Introduction: Black Images Matter: Contextualizing Images of Racialized Police Violence

Through the Black Lives Matter campaign, the country has witnessed on video the deadly force police visited on Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Sandra Bland, among others. Black protesters, like other social media activists, have stretched new media beyond its penchant for ephemerality, and “like-ability,” into a medium of dissent, remembrance, and intentional history, albeit of a spectacular nature. These Black media activists draw upon a longer tradition of using images to argue for Black equality. And it is indubitably true that images of Black suffering have been essential to the civil rights struggle. Whether it be the image of the whipped back of Private Gordon in 1862 (taken not long after photography became popular in the 1840s), or Richard Wright’s images of the Chicago slums in 12 Million Black Voices or the images of Bull Connor fire hosing Black youth in Birmingham or images of Rodney King’s beating, images of brutality against Black bodies have been a central part of the argument for civil rights—perhaps as important as the legal struggles themselves. However, with the rise of panoptic surveillance technologies, the relationship between visibility and power has become more complex, and the straightforward use of photographs as evidence of civil rights abuses more dubious. Once, images of brutalized marchers were used primarily by news outlets to shame the white actors and to call attention to inequalities. But arguably different forces are at work, for example, in the video of Eric Garner’s killing or the shooting of Walter Scott, which get mounted and mobilized in various ways across the wide world of the Web and across various right and left activist platforms, often failing to pierce the bubble of users’ individualized, choice-driven media world. This special issue aims to contextualize the images that have highlighted the racially discriminatory and predatory practices of American police, both pointing to the continuities of these images with earlier “Long Civil Rights movement” photography, dating back to the antebellum era—and to the current image regime’s divergences from it. It brings together papers highlighting preceding and intervening contexts that connect the contemporary images of police violence to a broader set of technologies of power used to frame the struggle of Black citizens with white police—and by extension a white supremacist state. The project of contextualization is vital, especially because the recent high trafficking of police brutality videos evinces a serial re-contextualization that has radically shifted the meaning of these images and their political valences.

The essays herein engage with a range of questions: What patterns of spectatorial identification and/or othering do these images inspire? Where and how have images of police violence been mounted, censored or misappropriated? And how do these images treat the Black body and its culturally-mandated work? Specifically, the volume brings together three linked problematics for analyzing images of police violence: history, ideology, and technology. Pushing beyond the immediate social media and cultural commentary, this special issue aims at a deeper appreciation of the meanings of these images in terms of preexisting, image-bound regimes of white power. The volume as a whole asserts and confirms that while the proliferation of police video images seems without precedent, visual traces of police-wrought violence against the Black body in the name of justice are evident in a lengthy genealogy of earlier media texts, ranging from lynching photography to civil rights–era photography to enormously popular television shows like Cops (1989–) and Law and Order (1990–2010). It is important to note that the bulk of the essays in this issue took shape and form before the rise of our current white supremacist presidential administration. If my memory holds, for many, during the all-too brief era of Obama’s presidency, it was possible to at least imagine that these images and the violence they contained were a part of what was passing away—an old regime of white power and brutal terror. But now they seem part of a horrific loop—a changing same—that continually redefines blackness through the logics and technologies of the...