The Viewer

Moments of absence punctuate the photographic landscape of the Rwandan genocide, as if nothing newsworthy is taking place. Dailies like the New York Times provide sporadic reports like flashing lights warning others of danger. Othering is a large part of the point. The trace of empire, interethnic conflicts, and global abandonment are offered up through the apparatus of the visual. Rwanda is the point of no return. The deep end of an imagistic ocean that meets no horizon.

There are one million stories for every photograph we have not seen. Narratives told and retold by those witnesses; the victims and perpetrators, their family members and friends. In the documentary archive of photographic images, though, corpses. Bones. Partial skeletons and human remains. Viewers sift through what is left of the dead and parse out what is important about the act. Survivors fall outside of the purview of the imaginable.

Survivors. Plural noun. Those who are left behind. Alfredo Jaar’s book Let There Be Light: The Rwanda Project 1994–1998 features as its cover image two children, arms locked in a comforting embrace, their backs turned away from us. There is, in the photograph, the remnant of a secret between them, one which is unavailable to the viewer, and to the naked eye. They are, in the words of Ben Okri, “the best things . . . growing in secret.”1 And yet this secret, both between them and within them, is there: available, but also obscured. The photograph offers a sliver of information: a slight vein extends from one hand to the forearm, and an eyelash points the viewer in the direction of one child’s gaze—downcast, but only slightly. We are refused full entry into the frame of the photograph, which somehow feels correct. What is it that we believe it is our right to see here? Moreover, what will we do with the body once we possess it in this way? In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, what is the role of the witness, and what is the viewer’s responsibility? For those of us engaged as it is, in the demanding work of remembering the dead, how do we imagine the visualization of healing that is still taking place?

Of his elegant artistic work, Jaar has said, “There must be another way to talk about violence without recurring to violence”—and this is where I want to begin this chapter, by considering the possibilities engendered by refusing to capitulate to spectacles of violence that have held black people in a state of rigid dehumanization. Jaar seems intent on retaining some level of anonymity for his subjects.2 They are nearly silhouettes against the framework of imagistic offering. In other photographs from the same series, they hold each other more closely—so tightly that no light gets through as they lean into each other, keeping the rest of the world at bay. The visual harmony intimated by these photographs obscures the gathering, which is rendered out of focus and beyond the viewer’s line of sight. “The photograph is laborious,” Roland Barthes reminds us, “only when it fakes.”3 Jaar uses Let There Be Light instead to indict the global community’s failure to respond to the genocide in real time, before nearly a million people lost their lives. That is the thing to see that is not visible, but the image is heavy with that
absence.

According to Jae Emerling, “Jaar explains the pace of the work as an attempt to alter the viewers’ habits who move from work to work, image to image far too quickly. The slowness of the text is deliberately frustrating and viewers grow impatient,” but, Emerling argues, “it is an aesthetic experience Jaar constructs, one that is about temporality, memory, attentiveness, an ethical encounter with apprehension.”4 Jaar’s pacing constitutes a practice of approach for the viewer in which they can bring their patience, their attentiveness, and their apprehension with them to the series.

Thus far I have attempted to find a way to attend to the black enclosures that photography engenders, the sliver of space through which there is a rendering of humanity that necessitates vigilant looking on the viewer’s part. I’m interested in the limits of empathy, particularly when black subjects are presented as tangential to the centrality of their photographic presence. Examining photographic archives from 1994 has repeatedly brought me back to artistic productions that attempt to retrieve black subjectivity from the eyes of others. In my perusal of the New York Times, Rwanda looms large as absent presence. As the vast majority of images from this region are aftermath photos, it is difficult to make survivors legible to the viewer, nor does the newspaper try.

How might we reconcile the current documentary project with the presence of blackness as fungibility that normalizes visual imagery? I am interested in the space of possibility that mourning facilitates, though black people are often left on the periphery of this possibility. What is it about blackness in the public imaginary that has repeatedly aligned it with suffering? How have artists attempted to illuminate the matter of black precarity? Does it register?

Jaar seems most attuned to the permutations of subjectivity when violence is also central to the production of the image. Let There Be Light is punctuated by the absence of news media coverage of the Rwandan genocide by international news organizations, making hypervisible the racial indifference on display. The world watched or it didn’t, but there would be no (US, Belgian, French, or British) intervention in Rwanda.5 There would be only photographs of cadavers, the thumbprint of empire, and a marked disinterest in survivors who are black.

