Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography by Martin A. Berger (review)

Martin Berger’s Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography is a well-researched and nuanced analysis of iconic civil rights images depicting the struggle of African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama, during the sixties. In his groundbreaking work, Berger not only focuses on the significance of these visual images in garnering support for the black civil rights struggle, he pushes his readers to consider the ways that these documentary photographs of this important era reveal as much about whiteness as they do about blackness. In the tradition of other important works in critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, Berger illuminates “the role that the photographs played in managing whites’ anxieties about race,” but more specifically “how white journalists and their audiences selected, framed, and responded to the most famous scenes of the civil rights era” (6).

Seeing through Race relies on close readings of the coverage of both the white and black press to buttress his argument that the consistent use of certain photographs was part of a complex assertion of an acceptable “menu of narratives that performed reassuring symbolic work” (6). According to Berger, such narratives emphasizing the brutality of powerful whites against helpless blacks not only worked to garner support for the civil rights struggle, they served to reaffirm white power and privilege. Berger contrasts the consistent choice of images depicting peaceful, middle-class protestors and helpless children being attacked with hoses and vicious dogs with photographs of clear instances of black resistance and agency. In the first few chapters of the book, he provides convincing analyses of white shame, the complex practice of whites distancing themselves from blacks, as well as the white interests served by these classic depictions of the civil rights struggle.

Berger provides a convincing analysis of the images that were consistently chosen by the press during the period of his study. However, his discussion of “the lost images of civil rights” and “visual absences” in the documentary record provides some of the most convincing evidence for his thesis (113). Most notably his analysis of the limited coverage of Emmett Till’s murder by the white media reveals the subtle and “complex symbolic work that black children performed in the white imagination” (126). In addition, Berger’s discussion of the cases of Ethel Witherspoon and Annie Lee Cooper reminds readers of the importance of intersectional analyses of the experiences of African American women. More specifically, his discussion highlights how stereotypical ideas about black womanhood functioned as part of dominant civil rights narratives and depictions that are the foundation of his study.

Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography is a compelling work that contributes to the rich scholarship on the African American experience in the United States. It also provides an important example of the ways that a critical engagement with the meaning and construction of whiteness contributes to the projects of social justice equality.