Between Empathy and Imagination: New Photographic Experiments in Memorial Aesthetics in Too Hard to Keep and The Birmingham Project

Alexander Hirsch (bio)
University of Alaska Fairbanks

The artist Jason Lazarus collects and displays photographs deemed “too hard to keep.” This essay contrasts Lazarus’s exhibitions with Dawoud Bey’s Birmingham Project, which commemorates the 1963 bombing of a Baptist Church in Alabama by exhibiting photographs of present-day residents of Birmingham. What contributions do these photo projects make as responses to loss? Despite their differences, both exhibitions build miraculous connections between strangers through powerful exercises in imagination. In the end, Too Hard to Keep and the Birmingham Project represent experiments in memorial aesthetics that occupy the productive tension between empathy and critical detachment.

Since 2010, artist Jason Lazarus has been collecting and exhibiting photographs deemed by their owners “too hard to keep” (Habe-Evans). Lazarus solicits the images from anonymous strangers who mail him candid portraits, photographs of pets, landscapes, sunsets, empty rooms, and quotidian scenes. The growing archive of images contributes to what he calls a “repository of photographs, photo-objects, and digital files [that are] too painful to live with any longer” (Habe-Evans). Though apparently unintended as public art at the time they were taken, the photos are framed as such once collected, curated, and exhibited in gallery spaces. The exhibitions summon into a public domain the private pain of individuals; by doing so, they reflect a mise-en-scène of grief that builds a felicitous connection between strangers. This is a public receptacle for excessive affect, a place where we can deposit material objects charged with the aura of a feeling that is, as Lazarus writes, “too difficult to hold on to, but too meaningful to destroy” (Lavalette). Here we have an artist who resurrects and archives lost or somehow “dead” subjects and whose namesake, Lazarus, ironically recalls a biblical figure famous for coming back from the dead.

It’s a brilliant project. To start, the exhibitions invite spectators in the gallery to reflect upon the nature of their own most difficult memories by engaging those of the photos’ former owners. What especially distinguishes Too Hard to Keep (hereafter THTK) is the way it showcases painful traces of loss and brokenness that exist in a suspended space of can’t-live-with / can’t-live-without. By contrast to the recent “Right to be Forgotten” movement that has sought to establish a universal right to have the vestiges of one’s internet presence erased, THTK focuses on emblems of unbearability too valuable to erase.¹ The THTK archive is flush with photographs that index such loss. THTK also calls attention to the impasses faced by those who inhabit an aftermath where it is not only loss that is at stake, but also the loss of loss itself. Lazarus requires that the owners of photographs “truly part” with the images they donate to his project. He accepts digital copies only on condition that other digital copies be deleted: “If you’re going to part with it – part with it. Then what you’re seeing has traction. . . . It is the remnant of the decision to relinquish the image from their archive into a public archive” (Habe-Evans). In any case, the images that make up the archive are tokens of suffering and grief that must be preserved in some way, even if they are abandoned by their former owners.²

Here, I contrast THTK with Dawoud Bey’s Birmingham Project (hereafter Birmingham), another recent photographic exhibition (2012–2013) that experiments with mediating and responding to loss in provocative, generative ways. Birmingham commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama – a flash point for the Civil Rights Movement – and memorializes the lives of the six African-American children who died, including four girls who died in the blast, and two boys who were killed in related incidents.³ Bey photographed present-day residents of Birmingham, half of whom are the same ages as the 1963 bombing victims (eleven, thirteen, fourteen, and sixteen), and half who are the age that the victims would have been had they survived the attack (sixty-five, sixty-seven, sixty-eight, and seventy, respectively). The exhibition features the portraits side by side, as a series of diptychs juxtaposing images that picture what the victims might have looked like at the time of their deaths with what they could look like today, had their lives not been tragically lost. The result is an arresting photographic exercise that illuminates the haunting echo not only of lives lost, but of the unrealized futures erased by the bombing.