The Eye in I

Rwanda occupies a space not of temporal collapse but of temporal stasis, where the genocide both precedes history and then defines it. In a claustrophobic apparatus of ocular containment, the photographic archive yields no center, no symbolic image to set and mark meaning. In a spectacular outgrowth of the coalescence of antiblackness in the global imagination, Rwanda stands in for the failed black state. Tasked with ensuring the safety and the forward progression of its own sovereignty, it could not. All else is data, that acquisition of the legible regard that dictates nominal investment. “If Rwanda was the genocide that happened,” Mahmood Mamdani writes, “then South Africa was the genocide that didn’t.”6 It is as if the gathered tensions of the two nations is funneled into Rwanda’s civil war and genocide. “The genocide that happened” did so in the light of day, and with the auditory assist of radio programs that fomented the acceleration of the violence.7

As the country embodying the relationship between genocide, hypervisibility, and global indifference, Rwanda occupies an unwieldy place in the imperial imaginary. From its position as a protectorate under the German empire in the late nineteenth century to the battle over its natural resources with Belgium, the tiny nation in central Africa became illustrative of the failure of black self-governance when civil war erupted in April 1994 and nearly a million Rwandans (mostly Tutsis) were slaughtered over one hundred days. Coverage of the genocide asks the viewer to negotiate a terrain of not seeing, instead inviting the practiced relationship with antiblackness to be their guide. Regardless of the efforts to refute this, engaging Rwanda as the ultimate site of death (but with none of the gravity reserved for Holocaust death camp sites) is how viewers perform visual indifference. History makes it easy if your investment is encapsulated in the facade of popular media as a space of information. The details of ongoing events are produced, but not much else, and this in and of itself is a large part of the problem.

First Name Unknown

One photograph illustrates this. James Natchwey’s image Rwanda is a profile of Nyabimana, whom the AP reports as having a “first name unknown.” A twenty-six-year-old man presents the right side of his face for inspection; there are four long machete scars visible. The cuts start at his scalp, and the deepest one extends from the side of his (open) mouth. Part of his right ear has been clipped off. Natchwey isolates a moment of exposure, the war, its scars, and the individual lives most affected. Nyambimana has his left hand on his neck, a gesture at once comforting and illustrative of the “evidentiary” quest of documentary photography. He is the evidence of harm that has been done. He is the witness—the survivor.

In the photograph, though, he is something else. A victim with an absent perpetrator. A last name with an “unknown” first. This fragmented and incomplete relationship to Rwandan history is a lack of attention to detail that symbolically structures the genocide so that it exists within and beyond time. Through a contemporary navigation around the cultural memory of the genocide, viewers can skim around and through the imperial archive of subjection that arrives here at a single image of one person and the visualized effects of trauma on the body. The photograph won Natchwey the 1995 World Press Photo of the Year prize, and its perpetual duplication deepened the viewer’s relationship with the space of temporal collapse that deserves further investigation. “As a symbolic operation,” Achille Mbembe writes, “representation does not necessarily lead to the possibility of mutual recognition. First, in the consciousness of the representing subject, the represented subject always runs the risk of being transformed into an object or a plaything. By allowing himself the capacity to be represented, he denies himself the capacity to create himself, both for himself and for the world, a self-image.”8 Because of a perceived and enforced absence of sovereignty, the “capacity to be represented” in the few avenues for representation available might appear better than nothing at all. This could only be true if the disciplined expectation of visual presence rendered black were not already such an embedded practice.

In her study of the Vietnam war in photographic memory, Thy Phu considers the swath of imagery making its way through North American media sites that foster the “blinders imposed by abiding assumptions about objectivity as a measure of journalistic truth.”9 Further, when images produced and disseminated fail to adhere to the narrow confines of racial representation, it will not gain traction. Instead, invested viewers will have to do a great deal of work in order to see alternate images representing the same event.

