Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People movie review (2014)
Perhaps not. While the case against slavery before the Civil War had largely been the province of the written word, by the time Union forces swept through the South as the war raged, photographers who came in their wake recorded the hideously despoiled flesh of whipped slaves, and these images helped explain to Northerners why it was just and necessary to mount a massive campaign against the “peculiar institution.”
After the war, newly freed blacks took control of their own images in two senses. Some learned the trade of photography and created pictures of their communities and acquaintances. And any African-American for a modest fee could have photos made of oneself and loved ones that reflected the subject’s own tastes in poses, attitudes, clothes and settings. The images Harris shows from this period are among the most entrancing in the film, as their projections of self-confidence, personal vitality and style, and in many cases, newfound prosperity anticipate similar displays of exuberant African-American pride following the civil rights victories a century later.
As Harris shows, black leaders understood the importance of such images from early on. That Frederick Douglass became one of the most photographed Americans of the 19th century surely testifies not just to his healthy self-regard but also an understanding of how instructive and inspiring these portraits could be to other blacks.
Yet the photographic and other proof of black talent, aspiration and success prompted various kinds of push-back throughout the Jim Crow era. Cartoons and advertising demeaning to blacks proliferated. D.W. Griffith’s horrendously racist “The Birth of a Nation,” American cinema’s first blockbuster, inspired the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been suppressed during Reconstruction. Perhaps worst of all, the lynchings and public mutilations of blacks in different parts of the country inspired a ghoulish mini-industry of postcards showing whites enjoying picnics and laughing festively as blacks were hanged and burned in front of them.
Such horrific images would be used to opposite effect during the civil rights era, however. At the funeral of brutally murdered teenager Emmett Till, the boy’s mother insisted that his coffin be left open so that photographers could record his grotesquely mutilated face. Those images shocked the nation and pointed toward years in which images of peaceful civil rights protestors being viciously attacked by racist Southern lawmen and mobs helped turned the tide of public opinion toward the overthrow of Jim Crow.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46tn6unpZy1bq2MpZynq12ZrrO3y7Jkm6SRmLhuvMeoq6ifopa9qbHRrGSappRiwamxjJ6knqqXmruksYyonWaZXaWysLzLnmRraGFp