The exhibition I will be discussing is For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, curated by Maurice Berger, May 21 through September 12, 2010 at the International Center of Photography, New York. The exhibition includes photographs, magazines and television clips from the late-1940s to the mid-1970s, in order to present the constant reshaping of African-American representations in mainstream culture during the second-half of the twentieth-century. The exhibition is divided into five sections: It Keeps on Rollin’ Along: The Status Quo, The Culture of Positive Images, “Let the World See What I’ve Seen”: Evidence and Persuasion, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: Broadcasting Race and In Our Lives We Are Whole: Snapshots of Everyday Life, 1935-75. The civil rights movement was fuelled by the power of photography and television. The popularity of illustrated tabloid newspapers and the rise of picture magazines intensified the public’s trust in photography, whilst the dominating effect of visual imagery on the nation also intensified with the development of the moving image and television.
The exhibition reveals images as weapons and their ability to act as messengers of political ideas. Photography is an important political tool in its ability to appear objective whilst being saturated with the viewpoint of the maker; it attracts the viewer to its denoted meaning, whilst projecting its connoted meaning onto the unaware observer.[1] The “truth” quality of a photograph conceals that the meaning of a photograph is in the hands of the maker and open to manipulation depending on its context. The struggle for racial equality was thus highly determined by the control and manipulation of image weapons. In this essay I will explore the power of the visual image to both subjugate and empower African-Americans, considering the signification of the shift for black Americans from being invisible to visible within mainstream visual culture, and the power and authority that one is awarded from being in control of one’s own visual representation.
For All the World to See was held at the International Center of Photography, an appropriate place to house an exhibition demonstrating the power of photography for political means. The ICP was founded in 1974 by Cornell Capa, as an institution to maintain the legacy of “Concerned Photography”, or social documentary photography. This was a new style developed to record the social problems of underprivileged and disadvantaged people. It began with the hiring of photographers by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Depression, to document the plight of the poor farmer. Gordon Parks, a famous black photographer was noted for his work for the FSA (Fig. 1). Parks recognized “the power of a good picture”, and relied on them to fight “effectively against intolerance”.[2] Photography provided Parks, and the people he depicted with a voice, bolstering black pride and alerting people to the severity of racism. As the cultural critic, bell hook expressed, the struggle for rights was characterized by a struggle for images.[3]
The first section of the exhibition, It Keeps on Rollin’ Along: The Status Quo presents the stereotypical images of African-Americans created by white people before the civil rights movement, to justify racism and slavery (Fig. 2). African-Americans were rarely included in mainstream culture in the 1900s, and when they were it was in the form of characterized stereotypes:[4] Hattie McDaniel as the devoted Mammy in Gone With the Wind (Fig. 3) and Archie Moore as the obsequious Nigger Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Fig. 4).[5] Their presence was erased from culture and their humanity was erased from their depictions.[6] They became blank screens devoid of culture; cultural ciphers for white manipulation.[7] The process of stereotyping is a way to control the other and to assert dominance and supremacy over the subjugated race.[8] As Edward Said explains in his discourse on Orientalism: “Something patently foreign and distant acquires, for one reason or another, a status more rather than less familiar.”[9] The documentation of black culture by whites was an attempt at domesticating and controlling the unfamiliar in order to make it safe. The process of making another culture familiar weakens their status, as their culture no longer appears original, but an imitation of the dominant culture.[10] White people could then define themselves against the inferior other, which they portrayed as a reassuring stereotype.