Searching for Pulitzer Prize–winning photographs from the past thirty years is like examining a wound that refuses to heal. Dozens of marked and marginalized people occupy visual space expressly for them to be othered further. In 1995, the Pulitzer went to a group of images from Rwanda taken by Associated Press photographers. Among the many corpses displayed with distanced vigilance by these photographers was another that managed to negotiate intimacy with death as a condition of (im)possibility for black subjectivity. A dead Rwandan child foregrounds the image—maybe nine or ten years in age—at a refugee camp outside Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The image’s background is the refugee camp, as we are privy to scores of refugees, their belongings in bags, suitcases, and other makeshift fabric carriers strong enough to hold a few items. Eight of the refugees are returning the gaze. Every one of those gazes is devastating in its disapproval, its silent judgement.10 Aside from the ease with which dead black children are photographed and disregarded, there is the disregard of the living—just a few feet back in the image—that is most prominent. The idea, I believe, is that the worst of the devastation of war is over, and now the slow march toward recovery can begin. This is a mandate, not a question, and it has at its center the inability to fathom a world of recovery that is tethered to colonial atonement. Instead, an insular black perpetrator/victim binary emerges and sustains itself through a repeated inculcation of the dead who are also living expressly for the immediacy of corporeal destruction.

How We See What We See

Beneath the facade of public information and access, dead black bodies appear. They appear as fodder, as illustration, and as a visual means to an end. They rarely appear to impart knowledge respectfully. Because “antiblackness is the weather,” black subjects are exposed to the elements with no reprieve. In a consolidating archive of dead bodies as news leads, black death, at the end of the twentieth century, is the default register. From a post–World War II news media perspective, there is an evolutionary arc, which is graphically positioned at or near the moment of violent death (these are not photographs of people peacefully appearing to be asleep). These acts of aggressive photographic capture correspond with a quantitative metric that leans heavily against black lives mattering outside the data of blackness doubling down on death. Much of this is about the mechanism of engagement—how we see what we see—and the administrative choice makers who ultimately decide who is consumed in the visual arena. These choice makers—newspaper and magazine editors, curators, and the like—are primarily white and male, having had the remarkable privilege of orienting the eyes of others toward the repetition of a theme: the problem of black bodies in time—as living, autonomous beings who have agency, purpose, desires, and futures. The photographic production we have been offered as viewers says otherwise. Black destruction, obliteration, capture, and imminent death is the line on the horizon that seems to keep white supremacy from seeing its reflection in the water. White supremacy necessitates a visual component, and if it will not look within, then it must look without. It must fix its gaze in the direction of an apt racial object, expansive enough to elicit interest, disgust, desire, or indifference. Rwanda offers all of these possibilities in a contained months-long time bubble that gave the world an example of failed governance on a devastatingly murderous scale.

But first, there is the absence of imagery. Reports from the region begin with incomplete information—a plane crash. “Hundreds feared dead” in the chaotic aftermath of the plane crash, and a scattering of more uncorroborated information. No photographs. There are more reports, then, sporadic and unsubstantiated. This much is known: On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana and President Ntaryamira were killed along with ten other passengers and crew members when their aircraft was shot down as it prepared to land in Kigali. Both Habyarimana and Ntaryamira were Hutu. Then the reports came streaming in of the killings taking place all over the country, by citizens against other citizens. No photographs. More reports by UN peacekeepers, clergy, witnesses on the ground. Rwanda becomes a nation of indiscriminate death. There is no before or after to contend with, just the unrelenting power of now. As Susan Sontag reminds us, “To catch a death actually happening and embalm it for all time is something only cameras can do.” Having an absence of gruesome moment-of-death photos did not ensure that Rwanda would evade photographic capture. It just took more time.

Now

From 1894 to 1918, present-day Rwanda was part of German East Africa along with Burundi. After World War I and under the Treaty of Versailles, Rwanda came under the administrative control of Belgium. Decades of theft, undermining, and ethnic control by Belgium positioned the ethnic minority Tutsis as the preferred group in the hierarchy of power in Rwanda. “The racialization of the Tutsi/Hutu was not simply an intellectual construct,” Mamdani writes. “More to the point, racialization was also an institutional construct. Racial ideology was embedded in institutions, which in turn undergirded racial privilege and reproduced racial ideology.”11 With tensions between the Hutus and Tutsis fraught, Belgium exacerbated those tensions by declaring that the Tutsis were innately better than Hutus and therefore entitled to have power and resources kept from Hutus. Mamdani continues: “The idea that the Tutsi were superior because they came from elsewhere and that the difference between them and the local population was a racial difference, was an idea of colonial origin . . . shared by rival colonists, Belgians, Germans, English, all of whom were convinced that wherever in Africa there was evidence of organized state life, there the ruling groups must have come from elsewhere.”12 By the time the murders began in April, reports treated the country as a double enclosure of self-destruction, as if there were no external European interference shaping political life and death in Rwanda. Photography’s absent presence, then, was an elongation of imperial infraction that framed responses to the genocide in real time.

