This lecture is drawn from Shawn Michelle Smith’s book Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography (Duke 2020). It focuses on Carrie Mae Weems’s photograph series Constructing History, for which Weems and a group of students reenacted famous photographs from the U.S. Civil Rights era. It discusses the elegiac and ambivalent nature of Weems’s recreations, which are often focused on assassinations, and proposes that the photographs enact a form of melancholia that creates an affective openness to the past and calls attention to a political project that remains unfinished. Constructing History highlights the complex relationship between photography and memory.

In the simplest of terms, this nation’s history of memorializing Black figures consists of two phases: before photography arrived in the United States and ever since. From the introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839 up through the twentieth century, Blacks and non-Blacks used photography to signify, cement, and remember the importance of certain Black figures. Examples include Harriet Tubman, Dred Scott, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Huey Newton, and Barack Obama. This paper considers the significance of a commonality visible across the lot: sitting. The concern here is how these iconic photographs – representative of Black people, the Black past, and Black protest – function in the aggregate as an archive of Black iconicity, the central motif of which is the seated Black subject.

Visual manipulation has been common in war photography, but in the digital age, correcting and colorizing vintage images has become pervasive. Projects like Random Acts of Photo Restoration on Facebook and Vintage Vietnam on Instagram use crowdsourcing to leverage the affordances of AI software to restore and colorize personal photographs, including those from the "Wall of Faces," a virtual memorial supported by the U.S.-based Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. In Vietnam, Project Team Lee is an initiative that deploys volunteers to digitize, colorize, and reunite portraits of martyrs with the revolutionary mothers who have long mourned their sons sacrificed for the anticolonial cause. What drives this fascination with photographic restoration? How do these practices, especially colorization, influence the revolutionary spirit and revival of patriotism in the postwar generation in Vietnam and the U.S.?

After the Second World War, as the Cold War took hold and many countries in the global south began to break free of colonial rule, the United States sought to promote its version of democracy across the world. In Africa, the U.S. Information Agency invested in a major program of activity within which photography served to imagine capitalist, consumerist, and democratic futures for the continent, modeled in its own image. From the mid-1950s, however, as African decolonization gathered pace and the U.S. civil rights movement took on new momentum, racial injustice presented an unprecedented challenge to this task, with images of racial violence circulating widely across the globe and undermining the image the U.S. sought to project. This presentation examines the ways in which the U.S. Information Agency responded to this challenge. For a brief period, civil rights protest was presented as a form of "democracy in action."

This session will reflect on recent civic movements from Latin America, considering the manifold ways in which photography has been deployed by members of the public towards justice seeking purposes. Starting with an in-depth discussion of the Nicaraguan case, where a large-scale student-led protest movement emerged in 2018, only to collapse into an ever-deepening human rights crisis, we will be looking at parallel examples from the region. How do different publics express their political identities and demands through photography? Can their aspirations be brought into being photographically? Ultimately, what happens when photography enters the political field, in the hands of the people?

Patricia Hayes engages with an archive of interviews with the late Santu Mofokeng (1956-2020) who posed critical questions about environmental activism in South Africa. Mofokeng argued that wide-ranging photographs of land and its development – actual and projected – might help to determine what the actual questions might be. He insisted that no one would pressure him to think "like other people" and interrogated the activities of anti-fracking groups as a symptom of a pre-existing white liberal problem. As a participant in an international project on "social landscapes" (2013), Mofokeng held back a number of images that in his view needed other kinds of unravelling and pointed to far deeper and older problems around race and exclusion.