This essay reflects on the way THTK and Birmingham converts spectators in the gallery into belated witnesses, albeit in different ways. Witnessing is often described as a mode of observation whereby a bystander beholds an event and then later bears testimony to the truth of this experience. But with Lazarus’s project, spectators cannot see what precipitated loss. The photo submissions are received anonymously and without explanation; the images, when exhibited, are displayed without reference or description.⁴ The viewer cannot help but imagine what makes this wide-angle landscape too hard to keep, or what renders that polaroid portrait too painful to live with. The result is that the art nearly becomes the story that viewers tell about what happened. Spectators in the gallery recognize, of course, that the story they tell cannot possibly encompass the true history behind the images, even if some pictures invite more or less accurate educated guesses. Whatever the distance between fiction and reality, spectators’ stories reflect the irrepressible desire to craft narrative for an unsettling, perplexing photographic object.

Birmingham also makes belated witnesses out of gallery spectators, who become third person observers party to loss and harm decades after the event it occasioned. Like THTK, Birmingham presents photographs in which the truth is somehow veiled, given that the portraits exhibit images of people who are not the true subjects of the photographs. Despite this similarity, Birmingham inverts THTK. With the latter, spectators often cannot quite identify the cause of unbearable loss, and this prompts an imagining that completes the exhibition. With the former, however, spectators already know the cause of loss, which is stated in the very title of the project, even if they cannot track the effect – the lost potential that attends the unrealized future lives of the bombing victims – which they must imagine by peering at photographic surrogates. THTK and Birmingham both cultivate a memorial aesthetics that hones the presence of an absence. But where the enigmatic past is what matters for THTK, with Birmingham what matters is the unfathomable future that was, for six children, violently obliterated.

The question is, what contributions do these photo projects make as responses to loss? At a time when protests over commemorative statues memorializing Confederate officials have reached a fever pitch, and when debates over the lasting power of Emmett Till’s photographic image raise such pressing concerns over the role of art in the course of public mourning, the stakes of our responses to the question remain high.⁵ The goal of THTK and Birmingham is manifestly not to bring about forgiveness, because the images do not establish a space for victims to engage with perpetrators, let alone release agents of harm from their burden of guilt. And neither project preoccupies itself with reparative justice, vengeance, punishment, or other forms of redressing past pain by focusing on what perpetrators of loss and brokenness presently owe. Finally, though THTK and Birmingham resist the urge of forgetfulness, and by their very nature reject the cathartic release associated with amor fati, they equally eschew infinite despair and melancholic fixation. THTK urges subjects of loss neither to let go nor to remain attached to their loss, even as it provides a means by which the photographs connected to loss may themselves be lost. Rather, THTK encourages such subjects to forfeit their emblem of too-muchness to a tardy tragic chorus that may not be able to fix what has been broken, but can bear witness to the trace that remains. Birmingham too elicits a chorus of late witnesses who are confronted by the undeniable exhortation to conceive the lives of the departed, even if this remains an impossible demand for spectators who cannot see the victims, or their lost futures.

What follows is split into three sections. In the first, I review some of the archetypal images from the THTK archive, focusing in particular on the way they encourage an audience of strangers to envision the lives of others in a manner that establishes grounds for the emergence of an uncanny affinity. To look at Lazarus’s THTK images is to view something deeply personal about the lives of the photos’ former owners, and this immanent contact brings about an intimacy that takes shape around a shared imaginable that synchronizes being in meaningful ways. But this intimate contact is betrayed by the fact that viewers cannot perceive what the intimacy is all about because its determining source remains crucially hidden for spectators. In the second section, I review a number of images from the Birmingham exhibition. Bey’s photographs bring the world of the victims into the space of the spectator, thus forging a more immediate contact between the two.⁶ And yet, the photos feature images of models who are analogues for victims, the true images of whom remain undisclosed, thus witnesses behold a world that is ultimately beyond their ken. In the end, I argue, both photo projects represent photographic experiments that occupy the productive tension between empathic unsettlement and critical detachment. Remarkably, THTK manages to induce intimacy by preventing the mutual understanding required for conventional empathy; Birmingham engenders intimacy by obstructing our view of victims and their fugitive futures. Whatever their important differences, both art projects draw on and make use of distance, the expanse dividing and separating people, as a necessary condition of possibility for ethical engagement. As such, THTK and Birmingham cultivate a memorial aesthetics that builds miraculous connections between strangers through powerful exercises in imagination, the operative idiom for reckoning with afterness.⁷