According to Edgar Roskis, in his essay “A Genocide without Images: White Film Noirs,” it was not April, May, or June that gave the larger public a full sense of what was happening during the genocide, but later, “between 14 and 20 July,” when “picture-chasers from all over the globe, from the most timid to the boldest, the most sensitive to the most cynical, poured into the area.”13 The area they poured into was Goma, in present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, and they did so when most of the killing in Rwanda had already occurred. The dead and dying were everywhere, and now photographs were everywhere as well. Contextualizing what had taken place in the one hundred days since the April 6, 1994, political assassination of Habyarimana and Ntaryamira, what looms is the deadly assist of news media reports that graphically produced a visual narrative of sovereign chaos rendered through aftermath photographs.

In these aftermath photos, viewers can see how these deaths are framed through the lens of the genocide. Within this, we have the global enforcement of antiblackness that buttresses the space between indifference and fungibility. How do we see what we see? Well, this primarily concerns whose job it is to bring this information to a larger public and why they do so in very restricted racial avenues of engagement. Said plainly, the people in control of a larger apparatus of news media dissemination do not look like the people who are positioned as dead on the page or the photograph or the video feed.14

In her study of documentary photographs under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, Ángeles Donoso Macaya analyzes the multivalent apparatus of representation that was more fluid and capacious than the narrow field of vision I examine in this book. For Donoso Macaya, then, “the practices that different critical texts commented on did not establish a mechanical or illustrative association between photography and reality but the concept of photography as a document and trace became a significant theoretical notion to consider them.”15 Further, as Donoso Macaya suggests, “photographs that circulate in the public sphere, such as news photographs, produce their audiences or spectators.”16 The intersection of photography and antiblackness corrupts the malleability necessary to give black subjects the ability to access three-dimensional existence. This is especially the case when there is any devastation taking place—because news media outlets move with the speed of a crisis event, to place dead black bodies in the center of a frame already constructed with them in mind. “What concerns me here,” Saidiya Hartman contends, “is the spectacular nature of black suffering and, conversely, the dissimulation of suffering through spectacle.”17 In a pattern of behavior that has become its own imagistic raison d’etre, the right to expose, highlight, enforce, violate, and demean is preserved as the right to inform, with no negative implications articulated. “Photography is commonly regarded as an instrument for knowing things,” Sontag tells us, for “cameras did not simply make it possible to apprehend more by seeing . . . they change seeing itself by fostering the idea of seeing for seeing’s sake.”18 In a black diasporic conundrum of the ocular, black subjects must navigate representation through the destructive apparatus of too many images where they are imagined and captured without full agency. We have seen and continue to see these images circulating in public. And our current ability to record some of these scenes of violent subjection on camera phones has opened up new venues for visualizing black death. These are snuff films, for viewers are watching the final moments of someone’s life. Taken as evidence or proof of murder, their existence on social media or the evening news is one more avenue where black life is curtailed within the public arena, as white viewers have a high tolerance for black death that they do not seem to possess when graphic images of white death are presented to them.

Aftermaths as Aesthetic Production

Donatella Lorch reports on the Rwandan refugees who “crossed the border into Tanzania by the thousands” to flee the civil war taking place back home. The date of the report on the refugees is May 2, 1994, nearly a month after the slaughter began. Between April and July, reports trickled through, and a fuller exploration of the war and the genocide emerged (slowly). Mamdani writes: “Two trends gathered over time. One accelerated the element of spontaneity, the other reinforced organization. The spread of massacres gave free reign to forces of banditry and pillage. As banditry and pillage grew, so did random killings. Yet, while there were reports of the poor attacking the well-off, the killings remained directed in the main at those identified as the political enemy, not the class enemy.”19

Decisions made in the flash of a newsroom meeting clash with the relative swiftness that people in power in these mostly white spaces allocate to black people generally, and black people in crisis specifically. Of this, black subjects will be the exception to every known rule about the ethics of media reporting and respect for the dead. Children will be shown, the names of the dead will not be verified, the newly dead and open-faced corpses will appear with abandon and disregard, and the desires of family members will be ignored. These decisions will place black people outside the circle of consideration and inside a tomb of disregard. This will be done without fanfare or footnote by those who look exactly like those who have been making those decisions for the past one hundred years. The same people who routinely pause when presented with a graphic image of white death. As if this is an oxymoron from which there is no return.

