Seeing the Future in an Image from the Past: Hannah Arendt, Garry Winogrand, and Photographing the World

Early on September 5, 1957, in an apartment building in Morningside Heights, New York City, the world arrived at the doorstep to Hannah Arendt's post-war American home in the form of The New York Times. Arendt stared at the face of a black girl, in a black dress adorned with a long white ribbon down its center, surrounded by a taunting, menacing, jeering white mob. A photograph that would make history, the picture of Dorothy Counts "in the newspapers [was] the point of departure of [Arendt's] reflections" on the question of race in America. Triggered by looking at this image by Douglas Martin, Arendt would write in the essay "Reflections on Little Rock" that the young woman's face "bore eloquent witness to the obvious fact that she was not precisely happy."¹ Regrettably, the image in the newspapers which brought the reality of racism into Arendt's home and prompted her to engage with the affairs of the world only resulted in a deeply flawed and highly controversial argument where Arendt failed to see how the world was set up to the detriment of some and the advantage of others.

In spite of her immediate, almost impulsively empathic response to this photograph and one taken the same day by Jack Jenkins of another young black student, Elizabeth Eckford, the truth of these images remained all but invisible to Arendt. But her failure, I would contend, results not only from her much-criticized narrow interpretation of the legal concepts of private rights of congregation and public rights to education; Arendt missed, as this essay will explain, nothing less but the promise of the future held in all photography.

As "eloquent witness" to black suffering at the hands of the white racist mob, Dorothy Counts' face was the punctum of Arendt's s analysis, that detail of the image that due to its poignancy "pricked" and "bruised" Arendt, what she could not simply dismiss and discard with the rest of the morning paper on September 5, 1957.² The picture stuck in her mind, and it took all of her mental prowess to ultimately erase and bury this original wound in a legalistic argument that failed to address the lived reality of black Americans. Unless we show why and how she failed to see these photographs, however, her flawed thinking might persist or others might overlook the import of similar photographs in a similar vein. It is possible to pursue Arendt's original instinct and, against her conclusions, bring the faces of both Dorothy Counts and Elizabeth Eckford back to light. Strangely, however, it is precisely by drawing on some of Arendt's categories that we may honor photography's eloquent witness to the heroism of the Civil Rights movement.

The Controversy over Arendt's Essay

Arendt's "Reflections on Little Rock" was published in Dissent with several months' delay, as the editors disagreed with Arendt's views. The essay unleashed a firestorm from critics who objected to Arendt's opinion that education is a private rather than a political right, and that school desegregation was not a matter to be ordered by the courts.³ Arendt made a case against the court-ordered racial integration of Southern schools which she viewed as a (private) matter of free association, rather than a (political) matter of equality. Arendt also criticized the use of children by their guardians and activists for political ends. As if to compensate for what she regarded as a failure in parenting, Arendt inserted herself into the position of the student's caretaker: "What would I do if I were a Negro mother?"⁴ She then proceeded to imagine herself in the position of a white mother, assuming imaginary authority over the teenagers in these photographs whom she felt were unduly cast by parents and political activists into a political struggle in which children have no part. After this initial empathic reaction to the photograph, which also prompted Arendt to view the struggle over equality as a generational issue between...