How Will We Remember the Protests?

The Peter and Gadsden photos, and images like them, became representations of their movements for a reason. Of the Gadsden picture, the historian Martin A. Berger wrote that the “appeal of such photographs to whites rested largely on the success of the images in focusing attention on acts of violence and away from historically rooted inequities in public accommodation, voting rights, housing policies, and labor practices.” Such images are effective in advancing racial-justice movements through straightforward depictions of individual victims and villains. But, as Berger wrote, their one-dimensionality risks obscuring the fuller image of inequities that exist and allows audiences to avoid confronting their own complicity in systemic injustice.

It’s too soon to determine which photographs will become lasting representations of the 2020 demonstrations, but it’s important to recognize the importance of documenting social-justice movements while being sensitive to the risk of commodification. The professor Nicole Fleetwood, who specializes in visual culture and Black history, wrote that “context provides a more complex understanding of the strategies involved and deliberate actions taken to actualize Black freedom struggles.” The diverse renderings of protest spaces this year have expanded the visual archive by some measure, but without contextual work, a dominant archive that has historically prioritized basic narratives and white legibility could flatten even these more nuanced photographs.

Requests for such contextual work are growing amid concerns that today’s protest photography is being used to surveil protestors. Some demonstrators, for instance, have called for photographers to blur or otherwise obscure faces, sparking a larger conversation about the right protesters have to participate in their own image-making. Without community engagement, protest images are divorced from context and coerced into tidy narratives. That kind of dissonance between image and reality allows for protest photographs to become iconic, while the subjects who made the image possible are left out of the conversation. Raiford wrote, “It is not that photographs ‘lie,’ but we unduly invest them with the burden of an all-knowing truth.” Relieving protest photography of such a burden requires us to acknowledge that photography is always subjective, contingent on both photographers and viewers. Raiford’s approach suggests that, while a single dominant archive cannot ever capture the full range of such images, recognizing those limits is already a step in allowing for different, more complex visual narratives to inform the way we remember protests.  

After Gadsden’s photo was popularized, the teen eschewed all the attention he received from it. He granted a single interview to Jet magazine, in which he admitted that he had just been a curious bystander and not a protester. Decades later, the journalist Diane McWhorter reached Gadsden by phone after having searched for him for years, and she later recalled that “he told me he did not want to ‘become involved’ in my story and politely hung up.” Perhaps it isn’t surprising that a person who was suddenly thrust into the spotlight and made a symbol as a teen would not want to talk about it. After all, the photo had already claimed to speak for him. But how might depictions of Black lives, of this year’s protests, change if Black people were treated as active agents in their own record? We might know—and remember—much more.