Sempervivum

I started this project by thinking through the multiple definitions of the term sempervivum in the available linguistic archive. I wanted something deployable when considering white supremacy’s capacity to set death against others and away from itself. Lynching photography has this capacity—to cement the idea of black death against the perpetuity of white life. It consolidates anonymous whiteness in crowds of onlookers whose regard is a mixture of joy, gravity, righteousness, and wonder. According to Autumn Marie Womack, “By the turn of the twentieth century as the number of lynchings peaked, the public’s interminable appetite for spectacular displays of black suffering was sated by an onslaught of lynching photographs.” Elizabeth R. Baer uses the term genocidal gaze in her study of Germany’s colonizing of present-day Namibia. She writes, “When the imperial gaze, prompted by racist hierarchy or by religious or ideological beliefs that engender a confidence in one’s superiority, evolves into a consideration of the gazed upon as inconvenient, as no longer deserving to live, the gaze can become deadly.” Hiding behind the premise of objective truth, documentary photographs traffic in the photographic destiny of others, who exist in a neoliberal concept of cause and imagistic effect.

Absence marks the force of the genocide through sparse or crowded but intensely gruesome images. So much happens in real time that is unseen by the global community. Witnesses, though, have no such protection. The viewer, in the aftermath of the violence, can do further violence as they peer through the center of each photographic frame and perform a training directive, one allowed by the exigencies of the photograph. Legible mostly as gruesome aftermath corpses, living survivors were disappeared within media coverage that was a situational failure. Privileging dead bodies over living survivors, newspapers and magazines marked the country as a “heart of darkness” from which there was no return.

Future Perfect

Survivor. Noun. “One who outlives another.” Victim and perpetrator appear side by side in a photograph. They make demands of the viewer. Participatory engagement orients the eye to the center of the frame, where the appearance of a resolution is taking place. The work demanded of the viewer is an assumption wrapped in an invitation: the work of representation requires a semblance of formal allegiance. An adherence to structural codes already in existence. A convergence of sightlines. An embodied ritual of recognition.

Appearing in the New York Times Magazine in 2014, Pieter Hugo’s series “Portraits of Reconciliation” presents Rwandans placed side by side—one victim and one perpetrator—visually performing some form of national redress.20 Timed to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, the photographs offer imagery as an instrument of repair, and this is designed to visually reflect a desire for reconciliation.21 Hugo’s images present an uncomfortable corporeal proximity (one person to another) as part of a “reconciliation” that has yet to occur. As Ulrich Baer writes, “Positioning the viewer in reference to an event that resists full absorption into narrative memory changes a crucial methodological question about the status of all photographs of trauma. A constitutive question of both traditional and more recent art-historical inquiries concerns the extent to which the reading of an image might be inflected by (prior) knowledge of its historical contexts.”22 Every one of these coupling photographs is an experiment in ocular allegiance. In the context of the Rwandan genocide, they offer an “after” that mutes the potency of “before.” They suggest closure where open wounds are just beginning to heal. They produce a fragile and often illusory visual reconciliation where only a previous gesture appears. Site-specific repair unfolds where those harmed are presented to the viewer with digitally constructed specificity.

The narrative accompanying each photograph in the magazine further alienates the subject from the viewer by offering a shortened account of the genocide by a survivor while also providing equal space on the page to the perpetrator. “Thus,” writes Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “the presences and absences embodied in sources (artifacts and bodies that turn an event into fact) or archives (facts collected, thematized, and processed as documents and monuments) are neither neutral or natural. They are created.”23 In the created archive of the genocide, in its collapsed and split trajectories, the demography of those affected by the violent events is rendered as a totality, an encompassing of the months-long siege that resulted in so many dead, so many wounded.

