“What is it about blackness in the public imaginary that has repeatedly aligned it with suffering?” asks Kimberly Juanita Brown in Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (51). Or, a related question, directed again to the visualization of precarious life: “What is the evidence we have that white people die?” (xxxi). Compelling and urgent, her book explores the visual culture of a global antiblack rubric she calls “supervivum [‘the live forever’]: white life and liberty rendered through black death and the constant invocation of unfreedom” (29). Particularly potent for this rubric are documentary photographs that construct the apparent “fact” that black life is predisposed to death, whether in the often uncontextualized placement of photography of black diasporic life and death in newspaper layouts or in the frequent citation of these images in rendering the exception as rule. Taking up critical shifts on the function and potency of antiblack racism as articulated by Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison, and Christina Sharpe among others, Brown extends arguments made by Ariella Azoulay, Courtney R. Baker, and Bakirathi Mani to dispense with the idea that the photographic image has ever been neutral, objective, or a document of fact. Rather, visual literacy is as disciplining of a social tool in the learning of antiblack racism as the structural public policies that engineer it, precisely because the visual traffics so effectively in the affective realm. Put simply: images teach emotion.
Over three chapters exploring visual depictions of the suffering and death of black diasporic subjects in South Africa, Rwanda, and Haiti in the Western (and largely the U.S.) press, Mortevivum shows how what Brown calls the “cartography of the ocular (moving from national location to national location, but always under the cover of blackness) has specific dimensions: a viable and recognizable enemy, the failure of other people’s sovereignty, and the global ability to reinforce white supremacist ideals” (xx). While images nonetheless circulate, as we do, within systems and structures that might appear to make such uses of them unchangeable, Brown resists such inevitability. Instead, or perhaps even then, the charge comes to us, as viewers and participators, as consumers and makers, on whether we are “to be trusted with the bodies of others when there is so much at stake” (94).
This Provocation takes seriously such a charge. While Brown engages mostly with the documentary image as found in news and social media coverage of antiblack violence, there are other arenas within which the most subtle antiblack imagery circulates, and minoritarian pain offered as subject without matter. In their curatorial and scholarly practices, Johanna Obenda, Delphine Sims, and Alexandra Thomas engage with the collection, care, and exhibition of artworks that image black life. In personal reflections on the challenges of this work and the necessity of shared reckonings, their perspectives open a unique engagement with the text and expand the conversations that Brown forwards in her argument,. Convened to open questions and to nurture communal praxis, their responses bring to bear the responsibilities that curators, historians, and teachers must burden and navigate for the collective futures ahead.
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Provocation #1: Johanna Obenda
Kimberly Juanita Brown reminds us that photographs are things. Things that obscure. Things that memorialize. Things that influence. Mortevivum positions the photo as object, beginning with a meditation on its materiality and the process of making a gelatin silver print. In the chemical solution, the exposure, and the development, each step of making an image is deliberate and intentional. Even regarding the digital image, Brown’s message holds true: photographs are made, archives are constructed, and depicting Black death is a choice. A choice—not an inevitability, nor an inherent right. Mortevivum asks who makes that choice and how this perpetuates global anti-Blackness. The camera is not a stand-in for our eyes, nor is the photograph a surrogate for our memories. Instead, the cache of photographs of Black suffering deemed as “documentation” or “evidence” is a crafted part of our “national inheritance and the spectacle of racial terror” (xxvi).
This type of “inheritance” is familiar to those of us who work with visual and material culture. It is delivered and preserved in the photographs, art, documents, and artifacts that comprise our libraries, archives, and museums. Mortevivum opens vital questions for these collecting institutions and the cultural practitioners that make them run. What does it mean to steward materials that depict violence and anti-Black tropes? How do we care for these materials, and, perhaps more importantly, how do we care for one another? When this “inheritance” is displayed, the public is encouraged to become “witness” at best and “participant” at worst.
Moving through Mortevivum’s transnational, cross-temporal examination of photography and anti-Blackness, I was prompted to consider how these public spaces promote engagement with objects. In museums, for example, entire pedagogies and practices center “close-looking,” an invitation to peer deeply and slowly at works to enhance visual observations. This strategy falls apart when it comes to works illustrating Black death. What does it mean to ask someone to look closely at objects of Black suffering? Are viewers to imagine themselves in the place of the subject to better understand the persons implicated? In a world where Black people are frozen into subjectivity through the camera, the brush, or the pen, Brown warns us of the limits of empathy, of “carnivorous voyeurism” (22). Mortevivum concludes with a reflection on viewers who already feel too close to an image—those who don’t need photographic proof to believe in the harms inflicted onto Black communities, those who see themselves in the photo.
Brown deftly articulates the present and potential violence embedded in photography and creates room for the possibility of a new praxis of displaying and viewing images. There are lessons for all of us who care for both “things” and for people. All publics do not hold the same proximities to these images, no matter how benign or neutral they may seem, and we must make space for more adept ways of documenting and understanding Black life in all of its complexities. Mortevivum will certainly provoke new, critical approaches to interpreting images for readers, educators, historians, creators, and curators alike. As is made evident, we have choices in these matters.
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Provocation #2: Alexandra Thomas
Reading Kimberly Juanita Brown’s incisive Mortevivum simultaneously affirms and challenges much of what I understand to be the risks and possibilities of curating photography. I find myself entangled in the antinomies: histories of capture (photographic and otherwise) dotted with freedom dreams, an anti-Black atmosphere that conditions yet cannot entirely foreclose Black living, hypervisibility met with emotional indifference, ephemerality/stasis, absence/presence, and a medium that is categorically anti-Black yet a consistent source of Black-authored image-making. These generative frictions, with “living death” at their core, are a result of the im/possibility of Black life itself.
