(Re)Picturing Black Life in the Face of Death

By Cammie Lee

“In our political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems… See the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest, or the most conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics!”

 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet”

“It is evident that the great cheapness and universality of pictures must exert a powerful, though silent, influence upon the ideas and sentiment of present and future generations. The family is the fountainhead of all mental and moral influence. And the presence there, of the miniature forms and faces of our loved ones, whether separated from us by time and space, or by the silent continents of eternity, must act powerfully upon the minds of all. They bring to mind all that is amiable and good in the departed, and strengthen the same qualities [in the living].”

Frederick Douglass, Lecture on Pictures. Dec. 3, 1861

Images, in all their various mediums, are portals into the past and tapestries upon which we project our present desires. Hardly just objects of decorous utility, they move people to act in extraordinary ways. In the fight for abolition, images unite people in shared passion and emotion, providing sites of healing and collective mourning. Yet they can also agitate wounds and deal further injury to those already hurting. In the words that follow, I examine three attempts to visually document a single act of racial violence, detailing impact, public response, and the poetry of the images themselves.

In August of 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till left Chicago to visit his relatives in Mississippi. While the exact details of the incident are unconfirmed, he allegedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, while shopping at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. Four days after the encounter, Roy Bryant – the woman’s husband – and his half-brother J.W. Milam forcefully removed Till from his great-uncle’s home and brutally beat the young boy, before shooting him in the head and dumping his body into the Tallahatchie River. His corpse was pulled out of the water three days later, a cotton gin fan wrapped around his neck and his body bloated beyond recognition. The two defendants were absolved from the crime by an all-white jury, although they would later emerge and publicly admit their guilt.

When Till’s mother, Mamie Till, first laid eyes upon her son’s mutilated body, she declared, “Let the people see what I’ve seen.” In an act of immense strength and bravery, Mamie arranged an open casket funeral for her son. The event was publicized by the national press and attended by tens of thousands of individuals, primarily African Americans, including civil rights leaders and politicians.

She also invited photographer David Jackson to document the funeral and the open casket; the photos were then published in Jet magazine, a publication produced and distributed amongst the Black community. Jackson’s photographs – and in particular, the photograph pictured above – created a national sensation, inciting rage and pain amongst Black communities and forcing many whites to come face-to-face with racial violence. It is important to note, however, that mainstream media outlets refused to print the graphic photographs, meaning that their circulation was mostly limited to Black-owned publications.

In Jackson’s photograph, Mamie Till clasps her hands in remorse and gazes at her son’s casket. Her future husband, Gene Mobley, clutches Mamie protectively, his hands rigidly clenched around her arms as if to shield her from the eye of the camera. His fingers leave visible indents upon the surface of her skin, indicating the firmness of his grasp. Unlike Mamie, Gene Mobley makes direct eye contact with the camera, confronting the viewer and reversing the power of the voyeuristic gaze at work in photography; although he is the immobile subject “captured” by the camera, his gaze is assertive and active, already anticipating the eyes of onlookers.

At first, the couple seems to be the primary subject of the photograph, as their forms are centered in the frame and in crisp focus. However, when we follow Mamie’s gaze, we encounter Emmett Till’s corpse. His reclining figure obscures much of his battered face from our view but still reveals enough to depict the violence Till must have endured. Although Till is slightly out of focus and only borders the perimeter of the image, Mamie’s gaze signals the importance of his body – the photograph would be incomplete without it.

As such, the subject matter of the photograph – rather than focusing on an individual body or bodies, as in a portrait – becomes a photograph of relation, and in particular, of mourning when relations are severed by death. By positioning Till’s body near the periphery of the composition, the photograph visually emulates the haunting specters of the dead, suggesting that lives cut short by racial violence forever remain within the frames of those who mourn them.

In a video project for TIME magazine, American lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson notes that the photograph had an important role in the Civil Rights Movement, empowering many members of the Black community to participate in the fight for racial justice. As such, rather than just memorializing the life of Emmett Till, Jackson’s highly-circulated photograph became an act of protest in itself, demonstrating how mourning in the face of racism is never just a temporary act, but an ongoing process that includes acts of activism. The photograph still resonates with the fight for abolition today, and contemporary artists and individuals continue to respond to Jackson’s work.

SOS, Amiri Baraka 

Calling black people
Calling all black people, man woman child
Wherever you are, calling you, urgent, come in
Black People, come in, wherever you are, urgent, calling
you, calling all black people
calling all black people, come in, black people, come
on in.