It is word against image as the written statements from both subjects appear beneath each one of Hugo’s photographs. They vie for space on the page of the magazine. In each instance, a “survivor” coexists with a “perpetrator,” sculpting a binary division that the viewer/reader must negotiate. In the condensed statements from the subjects, we have a kind of dual task. The work of these “portraits” and their corresponding statements is the work of the aftermath of empire, even when it doesn’t appear to be the case. Christina Sharpe writes, “Living in the wake means living in and with terror in that in much of what passes for public discourse about terror we, Black people, become the carriers of terror, terror’s embodiment, and not the primary objects of terror’s multiple enactments; the ground of terror’s possibility globally.”24 Drawing a photographic binary between “the one who did it” and “the one who outlives another” is of course one way to visually simplify the deep trauma experienced by Rwandans. It also speaks to the general inability that viewers have with being asked to grapple with multidimensional aspects of black humanity. With subjects who return the gaze, tentatively, forcefully, but who also remain somewhat inaccessible, the work of the viewer is the work of this extended archive.

We know as viewers that this victim and this perpetrator are still alive. We know they are not dead. However, the deaths that hover around them—family members, friends, neighbors, coconspirators, and state officials—are more difficult to glean. This is how genocide can appear when those impacted by the violence are black and assumed to be closely linked to death. Linked in ways that make blackness and death inextricable, and undeniable.

Documentary images thus reinforce the concept—blackness and death—as the natural result of a failure of global sovereignty. The framing is visually instructive, particularly when considering the long photographic history of family portraits and the antiblack legacy they heighten. The proliferation of “family photographs” comprised of people unknown to the photographer (and mostly unnamed) is yet another instance of this exclusionary practice. This too is a kind of family photograph, one that instructs the viewer how to collapse visual constituencies into a cohesive whole. “Blackness has been central to, rather than excluded from, liberal humanism,” Zakiyyah Iman Jackson writes in Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. “The black body is an essential index for the calculation of degree of humanity and the measure of human progress.”25 I am therefore explicitly cognizant of both the engendering and ungendering of photographic practices and am interested in parsing out the particularities of these demarcations.

The Problem of “Evidence”

By the violent logic of the scopic regime, documentary photography often aids and abets the fraught terrain of the visual. The repeated demands for “evidence” that a thing happened/harm was done is suffused into disparate archives, where, despite the very evidence sought, harm is either minimized or denied. Of the group of photographs (seventeen in total) winning several AP photographers the prize for Feature Photography in 1995, there are none that offer a version of humanity that retains the same for the subjects. Instead, in a dehumanizing motif of the ocular, what is being offered and preserved is the black subject as object. Bakirathi Mani writes, “I am convinced more than ever that the accumulation of visual objects, photographic and otherwise, cannot contravene the logic of racialization by the neo-liberal state.”26 Further, in the case of Rwanda and news media outlets, the accumulation of dead and decaying bodies coupled with the absence of living subjects led to mortevivum’s enveloped insistence. For the viewer, this means their role, circumscribed and curtailed, is reduced to scanning with futility, for there is everything and nothing at all to see. If, as Dionne Brand asserts, “cartography is description, not journey,” what of the global traffic in site-specific demarcations of the other?27 How does photography provide a visual assist, and what are some of the ways of not seeing or refusing to see? Ariella Azoulay writes: “Imagine photographers not taking new photographs of imperial disaster, not submitting news to media corporations predicated on this assumption, not showing up at photo opportunities of statesmen visiting conflict zones for which they should have been accountable, not giving their permission to use their photographs unless photographed persons have negotiated their meaning and their rights to these photographs?”28 To this I add, imagine a visual universe where to see black subjects was not to envision impending destruction or perpetual destruction. “For the dominant media by no means drowns us in a torrent of images,” Jacques Ranciere suggests, “testifying to massacres, massive population transfers and the other horrors that go to make up our planet’s present. Quite the reverse,” he states, “they reduced their number, taking good care to select and order them.”29 For the most part, this is true. For black subjects, there is this slippage between a lack of care and excessive use. There is no reduction in the proliferation of images, almost as if there is a collective understanding concerning the place of blackness in the world of images.

