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Skin, Flesh, and the Affective Wrinkles of Civil Rights Photography

Skin, Flesh, and the Affective Wrinkles of Civil Rights Photography elizabeth abel If we needed confirmation of our ongoing investment in the civil rights movement and the visual media that brought its local confrontations to a national audience, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, a summer 2010 exhibit at the International Center for Photography, provides a vivid example.1 Drawing its title from Mamie Till's heroic insistence on an open coffin for her brutally murdered son and from the determination of African American photographers and newspaper editors to make the shocking image of Emmett Till's face visible to the public, the exhibit and its accompanying volume powerfully affirm the role of the visual media in bringing racial violence into public view. Simultaneously and less explicitly, however, the volume also illustrates how much more vexed this role is than the language that affirms it, for the horrific photograph to which the title refers does not--indeed could not--accompany the title on the cover. Instead, the image is discreetly positioned at the volume's interior.2 Replacing Till's photograph on the cover is a more uplifting image by the same photographer. Ernest C. Withers's depiction of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike shows a long horizontal http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences University of Nebraska Press

Skin, Flesh, and the Affective Wrinkles of Civil Rights Photography

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Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright
Copyright © University of Nebraska Press
ISSN
1938-8020
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Abstract

elizabeth abel If we needed confirmation of our ongoing investment in the civil rights movement and the visual media that brought its local confrontations to a national audience, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, a summer 2010 exhibit at the International Center for Photography, provides a vivid example.1 Drawing its title from Mamie Till's heroic insistence on an open coffin for her brutally murdered son and from the determination of African American photographers and newspaper editors to make the shocking image of Emmett Till's face visible to the public, the exhibit and its accompanying volume powerfully affirm the role of the visual media in bringing racial violence into public view. Simultaneously and less explicitly, however, the volume also illustrates how much more vexed this role is than the language that affirms it, for the horrific photograph to which the title refers does not--indeed could not--accompany the title on the cover. Instead, the image is discreetly positioned at the volume's interior.2 Replacing Till's photograph on the cover is a more uplifting image by the same photographer. Ernest C. Withers's depiction of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike shows a long horizontal

Journal

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences – University of Nebraska Press

Published: Apr 26, 2012

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