Dana Schutz conceived her infamous painting of Emmett Till, modeled after David Jackson’s 1955 photo series, in August of 2016, following a heavy summer marked by racial tensions and the proliferation of police violence against Blacks. In the New York Times, Schutz – who is a white woman – indicated that she connected with the photograph by empathizing with Till’s mother: “I don’t know what it is like to be black in America but I do know what it is like to be a mother… Art can be a space for empathy, a vehicle for connection.” However, when the painting was revealed at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, it generated much controversy within the art world, eliciting cries of protest from the Black community, particularly online.

African-American artist Parker Bright organized silent, peaceful protests at the site of the Biennial with a small group of five or six others to stand in front of the painting and block it from public view until the museum’s closing. During his shift, Parker wore a t-shirt with the words “BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE” inscribed across the back, effectively re-captioning the painting with his body.

In addition, the artist and writer Hannah Black penned an open letter to the curators of the Whitney Biennial, advocating for the removal and destruction of Schutz’s painting as to terminate its circulation and eliminate its potential for profit (Schutz has since stated that she does not intent to ever sell the work). The letter included 47 co-signatories at the time of its publication in ARTnews.

Repeatedly declaring “the painting must go,” in her letter Black makes an overt distinction between Mamie’s courageous decision to display Till’s body at the time of his death and Schutz’s appropriation of Jackson’s photograph. The latter, Black argues, served as a symbol of “inspiration and warning” to Black people, while Schutz’s painting – in spite of its intent to reckon with white shame – treats “Black pain as raw material.” Like the images and videos which document Black death and suffering in the face of police violence, Black seems to suggest that Schutz’s painting is reminiscent of “deeply shameful white American traditions such as the public lynching.”

With cutting prose, Black implicates Biennial curators in the perpetuation of black death specularization, stating: “In brief, the painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about Black people because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time… white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.”

Schutz’s Open Casket offers an abstract re-presentation of Till’s body as depicted in Jackson’s photographs. Broad swaths of paint leave visible streaks across the surface of the canvas, blurring and thus abstracting the finer details of the original photograph. Geometric forms delineate the stiff contours of Till’s tuxedo and the surface upon which his body rests. In stark contrast, wispy streaks of color coalesce to depict Till’s face, their fibrousness only gesturing towards the violence carved into Till’s body.

On the one hand, Schutz’s abstract re-presentation of Jackson’s photograph obscures – and thus censors, beautifies – the gruesome marks of racial violence. Without the visual clarity of a photograph, the painting only acquires meaning by capitalizing on the history embedded in the original image – which is to say that the very existence of the painting, and its place in the Biennial, is predicated on Black suffering and racial violence, as Black claims in her letter.

On the other hand, the abstraction of form – particularly of the face – distances the painting from the political specificity of its photographic counterpart. By masking Till’s distinct facial features and rendering the body anonymous, the painting transforms Till’s figure into a haunting allegory for Black pain in the contemporary, establishing a connection between the past and the present and voicing an outcry against repeated patterns of racial violence.

The question then becomes a matter of representation. Who has the right to talk about and depict Black pain and rage? When Jackson’s photographs were first published, the imagery of Till’s body certainly meant more to the Black community than to white Americans and became an important symbol of both Black pain and strength during the Civil Rights Movement. Additionally, the photographs epitomized the experience of racism in America, which whites could only sympathize with. It would seem, then, that the photograph symbolically and historically belonged to the African American community.

But given that the photograph documents a personal history as well, of a body inhumanly violated, the question of ownership raises ethical considerations. Is it “right” for anyone to claim ownership over a body – a person – through the appropriation of a photograph, even if the experience of violence and racism is shared? One could argue that in arranging for a public funeral and displaying Till’s corpse in an open casket, Mamie knowingly sacrificed her privacy to offer up Till’s body as a site for collective Black mourning.

Yet even so, the re-presentation of Till’s body is markedly different from gathering around a body to draw communal support: the former uses another’s body as a surface upon which to inscribe and project the self, while the latter reincorporates the body back into the community, allowing the person to remain “alive” even after their passing. Perhaps in such an instance of immense significance and mourning – in both public and in private – the photograph and its subject are best left untouched.