Embedded in the rush to capture images of violence, devastation, and death, photographic subjects go partially or fully unnamed, as if the objective of the image is to mute any consideration of the subject in the image. In an agreed-upon exchange of disregard, viewers are allowed to let their gaze slide over a group of corpses registering as black and attribute swift death and perpetual destruction on sight. And in this visual grift, the purpose is often to self-soothe with the notion that nothing stands in the way of dispossession for others. Not war, not peace, not the liberal state, nor a moral imperative managed from without. “Thus whatever becomes fact does so with its own inborn absences,” Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us.30 The fact of the genocide must compete with its profound absences, and this is where it is possible to do the work that must be done.

An eerie combination of scores of bodies coupled with a lack of media reporting on the genocide warp the memory of the event and its continued ramifications. There are no standout images from the Pulitzer Prize–winning group of Associated Press photographs. Most are horrifically graphic—unspeakably so—but even in the ones that avoid a kind of granular violence, there is the absence of any kind of human focal point that adheres to any kind of logic that preserves the humanity of the subject of the photo. There are people in the photographs, it must be said, but they are incidental to the image.

To be incidental to the image in this context is to be somehow beside the gravity of the point. And how can one be beside the gravity of the point when one is the point: the human cost of this conflict, this war, and this genocide? Antiblackness is the matter through which all matter is made. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson writes, “I contend while antiblackness is terrifyingly persistent and ongoing as a system, antiblack racism and its (somatic) effects nevertheless unfold processually, bearing the capacity to take form as ‘event’ and within the ontological expanse of ‘emergence’ rather than reflect a passive ‘legacy’ emanating from a reified foundation or immutable structure.”31 The media coverage of the genocide collapsed Rwanda into a murderous event and a series of casualties, but antiblackness in the media is a part of a long history that is “terrifyingly persistent” and photographically held in place.32

Jaar demarcates the slow movement of media outlets concerning the genocide and its global coverage. His documentation of the cover stories in Time and Newsweek speaks to a much longer history of visual indifference catalogued over time. Jaar pairs information about the genocide with the cover images of weekly news magazines to highlight what is missing, minimized, made inessential, and disappeared. “May 22,” the left side of the image reads. “The Rwandan Patriotic Front gains full control of Kigali and the airport.” The final line points to the growing number of the dead by that date: “300,000 deaths.” The following page shows that the cover image of Newsweek from May 23 is a grainy photograph of a World War II soldier crawling through the water toward the shore at Omaha Beach, Normandy.33

The famous Robert Capa image from 1944 visually sets the tone of investment for the viewer, requiring little more from them than an already-present understanding of the measure of the gravity of war based on race and nation. Like the United States, but on a bigger scale, European nations return to the second world war and its allied success over the Third Reich as proof of some innate national goodness they share. And here, as Paul Gilroy suggests, “that memory of the country at war against foes who are simply, tidily, and uncomplicatedly evil has recently acquired the status of an ethnic myth.”34 Gilroy continues, “It explains not only how the nation remade itself through war and victory but can also be understood as a rejection or deferral of its present problems.”35 The United States is nothing if not a nation “remade . . . through war and victory.” From the Civil War to World War II and the Gulf War, the United States imagines its reflection in a mirror that reflects back only what it wants to see. So on the cusp of the fiftieth anniversary of the storming of Normandy, Newsweek revisits this moment (with weeks to spare; the event began on June 6, 1944) and makes the choice to continue ignoring the genocide that has claimed three hundred thousand lives. And it does so, again, as if nothing newsworthy is taking place. According to Gilroy, this stance, “and the accompanying inward turn, functions as a ‘defensive gesture,’” reifying the inherent value of the memory of World War II against a lack of interest in the victims of the current war taking place in Rwanda.

The Afterthought

Because most of the photographs coming out of Rwanda through news media outlets are aftermath photos, they lack the urgency of what Barbie Zelizer calls “about to die” images. For Zelizer, the impact of impending death is what gives these images their potency as people know precisely what is at stake with the photographs. Therefore, according to Zelizer, “though people tend to recall more about the news when visuals depict what is happening and exhibit certain empathetic bodily responses to what they see in images, viewers have definite assumptions about what should and should not be shown, and many regularly try to constrain images by notions of decency, taste, appropriateness, and tone.”36 She goes on to claim that “very few photographs in the news actually depict death.”37 This is in fact true, but only if you exclude the default position occupied by black subjects photographically. I contend that black death is such a naturalized photographic documentary position that most white viewers do not notice how ubiquitous it is. Part of the reason they do not notice is that the repetition of people who register as white do not register as dead in the news media. Death is for others, and though the “others” can shift and change over time, default imagistic death is the space black subjects occupy. The viewer’s relationship to the subject is one that Lisa Cartwright and Marita Sturken discuss in their book Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture.38 “Practices of looking are intimately tied to ideology,” they write. “The most important aspect of ideologies is that they appear to be natural or given, rather than part of a system of belief that a culture produces in order to function in a particular way.”39