1

“Where the painter constructs,” Susan Sontag writes in On Photography, “the photographer discloses” (135). In part, this distinction between artistic construction and disclosure relies on the assumption that where a painting visually includes the intentions of the artist, in a photograph one sees what is to be seen whatever the photographer’s intentions. Kendall Walton underscores this point when he writes that “Photographs are counterfactually dependent on the photographed scene even if the beliefs (and other intentional attitudes) of the photographer are fixed” (264). This is why, Walton argues, photographs can serve as evidence when paintings cannot.⁸ Following this logic, Walter Benn Michaels points out that

I can hardly, say, accuse you of stealing my wallet and then offer as proof a little watercolor I’ve just made of you sneaking into my room. The watercolor would count more as a repetition of the accusation than as evidence of its truth, precisely because the referent — your entering my room — would be optional rather than necessary. . . . The photograph necessarily shows what was in front of the camera; the painting shows what was in front of the canvas only optionally — and the option is the painter’s. (12)

The argument has been taken for granted in photography theory for decades. But with THTK, though the photographs serve as evidence, it is not evidence that reveals truth. In addition to documenting an event, the pictures also gesture toward its unbearable impact. Roland Barthes famously argued that a photograph is “in no way a presence . . . its reality is that of the having-been-there” (44). With THTK, by contrast, spectators bear explicit witness to their own having not been there. Indeed, from the perspective of the archive, what precipitates loss remains concealed. What counts is that the photograph is the relic of a memory that is too hard to keep.

One of the photos from the archive (Fig. 1), in black and white, shows a crowd of a dozen or so friends posing for a group shot. They are in a park at night, or perhaps they are camping. Most are smiling, though not everyone appears to be ready to pose for the shot. In the back row, one man is sitting on another man’s shoulders, dragging on a cigarette. In the foreground a dog is climbing into a woman’s lap. Judging from the haircuts and attire, the image may have been taken in the early 1970s which, remarkably, means the former owner must have held onto the photograph for at least forty years. Everything in the photograph appears unremarkable but for the lower righthand corner, where one of the persons originally pictured has had their shape crassly cut out with a razor. The effect is disquieting. In an effort to censor a portion of the photograph, it appears the photo’s former owner has attempted to purge the image of someone, presumably the source of some wounding. But, tragically, as with all cases of censorship, the eye is drawn to what is repressed. Hardly spirited away, the entire photograph is about the erasure and, by extension, about the person who is no longer there but whose trace continues to haunt the image as the presence of an absence.

Fig. 1. Jason Lazarus, THTK (2010-Present). Used by permission.

Another photo (Fig. 2) pictures the imprint of a woman lying in bed. She is wrapped up, smothered in a white patterned duvet. Concealed beneath the cover, she appears ghost-like, and this metaphor underscores her spectral position as someone connected to a too-hard-to-keep memory that must be jettisoned, if also distributed and shared. The image faintly recalls Rene Magritte’s “The Lovers” (1928), a painting that famously portrays the frustrated desires of two lovers entangled, both veiled by a cloak of pale fabric. Asked once about the meaning of the painting, Magritte replied, in a surrealist mood, that “It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable” (87). Of course, in the case of the image from THTK, even if the details concerning the source of loss remain unknowable for spectators, we understand that the photo must mean something to someone, because the former owner has surrendered it to an archive that indexes vital sources of undeadness. In this sense one could argue that Lazarus’s phrasing of “too hard to keep, but too meaningful to destroy,” might be somewhat misleading. The “but” is too quick. It might be that some of these pictures are too meaningful to destroy precisely because they are too hard to keep. One must jettison the relic of a memory if it symbolizes a source of grief that is overwhelming enough; but precisely because that grief is so overwhelming one must take care not to obliterate its artifact, for doing so may threaten a site of vivified meaning. As one critic recently put it, “A photograph is the umbilical cord connecting us to what we have loved and lost, to what is gone because we failed to save it, or to what might have been, but now will never be” (Silverman 3–4).

Fig. 2. Jason Lazarus, THTK (2010-Present). Used by permission.