Excerpt from Afterimages by Audre Lorde

A black boy from Chicago
whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi
testing what he’d been taught was a manly thing to do
his teachers
ripped his eyes out his sex his tongue
and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone
in the name of white womanhood
they took their aroused honor
back to Jackson
and celebrated in a whorehouse
the double ritual of white manhood
confirmed.

In 2016, the British-American photographer Oliver Clasper embarked on a journey across America to photograph spaces where lynchings had occurred, from Portland, Oregon to New York City and all the places in between. Clasper’s series, titled “The Spaces We Inherit,” documents 24 different locations over a span of 150 years through photographs, interviews, sound, and a short film. In addition to photographing the sites of lynchings and murders, Clasper also profiled the individuals currently associated with the locations or the victims. Clasper explains in the Times that the project is meant to reveal the histories of violence and terror embedded in seemingly innocuous locations, and spark “necessary conversations.”

Taken out of context, the photographs seem rather insignificant, depicting the banality of American suburbs, woodland brush, and unmarked city street corners. Yet upon identifying the spaces as locations of lynchings, it is their indiscrete ordinariness which makes the images so sinister. The haunting absence of bodies in the photographs becomes glaringly apparent, a reminder of the many lives lost to racial violence; what is not depicted is just as important as what is.

The photograph of Emmett Till’s lynching site reveals a weathered barn, now modified to serve a functional purpose for its current owners. Plastic utility buckets, milk crates, and other miscellaneous items line the perimeter of the barn, gesturing towards its use as a storage unit. The lighting in photograph casts a slight vignette around the perimeter of the photograph and a white electrical wire dangling from above mirrors the silhouette of an abandoned lynching rope, giving the space an ominous appearance.

Yet although Clasper – like Schutz – is a white artist who aspired to depict Black death and facilitate healing through art, his work was celebrated rather than condemned, and is prominently featured in both the national press and the websites of local community organizations. In her painting, Schutz committed a double offense: first by appropriating the intellectual and creative property of a Black artist – both in subject matter and composition – and second, by driving her artistic fingerprint into Till’s body, further violating his corpse.

Additionally, as suggested by the language used in Parker Bright’s protest at the Whitney Biennial, Schutz’s painting bears too close a resemblance to the phenomenon of Black death spectacularization in the news. The media often sensationalizes stories of racial violence and police brutality, and consuming graphic images and videos through present formats of news distribution often alienates the audience from such events and degrades the victims to subjects in a spectacle. While Schutz’s painting contributes to the defacement of Black victims by re-presenting Till’s corpse through the white gaze, the absence of bodies in Clasper’s photography reminds us of the immediateness of such events, and demonstrates how everyday spaces and moments have the potential to become sites of spilt blood. ▣

Bibliography

Clasper, Oliver. “The Spaces We Inherit.” Accessed December 4, 2020. ://lynchingsitesmem.org/resources/spaces-we-inherit.

Clasper, Oliver and David Gonzales. “Echoes of Lynchings in Quiet Photos.” The New York Times, February 28, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/lens/echoes-of-lynchings-in-quiet-photos.html.

Dewan, Shaila. “How Photos Became Icon of Civil Rights Movement.” New York Times, August 28, 2005. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/us/how-photos-became-icon-of-civil-rights-movement.html.

Greenberger, Alex. “‘The Painting Must Go’: Hannah Black Pens Open Letter to the Whitney About Controversial Biennial Work.” ARTnews, March 21, 2017. https://www.artnews.com/artnews/news/the-painting-must-go-hannah-black-pens-open-letter-to-the-whitney-about-controversial-biennial-work-7992/.

Muños-Alonso, Lorena. “Dana Schutz’s Painting of Emmett Till at Whitney Biennial Sparks Protest.” Artnet News, March 21, 2017. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/dana-schutz-painting-emmett-till-whitney-biennial-protest-897929.

Kennedy, Randy. “White Artist’s Painting of Emmett Till at Whitney Biennial Draws Protests.” New York Times, March 21, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/arts/design/painting-of-emmett-till-at-whitney-biennial-draws-protests.html.

Time Photo. “When One Mother Defied America: The Photo That Changed the Civil Rights Movement.” TIME Magazine, July 10, 2016. https://time.com/4399793/emmett-till-civil-rights-photography/.

Williams, Timothy and Michael Wines. “Shootings Further Divide a Nation Torn Over Race.” New York Times, July 8, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/us/shootings-further-divide-a-nation-torn-over-race.html.