Published in 2010, the same year of the earthquake in Haiti, Zelizer’s book About to Die: How News Images Move the Public is an exploration of public sentiment born from the photographs that depict people who are in danger of imminent death. In fact, Zelizer’s book is filled with imagistic examples of this relationship between the viewer and the viewed from very famous photographs, like Richard Drew’s Falling Man image from the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, to anonymous images taken by witnesses during war. International in scope, Zelizer’s project aims to highlight those moments of proximity that the viewer shares with those who are photographed. And while there are black subjects in her archive, they by no means dominate the production of human subjects Zelizer is interested in discussing. In fact, black subjects in Rwanda’s genocide upend the argument that Zelizer makes repeatedly in her book. “Impending death,” she writes, “can be remotely possible, vaguely possible, distinctly possible, or even probable, but it is never certain, and information conveying certainty is not made available by the news organization.”40 I contend that it is precisely the promise of certainty that gives black subjects the mark of mortevivum, where death is read as imminent and certain, the racial demarcation of antiblackness rendered photographically.

Indeed, there is only the how and why to contemplate in Rwanda as the space between absence and graphically produced death is a matter of months. There is, then, not the immediacy of a response that requires swift action. But here, in the space between photography’s ability to capture and antiblackness’ surveillance within a space of disregard, black subjects are both “about to die” and always somehow beyond the reach of death. They are also contained within a forward movement of death in the print as the repetition of training provides the viewer with the pointed fungibility already heavily rehearsed. This is the vexed space between the evidentiary and the visceral offering of death the photograph possesses.

Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, African students fleeing Kharkiv, Lviv, and Kyiv were stopped from boarding trains to Poland by Ukrainian security forces and border guards and told that “Blacks were not allowed.”41 The outbreak of war and the vulnerable status of Africans studying in Ukraine were met with racial refusal as there was no stated reason from Ukrainian officials for why black residents were refused refuge from the cities where bombings had begun. Somewhere in the psyche of these officials who were there to provide protection and safety to those fleeing the city, they could not find a way to include African students in the category of the protected. And when later asked about this heavily visible discrepancy, there was no defense provided for the action.

The United States’ official response to Russia’s war of aggression is instructive as well. Although the two countries were previously intertwined and Russia has worked tirelessly to violently return Ukraine to the country despite resistance from Ukraine. In dealings with the Eastern European nation, there is a sense of an understanding of the country’s autonomy, untethered from any previous conflicts with Russia. Images also bear out the international understanding that Ukrainians, embattled and invaded, are fighting for what is rightfully theirs, with the assistance of multiple governments and heads of state. Meanwhile, infantilizing and declaring swift retribution for national self-defense seem to be the gift that black sovereign nations receive in times of need. Or complete silence and neglect.

The Eye in Temporal Collapse

Walter Gadsden’s immortalization at the age of fifteen on a gelatin silver print is not something he can remove himself from, nor is it the path to black freedom offered up by those in pursuit of something akin to human rights. Instead, his image symbolizes the many ways photographs are placed in the arena of representation in order to constrict the very idea of representation separate and apart from violation. Hugo’s photographs, too, statically regard the route to regard as one tempered by the vicissitudes of antiblackness as it is only antiblackness that would attempt to collapse time and murderous violence with the simplification of a series of images meant to reconcile the space between memory and forgetting.

Moments of quiet encase the missing photographs of the Rwandan genocide as if they are enveloped in the lush landscape of the nation, unseen by most. While survivors travel as refugees, traumatized and wounded, newscasters will lean into an externally imposed narrative of destined death, almost as if they have been instructed to do so. In the interim, the narrative constructed around the genocide will imagine it as ordained by a self-destructive god, hell-bent on disappearing a large segment of the nation into the abyss of absent archives.