I wonder if my checklist for “Homecoming: Domesticity and Kinship in Global African Art” at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum would have changed if I had had Brown’s book in hand. It was while curating a small gallery of historic and contemporary photographs related to the exhibition’s theme that I began to ponder the delicate yet persistent nature of the photographic image. In museums, photographs are vulnerable to light and can thus only be on display for three or so months at a time. The exhibition included colonial-era photography taken by European colonizers on the African continent, mainly Zulu families in South Africa. I debated including them in the show until the very end but ultimately decided that one cannot ignore the imperialist fantasies of early photographers. When faced with colonialist ephemera such as historic postcards, it is harrowing to know that such flimsy material objects channel and bolster the most violent and racist logic of Western modernity. Then, there are the iconic black pages with largescale white block letter quotes on standout pages throughout Mortevivum; the final one reads: “We are so much more than the way we are imagined by others” (115). My political desire is for the photographs I display to mobilize the “vigilant looking on the viewer’s part” that Brown enacts (51).
Something as immersive as the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg that Brown analyzes is not necessarily the answer to exhibiting photography in an art exhibition, but perhaps didactics should introduce a more critical lens to photographs to dismantle the dominant understanding of the medium as always truthful about its subjects. In a wall text, I asked: “How can we read against the grain of the artist’s intention to instead bear witness to these historic figures who sought to resist the devastation of colonial violence?” Mortevivum answers that question. A major lesson for curatorial practice emerges from the book: awareness of why and how images of Black life and death circulate is essential. It is worth considering whether some images should even go on display in museums at all anymore if they contribute to the hypervisibility of Black death without a critical didactic or curatorial framing that fully balances it out. Sometimes the risk is too great. Brown helps us understand the context for these risks.
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Provocation #3: Delphine Sims
Kimberly Juanita Brown’s Mortevivum makes you tremble with rage and devastation. With the passions akin to a manifesto but cerebrally described, Brown exposes the history of global photography, specifically media images, for their trafficking in Black death. Writing alongside Saidiya Hartman’s foundational theories on the pleasure whiteness takes in iterations of Black pain, Brown argues that the passive white viewer of 1990s New York Times photography similarly finds pleasure in Black tragedy. Throughout the book, Brown does not reproduce photographs of Black people’s end of life, but rather the front page of newspapers which spectacularized these occurrences. In doing so, she gestures to the leisurely encounter with Black pain as part of a quotidian experience, fleeting in the emotive response from the white viewer but a part of a global landscape rapt with antiblackness. The newspaper reproductions appear so dark it is difficult to access photographic detail, but Brown interferes even further into the images of Black death by removing the deceased or cropping the photographs with a gray swatch of emptiness. Rather than re-exploit those dead through detailed reproduction, Brown laboriously and eloquently describes the images. She offers us the life and grief that surrounds the victim through attention to facial expressions. Brown notes that for many decades, Pulitzer-prize winning photographs have been violent illustrations that produce a feeling of “examining a wound that refuses to heal” (64).
Throughout Brown’s text, I was thinking of Diana Bryant. In 1974, Bryant died at the age of eighteen when she fell from a collapsed fire escape during an apartment fire in Boston. Her goddaughter, Tiare Jones, fell on top of her, surviving the fall because Bryant’s body cushioned her. These final moments in Bryant’s life were photographed and featured in the Boston Globe. The photographer won a Pulitzer Prize for an image of Bryant suspended in air with Jones hovering just above her: “living death in a series of still frames, refusing complex humanity” (xx). The photograph catalyzed fire safety laws across the city and became famous for its existential depiction, but Bryant is lost to the narrative. The photographer, writing shortly after the photograph was taken, did not name Bryant and Jones when summarizing the career successes that followed his chance encounter with the fire scene: “Except for the tragedy itself, the whole experience has been fantastic” (quoted on the photographer’s website).
Brown rehearses a number of photographic projects largely created by Black photographers and artists of color, such as Dawoud Bey, Sandra Brewster, and Alfredo Jaar, whose photographs might disturb the lecherous gazes resigned to Black death. She reminds the reader that Tyre Nichols’s family produced an image campaign featuring a spectrum of his life to counter the release of the police body came footage documenting his murder. In a gesture to counter “the space of photographic stasis that consumes and corrupts their [Black people’s] ability to be autonomous,” I return to Diana Bryant to think of her beyond her last moments in the air (xxi). We know so little of Bryant but that she loved children and was excited to look after her godchild on a day when she wasn’t working as a hairdresser. Did her nurturing spirit extend to the potted plants that descended to the cement alongside her and Jones? A spirit of protective care is seen in the images which preceded her fall, the photographs which did not win awards, where she clutched Jones against her body with hope for their rescue and their future.
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Contributors:
Johanna Obenda is a cultural practitioner, curator, and educator. She holds an a M.A. in Public Humanities from Brown University. Johanna is a curatorial specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. She is the lead exhibition developer of the upcoming internationally traveling exhibition “In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World” and co-editor of the companion publication.
Delphine Sims is an Assistant Curator in the Department of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She completed her PhD in History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Recently, she was the Andrew Wyeth predoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts within the National Gallery of Art, and from 2021-2022 she was the Andrew Mellon predoctoral fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has worked on numerous museum exhibitions and contributed writings to several catalogues. Her writing can also be found in Mattemagazine, The Believer, and Aperture.
Alexandra M. Thomas is a Black feminist writer based in Hartford, CT, and an assistant professor at Fordham University.
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Anni A. Pullagura