These character types were based on conceits dating back to the time of slavery: the contented slave, the wretched freeman, or the exotic primitive, with either a comic or a brutish nature. These tropes did not disappear, they merely adapted with the changing social status of African-Americans. [11] The increasing migration of black people within America after World War II, particularly south to north, meant their physical and thus visual presence was intensified.[12] There was an ambivalence towards race and this visually manifested itself in images of African-Americans, who were no longer depicted as slaves, but still not as equals.[13] The fear of racial intermixing brought on by black migration, led to distinct stereotypes of African-Americans as asexual[14] and of a lower class, that one could not, or would not, want to mix with.[15] The most common depictions of African-Americans in this period, especially in advertisements, were as cooks, maids, servants and other domestic workers (Fig. 5). In the exhibition, the 1948 advertisement for General Tire and Rubber Company (Fig. 6), depicts the black chauffeur and white woman compositionally worlds apart, thus elucidating the distinct social separation between the races.[16]
The developing technology of the camera was vital in establishing the civil rights movement as visible, showing the nation what it previously would not see. The represented revolution began. The Culture of Positive Images section of the exhibition, documents the process of recasting the culturally blank, negative image of black people, to produce a positive image of African-Americans imbued with personality and culture. This was particularly achieved with the rise of African-American pictorial magazines, such as The Crisis, Negro Digest, Sepia and Ebony, as displayed in the exhibition (Fig. 7).[17] The focus on aesthetics attempted to replace earlier stereotypical portrayals of black people, with images of a race of culture-bearers.[18] Portraits of successful African-Americans were paid tribute to in the “Men of the Month” columns in The Crisis (Fig. 8).[19] The success of the magazines lay in their combination of addressing the horrors of racism (Fig. 9), alongside celebrations of black accomplishment. The use of images of bigotry, highlighted the struggle against oppression, but contrasted with positive depictions of black people, this struggle became something the African-Americans could triumph over.[20]
Images that depicted the atrocities of racism relied on the power to shock, forcing the nation to confront the visceral evidence of the violence one human can inflict on another.[21] The photograph of the fourteen-year-old Emmett Till’s mutilated corpse (Fig. 10) astounded and challenged viewers, forcing everyone to accept some blame for such a horrific crime, and spurring others out of inaction.[22] “Let the World See What I’ve Seen”: Evidence and Persuasion reveals the role of images in changing public opinion and attitudes toward race. The nature of photography provided a harrowing picture of racism that surpassed the ability of words, drawings or paintings. The widely disseminated eighteenth-century engraving, The Description (Fig. 11), depicting a plan of a slave ship showing how the slaves were transported, illustrates the difficulty in representing the horrors of the ‘middle passage’ and slavery.[23] The diagrammatic quality of the engraving, and its decorative form reduces the viewer to passive observation. The human body becomes a geometrical form. The culture and individuality of the slaves has been erased, as they become part of the boat, or cargo. The slaves are cultural absentees, as a blank page for white guilt.[24] As Marcus Wood explains “The Description is…a memorial to disaster, not a representation of what ever happened. As a memorial it acts as a point of focus for collective historical memory, as a space for mediation, as something clear and clean…”[25] Such images acknowledge the atrocity of the journey from Africa, but absolve the guilt of the viewer by erasing the horror from the image and the humanity from slaves. Photography is able to represent the un-representable. Photography does not absolve guilt; it condemns the viewer through its immediacy and verisimilitude. Photography is more potent than reality and its authority is driven by its objectivity.
