Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography by Shawn Michelle Smith (review)

Shawn Michelle Smith's new book is right on time. Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography helps us better understand our current cascade of crises, especially the lethal epidemic of police brutality and anti-Black violence in the United States. With a text centered on contemporary photography and theory, Shawn Michelle Smith, professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, brings together the history of photography, the history of race and racism in the United States, and a clear-eyed commitment to social justice. Her aim is to shine light on how the medium of photography can enable viewers to confront the life-threatening—and life-ending—structural racism of the past and the present while also holding space for viewers to envision and work toward a safe, healthy, and just antiracist future.

Like the artists whose work she engages, the talented interdisciplinary scholar is interested in photographs and photographic projects that, as she explains, draw "into view historical moments of racial crisis and transformation in the United States that have also figured prominently in the history of photography" (1). In other words, these are pictures that capture watershed moments and events in American history—major turning points that have also been catalytic to the medium's trajectory.

Both historically grounded and theoretically immersed, Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography investigates twin concerns of time and meaning. Smith is interested in exploring what she sees as the "temporal disruption" inherent in photography (24)—the way the medium "brings a past and also a future into the present" (31). At the same time, Smith is also interested in exploring what she calls "photographic mutability" (17), which she defines as the ways photographs allow for varied and varying meanings, including iconic images that "have become stand-ins for expansive, mobile, and sometimes contradictory meanings" (4).

Organized both chronologically and thematically, each chapter explores a photographic project or projects by a contemporary artist that invites contemplation on, or conversation about, the potent nexus of photography, race, and social justice across time. With focus on the era of slavery and abolition, chapter one, "Looking Forward and Looking Back," focuses in part on Rashid Johnson's Self Portrait with My Hair Parted Like Frederick Douglass (2003), a photograph based on a well-known daguerreotype of abolitionist Frederick Douglass produced around 1850 soon after the fugitive's legal emancipation. Smith first considers Douglass's Civil War era essays and lectures regarding photography, representation, personhood, and social progress, as well as the famous activist's own "repeated photographic performances." Smith argues that Douglass—"the most photographed American of the nineteenth century" (27)—understood incisively how the medium could slide between the tenses—how it could, she explains, "create forward momentum with a retrospective pull" (17). In this context, Smith then examines Johnson's contemporary photographic project, which dialogues directly with Douglass's historic portraits and proclamations while both experimenting with nineteenth-century photographic techniques and participating in twenty-first-century conversations regarding race, racism, the presentation of self, and the photographed subject.

With a focus on the Civil War, chapter two, "Photographic Remains," centers Sally Mann's photographs begun in 2001 of Civil War battlefields—specifically, Antietam—in conjunction with Alexander Gardner's famous photographs of death and destruction made at the bloody battle site in 1862. Smith considers how Mann's Antietam photographs engage both the history and the images of the pivotal battle that happened here on September 17, 1862, which killed or wounded 23,000 soldiers, and that led President Lincoln to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Smith considers how Mann's photographs and their titles conjure the potency of Gardner's well-known eyewitness photographs of the dead and nod to Gardner's process. At the same time, Smith shows how Mann's misty, uninhabited photographs, which dramatically reveal the living hand of the contemporary artist, prompt viewers to...