibilities embodied by members of the black diaspora.

The movement from displaying graphic death on photographic film to current video presentations has been facilitated by the advent of digital imaging technologies and social media. It is the next stage of the violent evolutionary tactics meted out against black subjects. Now, instead of a still image contained and held within a frame, we have moving images, films that provide corporeal presence and then cause viewers to witness their deaths. Snuff films, though they are rarely called by that name. And it is the long history of imagistic disregard that gives these death videos their point of origin. The desire to see black people on the precipice of death is something we should name and unpack. At its center is the understanding, created over time and with violent precision, that black life is so devoid of value that it need not be held with any regard. But regard is held; and so is the murderous application of a look. A practice of racial sociopathy where the understanding, implicit in the display of dying black subjects, is that this is the arena of belonging to which we are relegated. From Laquan McDonald and Eric Garner to Philando Castille and George Floyd, there is a ready audience eager to watch us die.

This very evening, as I write this conclusion, Memphis police will release bodycam footage of Tyre Nichols, a twenty-nine-year-old black man beaten to death by five black police officers. White supremacy, as we know, has no race. “Blacks know something about black cops,” James Baldwin writes in The Devil Finds Work. “They know how much the black cop has to prove, and how limited are his means of proving it.”7 Having seen the video, Nichols’s family released their own images to represent their loved one. In a mixture of still images and video clips, we see Nichols doing what he loves—skateboarding—gliding on and off railings and ledges, his body lanky and long. His moves are joyful and effortless. The release of the officers’ bodycam footage, a snuff film with a 6:00 p.m. EST scheduling time, was then discussed heavily on social media, with the understanding that black people would yet again be traumatized without recourse.

Elizabeth Alexander’s vital question about the visuality of suffering black folks have to navigate is instrumental. “Can you be black and look at this?” is an insular question posed to the people most affected by repeated viewings of antiblack violence. “Black bodies in pain for public consumption,” Alexander writes, “have been an American national spectacle for centuries.”8 Not just national, but global—a global spectacle that takes black pain and black death as its point of departure. The “paranoid color wheel” that James Baldwin articulates is the gleaming void of meaning that encircles black being.9 Navigating this requires vigilance, patience, fortitude, and mercy. Because, like most antiblack structures of order, this too must be seen through the spectacle of race. Black subjects gather within an externally imposed visual forfeiture of worth rendered photographically. Instead of acquiescing to the dispossession on offer, alternate sites of retrieval are deployed by the collective, with the understanding that even this might not work.

Sandra Brewster’s 2017 series It’s All a Blur (or Blur) features photographic portraits in motion, parsing out the space between stillness and movement. Taken over a series of years, Brewster’s photographs give the viewer a way to temper the harm of a one-sided gaze. Her subjects are photographed while in motion, moving their heads from side to side. The result is a print blurred with painterly figuration within abstraction. The subject’s face is faded out, thickening the texture of the image. This is a present haunting—figures there and also not there. Blackness bathed in the protective submersion of anonymity. Harper continues:

She shades the prints bathed
in what iron water there is,
artesian iron spring water;
pictures of wintergreen
blur in darkness,
the second hand stops.10

The “second hand stops” in a swirl of recognition that the image is beyond the fixations of time.

On a saturated blue archival print Carrie Mae Weems offers the viewer one way to blur in darkness and evade the fixed delineation of photographic antiblackness. Part of her 2016 series The Usual Suspects, Weems casts a shadowed figure / a figure as shadow into the visual field. Accompanied by quantitative death data that enters the public sphere through the media, Weems focuses instead on black life—individual, collective—that undergirds the violences experienced. Weems aims to hold fast to the humanity of black subjects killed violently and often publicly, thus not afforded such measure. Each archival print serves as a reminder—that there is someone in the image—somebody in the frame. That they are remembered. Regarded. Loved.