Not all of the THTK photographs demonstrate instances of loss that are exclusively centered on people. One image (Fig. 3) frames a dark and ominous sky viewed through a car’s front window shield. A storm appears to be gathering, and leaves are blowing about a dirt road lined with trees that are swaying in the gale. In the distance, across a field, one can almost make out the silhouette of a residence. On either side of the road we see an old chain-link fence guarding a lawn, which has been faintly tire-marked by vehicles trailing an ad hoc driveway. The scene is charged with the dragging undertow of an unnerving feeling. Peering out from the vehicle’s interior underscores a sense of shelter: the car as haven from the storm. And yet this feeling of safety is belied by the disturbing knowledge that this place is somehow the enigmatic sign of a memory deemed too hard to keep.

Fig. 3. Jason Lazarus, THTK (2010-Present). Used by permission.

There is another photograph (Fig. 4) that speaks to the ways in which places can be vested with what Raymond Williams once called a “structure of feeling,” actively-felt meanings and changes of presence that exert palpable pressures, even if they cannot be defined or otherwise easily classified (132–133). The image is of an old hatchback, parked underground in a garage. A beam of light is streaming through a clearing above a ramp that leads outside, casting the dark concrete bunker into relief. The light carries the faint green hue of flora from outside, illuminating streaks marring the walls and contrasting the cool concrete with warm light, death with life. As with the photograph of the gathering storm, one cannot help but sense the loneliness, dread, and yearning that coalesce as the photo’s gestalt.

Fig. 4. Jason Lazarus, THTK (2010-Present). Used by permission.

As gallery visitors viewing THTK, spectators are cast as witnesses who cannot be sworn because they cannot offer testimony of an event that remains crucially out of view. Peering into the photographs on display means coming to terms with the fact that although the spectators know the photographs are tokens of unbearability, more often than not, they cannot understand why. Rather than focus on delivering an empirically accurate portrayal of what they observe, spectators in the gallery are instead acutely aware that their testimony will be largely invented. The emphasis lies with the fantasy of what might have been, and with the stories that spectators tell about this imaginable past. Great art, Theodor Adorno once wrote, depicts something that we do not and cannot know. In light of THTK, he might have added that, in part, what makes such art resonant is that its audience must try, and generatively fail, to come to terms with it through storytelling. As such, THTK can be understood in terms of what Charles Altieri has recently argued regarding the goal of art generally:

Rather than describe or represent phenomena, the primary task of art is to ‘realize’ states of being by eliciting what power these states can offer for the sensibilities that engage them. So making must take priority over interpreting, and the concern for what can be willed as engaged inspiration for conditions of making replaces the concern for how willing might be justified by knowing. The primary question for art . . . becomes not whether a statement is true but whether the energies of its making can be exemplary and can specify domains where particular stances become valuable for what they bring to the world.(20)

For Altieri, in other words, the “primary task” of art is not to explain the truth of something, or otherwise decant experience through representation. Rather, its objective is to evoke meaningful “states of being” that are tied to the energetics of its making. Following this line of thought, we might say that the primary objective of Lazarus’s curated photographs is to elicit powerful states of being. One cannot tell what happened in that place on that stormy day, or otherwise explain why the woman wrapped in a blanket represents a source of intensely felt loss. The focus is placed instead on the values these images conjure up, and what dispositions of imagination they make possible. In part, the meaningful dispositions summoned up by the images stems from the uncanny bond they facilitate between former owners and spectators in the gallery. Though a closeness forms between the two, former owners and gallery visitors never actually meet; they remain strangers for one another, and what brings the spectators to the former owners remains nonetheless distancing.