Photography’s objective qualities were first exploited by anthropologists to convey distinct differences between the races, in an attempt to justify slavery and the subjugation of black Americans. The typological photograph acted as representational colonialism.[26] The slave daguerreotypes taken for the scientist Louis Agassiz in 1850 in Columbia, South Carolina illustrates the scientific and political use of photography in this period (Fig. 12-13). Agassiz arranged for seven slaves to be photographed, largely naked, from front and side views in order to analyse the physical differences between European whites and African blacks. Agassiz’s aim was to prove the superiority of the white race and the theory of “separate creation”: a belief popular in the southern states of America that the various races of mankind were in fact separate species.[27] The transparency and truth quality of the photographic record, validated such racial myths into anthropological facts.[28] Scientific photographs, such as Agassiz’s, preceded and enforced racial stereotypes.[29] As Allen Sekula explains photography is ascribed value in quantifying things, and by placing them in a circulatory system that emphasizes their similarity and difference to things.[30] Categorizing photographs implies a hierarchy, and enforces divisions between self and other. The realistic quality of the photographic image supplies the depiction with the authority of fact, whereas in truth the opinion of the image-maker underlies the classificatory system that the typological photograph displays.[31] Roland Barthes’ “reality effect”, describes the ability of a photograph to appear objective and realistic because the abundance of information provided confuses and hides the cultural message.[32] Agassiz depended on the collapse of his subject into a “type”.[33] The slave daguerreotypes are types, not portraits. The subject is silent; constructed and owned, displayed as an object. A type discourages style and composition, the setting has minimal external information, alienating the subject and enhancing objectivity.[34] On the other hand portraits affirm the individuality of a person, and situate their position in society through setting and props.[35]
The last section of the exhibition In Our Lives We Are Whole: Snapshots of Everyday Life, 1935-75 is concerned with the everyday objects of African-American life, from family snapshots to the visual campaign of the Black Panther Party. Snapshots (Fig. 14) and studio portraits (Fig. 15) were an important part of African American life in taking control of their own representations, making themselves visible and challenging stereotypes. Portraits were essential in countermanding racist imagery, in the struggle over images.[36] The penultimate section of the exhibition, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: Broadcasting Race examines the role of black actors and performers on entertainment television, highlighting the often simplistic and stereotypical representation of African-Americans in mainstream culture.[37] The private portrait allowed black Americans to take control of their own portrayal, free from the intervention of (white) mainstream culture. These photographs were unaffected by the racial anxieties connected with depicting an African-American to a majority white audience. Before the rise of snapshot cameras, black studio photographers were a vital aspect of African-American life.[38] These images were crucial for black Americans in forming their own sense of self and identity, highlighting that the authority of an image lies with the image-maker.[39]
The use of photography to both subjugate and empower a race highlights that however objective a photograph may appear, its meaning is highly determined by the image-maker, and the context of the photograph. Civil rights photographers were not objective presenters but skilled commentators with the ability to heighten the conceptual gravity of an image. As with the photo booklet displayed in the exhibition: Complete Photo Story of Till Murder Case, 1955 (Fig. 16) created by the photojournalist Ernest Withers. The repetition of images connected with the Till murder confronts the viewer to engage with the issue of race and acknowledge the photographs’ cultural meaning.[40] Many civil rights images stirred segregationists into accusing newspapers and magazines of being biased, for using photographs that manipulated the truth and supported unfair allegations of police brutality and violence against blacks. Albert Person’s The True Selma Story is a periodical that analyses the coverage of the riots in Alabama and has sections titled “How ‘IMAGES’ Are Created” (Fig. 17).[41] As Roland Barthes states: a photograph contains two messages, the perceptual message and the cultural message- the confusion between these two messages, establishes the success of the mass image. Roland Barthes expounds that an image has two functions: a denotative function and a connotative function. A photograph can appear denotative; when in reality the viewer is more influenced by the connotative message of the image and its culturally determined meaning.[42] As the theorist Allen Sekula points out, “every photograph is a sign, above all of some-one’s investment in the sending of a message.” This quote highlights the power of photography, yet also the power of the image-maker and context of the image. The success of civil rights visual imagery disseminated from the movement’s leaders and photographers intelligent manipulation and utilisation of the images, whilst providing a necessary framework of speeches and protests and amply distributing and believing in their power (Fig. 18). These images were also met by an increasingly visual society enthusiastic to devour mechanically reproduced images. A modern cultural transformation adopted by the modern struggle for racial justice and equality.
