Skin, Flesh, and the Affective Wrinkles of Civil Rights Photography

If we needed confi rmation of our ongoing investment in the civil rights movement and the visual media that brought its local confrontations to a national audience, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, a summer 2010 exhibit at the International Center for Photography, provides a vivid example.1 Drawing its title from Mamie Till’s heroic insistence on an open coffi n for her brutally murdered son and from the determination of African American photographers and newspaper editors to make the shocking image of Emmett Till’s face visible to the public, the exhibit and its accompanying volume powerfully affi rm the role of the visual media in bringing racial violence into public view. Simultaneously and less explicitly, however, the volume also illustrates how much more vexed this role is than the language that affi rms it, for the horrifi c photograph to which the title refers does not—indeed could not—accompany the title on the cover. Instead, the image is discreetly positioned at the volume’s interior.2 Replacing Till’s photograph on the cover is a more uplifting image by the same photographer. Ernest C. Withers’s depiction of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike shows a long horizontal line of male demonstrators proudly carrying signs declaring “I AM A MAN.” Celebrating and extending the strikers’ visibility,