Confronting the Legacy of Photography’s Anti-Blackness

Photography and death are tied, inextricably, in a knot. Art historians, critics, poets, and theorists have covered this extensively: Post-mortem photography began alongside the medium’s invention. The American Civil War is recalled primarily through photographs of dead or dying soldiers and civilians. Even fake death, as in Hippolyte Bayard’s Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840), attests to its presence in photography. 

Roland Barthes wrote that a photograph is “the living image of a dead thing.” Susan Sontag said that photography “converts the whole world into a cemetery.” But what kinds of death have been, and still are, imaged—and how are they imaged? What separates the imaging of various cultures and races and how are these images disseminated?

Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (2024), by Kimberly Juanita Brown, examines these questions through Black death—the imaging of the death of Black people—and shows the legacy of anti-Blackness to be characteristic of the photographic enterprise. The inaugural volume of On Seeing, a new series from MIT Press, Mortevivum is a necessary addition to the archive of photographic thought. It will change the way readers look at images of all kinds. It shows how the scaffolding that structures the photographic enterprise is laid out before us in the everyday onslaught of images.

Photography grew up with the United States, flourishing along the path of empire as it advanced westward. The medium was instrumental to the national project, as seen in the many nineteenth-century surveys designed to scout exploitable land for settling and mineral mining.  Intentionally and unintentionally, it promoted the white supremacy of colonial conquest. “Because the nation’s history is intertwined with black enslavement, indigenous slaughter and removal, theft and unacknowledged violence, the land is haunted and so are its people,” Brown writes. “Photographs reinforce a national ‘we’ that never was and never will be.”

Mortevivum lays out an array of exhibits: the Civil War, lynching, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, apartheid and the Soweto uprising in South Africa, the Rwandan genocide, Rodney King, and George Floyd, among many others. As Brown writes, “antiblackness blankets this history like a cloak with no beginning and no end, offering only momentary exercises of reprieve. And almost never on purpose.” The latent effects are as treacherous as the obvious. Film stock, for example, was tested specifically to flatter white and lighter skin tones. Despite years of complaints from Black mothers concerned by the faces of their children looking like “ink blots,” Kodak changed its film only when furniture and chocolate manufacturers claimed that their formulations discriminated against dark hues. In 2012, the artist duo Broomberg & Chanarin explored this history in their series To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light. The project’s title phrase had been used by Kodak to signal that its new film stock could render dark skin. Today, the legacy of this bias continues, as the researcher Joy Buolamwini discovered, with flawed facial recognition programs and artificial intelligence.

Brown offers the term mortevivum—“the living dead” in Latin—in order “to understand this particular photographic phenomenon: the hyperavailability of images in the media that traffic in tropes of impending black death. These tropes cohere around an ocular logic steeped in racial violence (and the nostalgia engendered therein), and they make any tragedy, any crisis, an opportunity for viewers to find pleasure in black peoples’ pain.” Thus, the history of photography is shadowed by the aestheticization of Black death.

Mortevivum is a shock to the system delivered with incendiary grace. Brown makes visible the latency—or veiling—of the Black experience of photography and the disseminated image through media. Her critical perspective moves across the shared history of postcolonial Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. She writes about these moments and their reverberations in a way that conjures today’s realities. The book feels present, even when the photographs and histories tell us of well-trod pasts. The reader is to use history to reckon with the present, as in a Civil War–era photograph Brown examines early in the book: John Reekie’s A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia (1865), wherein five Black soldiers bury the bodies of their slain comrades. One of these men sits just behind a cart piled with skeletal remains and five skulls; five skulls and five Black men. The seated man gazes into the lens, to the living.

Nearly 150 years later, in The Birmingham Project (2013), photographer Dawoud Bey made a series of striking diptychs addressing the human toll of the civil rights movement. He paired a Black child who, at the time of the portrait, was the same age as the victims of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, and an adult fifty years older—the age the child would have been in 2013. The series has become one of Bey’s most stirring reflections on the Black experience of violence, hate, and resiliency in America—here the sitting figures confronting the viewer through a gaze suffused with this history.

In Mortevivum, essays on white paper with black text are interrupted with black pages that broadcast pull quotes set in white type, a design strategy that reflects the binary Brown examines throughout. It reinforces the ideas between the pages: Blackness relegated to punctual interlocution. The three main chapters—The Empire, The Viewer, and The Sentiment—cover historical epochs or pinpoint significant moments in time and examine a few photographs selected for their representative potency, such as Bill Hudson’s Police Dog Attack, Birmingham, Alabama (1963), and Peter Magubane’s photobook Magubane’s South Africa (1978). The text is dense with references to photographic thought, theory, and social history, from Frantz Fanon and Aimé Cesaire’s anticolonial discourse to Achille Mbembe’s and Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopower, sovereignty, enmity, and killing. For some, this may feel impenetrable, a wall put up by the author. Instead, the strategy braids together photographic relevance and truth to testify that anti-Blackness is characteristic of the photographic enterprise. “Imperial dispossession is a photographic practice, an existing archive of destruction, enslavement, and scopic control,” Brown writes.

There are the power structures between photographer, subject, and viewer—and there are also the circumstances of dissemination, the observer-reporter who interferes in what has transpired and what will transpire. This is why Brown reproduces newspaper images of Black death with the bodies omitted, not as a form of censorship, but as an act of resistance. These altered newspaper images force the viewer to reckon with the reactions of witnesses. “I contend that black death is such a naturalized photographic documentary position,” Brown writes, “that most white viewers do not notice how ubiquitous it is.”

And yet, Brown shows us life as well—the life of those reacting to death but more importantly the work of artists who are resisting this ubiquity through creation. Sandra Brewster’s series It’s all a blur (2017) embodies this resistance through works that refuse or evade the detail of the documentary position. Her photographs depict subjects as ghostly silhouettes that are, in Brown’s words, “bathed in the protective submersion of anonymity.” Inspired by Brewster’s parents, who immigrated from Guyana to Canada in the 1960s, the images depict the facelessness of migrancy. We know the figures are moving, shaking their heads during a long exposure as if rejecting the constraints of the fixated moment. The flecking of emulsion (a product of the gel transfer process) from the surface of the works becomes a Black-like skin falling away from the hard, evidentiary white surface. “We will continue to exceed the frame of the photograph so that it will not be the only way to define us,” Brown writes. “We will have beauty without terror and without violence.”

Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual was published by MIT Press in February 2024.