Maurice Berger’s aim of the exhibition is to depict the importance of visual images over words in the achievements of the civil rights movement. He highlights the dramatic impact of photography and the moving image on fuelling the movement, whilst maintaining the role of the image-makers and the context of the movement. Berger is successful in his aim as he addresses the role of visual culture in structuring and strengthening the movement, and places this issue within the discourse of American history.[43] Berger reveals the visual myths of blackness, by locating the images into a context that deals with issues of race, the exhibition space. The images and objects are tightly linked with their social history and cannot be understood without engaging with the social and historical context that surrounds them. They are no longer images or objects that stand for the entirety of African-American culture; they are established as parts of a process of visual manipulation for certain means of representation. Berger re-appropriates images and objects from America’s history and places them within a discourse of image making and ways of seeing. Berger highlights the function of an image within society as a messenger of political and cultural notions, and alerts us to an image’s subjection to manipulation, and its role within asymmetrical power relations. Therefore the audience is awakened to the power of imagery, by being subjected to powerful images.
For All the World to See makes African-Americans visible for the viewing public. The exhibition highlights the cross-cultural contact between white and black communities in the second half of the twentieth-century and the visual imagery produced within this contact zone. The exhibition explores the role of visual imagery in the hands of the subjugators and the liberators of black people. Contrasting the use of imagery to stereotype and negate black culture, with its function in propelling the civil rights movement towards success and awakening the American people from their racial stupor. The exhibition demonstrates the important parallel between the rise of the civil rights movement and the birth of television and the popularity of visual mass media. The images from protests and sit-ins provided television and the mass media with a constant source of news and stories. Whilst the increased depiction of the horrors of racism, alongside positive black people in the media, fuelled the success of the civil rights movement in awakening the nation to the cause, and altering the public opinion on race. Through African-American’s reclaiming of the image of themselves, they were able to control their political future and cultural dominance. The black body and mind was no longer conceptually imprisoned.
[1] Roland Barthes, "The Rhetoric of the Image," in Image-Music-Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 37.
[2] Maurice Berger, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 3.
[3] Berger, For All the World to See, 5.
[4] Berger, For All the World to See, 33.
[5] Berger, For All the World to See, 18.
[6] Berger, For All the World to See, 33.
[7] Berger, For All the World to See, 18.
[8] Berger, For All the World to See, 18.
[9] Edward Said, "Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental," in Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books A Division of Random House, 1978), 58.
[10] Said, "Imaginative Geography and Its Representations," 62.
[11] Berger, For All the World to See, 15.
[12] Berger, For All the World to See, 18.
[13] Berger, For All the World to See, 19.
[14] Berger, For All the World to See, 20
[15] Berger, For All the World to See, 30.
[16] Berger, For All the World to See, 24.
[17] Berger, For All the World to See, 51.
[18] Berger, For All the World to See, 53.
[19] Berger, For All the World to See, 55.
[20] Berger, For All the World to See, 57, 102.
[21] Berger, For All the World to See, 105.
[22] Berger, For All the World to See, 109: The sociologist and activist Joyce Lander explains “All of us remembered the photograph of Emmett Till’s face, lying in the coffin…Everyone of my SNCC friends…recall[ed] that photograph. [It] galvanised a generation as a symbol-that was our symbol-that if they did it to him, they could do it to us.”
[23] Marcus Wood, "The Irrecoverable: Representing the 'Middle Passage,'" in Blind Memory: Visual representations of slavery in England and America 1780-1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 17.
[24] Wood, "The Irrecoverable: Representing the 'Middle Passage,'" 23.
[25] Wood, "The Irrecoverable: Representing the 'Middle Passage,'" 32.
[26] Brian Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz's Slave Daguerreotypes," American Art 9.2 (1995): 54.
[27] Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science," 40.
[28] Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science," 40.
[29] Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science," 53.
[30] Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science," 46.
[31] Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science," 47-48.
[32] Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science," 48.
[33] Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science," 48.
[34] Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science," 54.
[35] Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science," 55.
[36] Berger, For All the World to See, 176.
[37] Berger, For All the World to See, 140-160.
[38] Berger, For All the World to See, 177.
[39] Berger, For All the World to See, 178.
[40] Berger, For All the World to See, 112.
[41] Berger, For All the World to See, 123-124.
[42] Barthes, "The Rhetoric of the Image," 36-37.
[43] Berger, For All the World to See, 5.
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