David Jackson’s heartrending image of Mamie stoically gazing at her child, murdered in Mississippi by racists for allegedly whistling at a white woman, is credited with having galvanized the civil rights movement.Īnd more recently, in 2015, a photograph of the drowned body of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi lying facedown on a Turkish beach added pressure on governments, four years after the disastrous conflict in Syria had begun, to accept greater numbers of refugees from that country. In 1955, Mamie Till Mobley asked that the mutilated body of her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till, be photographed and published in Jet magazine. The students cite the power of specific photographs as inspiration. Even if it’s hard to face.” The students are dissatisfied with “a world where post-shooting photos are mothers hugging their daughters, and police tape.” Nor are they interested only in photography as it is conventionally done-as a reaction-but also as an empty frame that may one day, tragically and hauntingly, need to be filled in, largely because too few did anything now to prevent such future calamities. Because in order to find a solution, we have to see the problem. It’s made when we see humanity at its worst, and together, bring out our best. “And progress isn’t made through censorship.
Orlando 49, Vegas 59, Parkland 17 - numbers that lack humanity,” they assert.