Temporality is a fixation that blackness cannot abide. Photography aids and abets, but this is not the whole story. We blur in darkness where legibility is the command. But our existence, such that it is, is a phenomenon that seeps through the frame of the photograph to reveal the world beyond it. A world of patient looking that envelops the subject with the determined patience of the beloved who would recognize your body from a silhouette presented to them in low light. A look that reminds you that you “will not die here.” We will not die here, in the two-dimensional space of disregard that is deployed under the moniker of evidence. We will continue to exceed the frame of the photograph so that it will not be the only way to define us. We will have beauty without terror and without violence. And we will have justice, “for the living and the dead,” as Toni Morrison assures us.11 Everything else is detritus.

Us

It was the first time I got choked up during a presentation, and the last time I have shown graphic images of black death while giving a talk. While I had quietly agreed to manage the psychic toll of this project for myself, I had not thought enough about the book’s presence as a traumatizing force that other black people would have to guard themselves against. To evade, like a series of triggers with no warnings or a public showing of Gone with the Wind that nobody told you would be playing at your favorite theater. I was a visiting Martin Luther King fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 2017–2018 academic year, and this was my project presentation talk. These talks are public and are often attended by faculty and staff at the institution. This talk was the first time I was presenting work on photography and antiblackness to an audience that was more than 50 percent black. And there I was, being asked a question that was so devastating in its perplexing simplicity that I was instantly overcome with emotion. “Why do they hate us so much?” was the woman’s question. I can only remember responding, “I don’t know.” And I still don’t. What I do know is that pleasure is derived for some just by having a proximity to viewing black people in pain. And photographs of black suffering proliferate so that this can be done with little recourse for the victims of such violence.

In her poem “photograph,” Lucille Clifton lingers lovingly over an image of her grandsons “spinning in their joy” while the poet, their grandmother, registers a prayer that is also a lamentation:

universe
keep them turning turning
black blurs against the window
of the world
for they are beautiful
and there is trouble coming
round and round and round12

The speaker speaks of not only an inner vision deepened by racial intuition, but “trouble coming” that she can hear or touch, and an understanding of the world shaped by the meaning making of blackness as fungibility. Yet in her mind’s eye, there is the photograph: grandsons who are safe and free, children at play, “black blurs” that she wants to hold to that moment, that freedom, in the hopes that this image is normalized over the proliferation of photographs marked as documentary but aggressively participating in aestheticizing black death. We have many examples of the devastating immediacy that attends black engagements with public space. This poem provides the possibility of containing this engagement, this effort to use dark space in a more meaningful way.

I think about that day at MIT a lot. I think about the way my tunnel vision exposed me to the fallacies embedded in the project. I think of the woman who posed a question within a wail. I think of my inability to give her an answer that made any sense. “For from our original expectations of increased intimacy and broader knowledge,” Toni Morrison writes, “media presentations deploy images and language that narrow our view of what humans look like (or ought to look like) and what in fact we are like.”13 This is still the case, particularly when photography deepens a two-dimensional relationship with the aftermath of slavery and Western imperialist violences framed within. And black subjects fight for the kind of photographic redemption song worthy of our complex humanity, our complex history. Harper writes,

She shakes the developing tank
as a uterus
mixing developer
to the negatives
where no light appears . . .
a simple enlarger,
a bulb with a shade,
images born through her lens
packed on the contact sheet;
fatted negatives under thick
condenser glass,
prints from her uterus,
cramps from her developing tank.14

We live in the exposure to light that corrupts our relationship to the external world. We live with the knowledge of our imagistic dispossession.

And yet, this is not the end of our story. We are not remanded to the strictures of a singular photographic display. Exceeding the frame of capture is one way we navigate the world of the visual when that world is eager to violently include us. In this way, we alter the temporalities of containment that disallow our complex humanity. Our complex vision. We are so much more than the way we are imagined by others. My hope is that we continue to gravitate toward representations that reflect our interior lives while leaving room for the exigencies of movement, stillness, and time.