Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Simone C. Drake and Dwan K. Henderson (review)

Abstract

importance of photography and mass media to the modern civil rights movement but also how the trauma of white supremacy and anti-Black violence continues to haunt, threaten, and end our lives. As Smith considers the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and ’70s, chapter six, “Photographic Reenactments,” examines Carrie Mae Weems’s Constructing History, a body of work about the era that includes a series of blackand-white photographs and a video that Weems created with art students in Atlanta. As part of the project, the artists re-created some of the era’s iconic images through photographed performances. Through these reenactments, Smith shows how the multilayered project draws attention to links between photography and history. Moving from photograph to performance to photograph, the students and their guide attempt expressly to embody the past, experience its present weight, and imagine what may be useful to carry forward to the future. In chapter seven, “False Returns,” Smith reflects on Taryn Simon’s The Innocents (2002), a photographic project in which the artist documents legal cases of mistaken identification by photographing exonerated individuals at the sites with which they were wrongly, fatefully associated. Here, Smith discusses Simon’s subjects, who were “misrecognized as the perpetrators of violent crimes on the basis of mug shots and other visual aids” in relation to longer histories and practices of racial profiling and criminal identification (152). Smith carefully considers the way in which the project both challenges and upholds photography’s powerful and painful relation to criminal identification and the prison industrial complex. In her Coda, “A Glimpse Forward,” Smith explores Dawoud Bey’s The Birmingham Project (2012-13), in which Bey recalls the white supremacist bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963 by pairing portraits of residents the age of the four murdered African American girls with portraits of people the age the martyred victims would have been, had they been free to survive. In describing this project, Smith writes: “Bey’s work looks back, but also forward to a viewer whom it asks to take up the unfinished work of racial justice” (14). In its mindful activation of past, present, and future, Bey’s Birmingham Project crystallizes Smith’s aims and intentions in Photographic Returns. Like many of the artists whose work she engages, she impels her audience both “to look back and move forward” (173) as we continue to struggle for racial justice and build the world we need to survive. For Smith, “the time of photography,” like the time for justice, is now.