Conventional models of intimacy tend to stress the vital role played by recognition, reciprocity, empathy, shared space, contact, or promising as vehicles by which intimacy is sacralized. In this sense, intimacy is often articulated either as a coming to know and affirm who the other authentically is, or as a form of giving and getting, where what is exchanged is equitably distributed. With THTK, however, there is not enough mutual understanding for recognition to take place. And the intimacy generated by the photographs is not facilitated by reciprocal exchange either, because former owners surrender the photographs without receiving anything directly in return from spectators. Similarly, the intimacy marshaled by THTK is not a product of promising. Where promises guarantee what will be, spectators of THTK come to embrace another grammatical mood associated with what might have happened. In this way, ironically, spectators end up promising not to promise, because they occupy a register of attention, encounter, and relation that prevents them from being able to accurately predict the past. The intimacy struck in the THTK gallery is not the outcome of empathy either, if empathy can be defined as a tenderness toward the suffering of the other when one recognizes that one has personally experienced this pain before. Empathy nurtures a shared horizon of understanding that is ultimately embedded in a personal memory.⁹ With THTK, however, spectators cannot develop empathy for the photograph owners, because it is unclear what their loss represents, or from where it derives. Though they may feel compassion in a generic way, it is uncertain whether viewers in the gallery can connect empathically with former owners. Part of what makes THTK so effective is that a touchstone of intimacy is established precisely by this frustrating inability to empathize.¹⁰ A bond of intimate alliance takes shape around an animating condition of sudden unsettlement. Because they are unable to describe a source of loss for victims, spectators are released from the pressure to bear testimony to it. Instead, they are placed in a position where, because they cannot know, they must imagine. In imagining, spectators foster a connection with former owners by virtue of what is meaningfully possible even if — or precisely because — it is likely not true. As such, with THTK, it is not inherent likenesses that establish a precondition for intimacy. As with other forms of relationality, this one coheres around a public object — in this case, a photograph — but that object is not like a social contract or birthright, concepts that both name what is guaranteed for members of a group. Instead, this affinity is brought about by what is ultimately uncertain, and it is exercised through an invitation to envision who the other is, and imagine what has happened to them.¹¹

2

Until they yielded their pictures to THTK, the former owners likely never intended them to be displayed in public. The photographs that make up Birmingham were, however, always intended as public art. They are exquisitely polished, expertly crafted artifacts. This difference in intention changes the effect. In the THTK gallery, spectators and former owners experience an intimate (albeit asymmetrical) bond, not only because of the sympathy viewers may feel for all victims of suffering, but also because of the candid quality of the photographs. Precisely because we were never meant to see these representations of loss – they contain what Walter Benjamin once called the spark of “contingency” or accident (510) – spectators may be tempted to feel that they are somehow more “authentic.”¹² The photos are raw, unfiltered, and candid, and spectators thus trust them more. The Birmingham images are different. They are carefully cultivated, focused, and professionally edited. There is intentionality behind these images, so that when spectators view the pictures they identify as an expected audience. Recognizing this fact potentially threatens trust between the photographer and the viewer, because the viewer knows the images are deliberately staged to solicit a specific response, which engenders the paranoid feeling that one is being manipulated. This distrust is elevated by the fact that, in the galleries, viewers cannot see the victims who are promised as the true subjects of the photographic memorial. Despite this distrust – or rather perhaps because of it – Birmingham appeals to a complex form of affinity. Because spectators view portraits of models who are substitutes for the true subjects of the photos, they must think analogically about the victims of the bombing. Doing so prompts viewers to imagine who the victims actually were, given that their images are conspicuously absent from the gallery. Whereas THTK establishes touchstones of intimacy by providing windows into worlds of loss that spectators were never meant to behold, Birmingham galvanizes affinity through carefully staged images of models playing victims.¹³

In contrast to THTK, which focuses on animating perplexity around the question of what happened, Birmingham connects spectators in the gallery to what has been lost but assumes they will understand what transpired in the past. The victims of the 1963 Birmingham bombing – Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, along with Virgil Ware and Johnny Robinson, who lost their lives as a result of the violence that followed the bombing – are memorialized by Bey’s sixteen photographic diptychs. Like THTK’s, Birmingham’s objective is not to bring about forgiveness or stoke abiding resentments, but Birmingham departs from THTK because the victims of loss have died, and so cannot dedicate a mysterious icon of loss to a public archive. The victims are gone, and with them their lost futures. By definition, these futures remain open to a contingent field of endless possibility – anything might have happened for these children, but this potentiality has been cut off by the bombing’s destructive, violent force. Bey’s photographs memorialize the loss brought about by the bombings, but do so indirectly, because the photos picture people who are not accurately reflect the victims. This itself might be read as violent, because those who were erased by the bombing are made absent again by images that exclude their appearance. In this case, however, Bey uses the technique of erasure to draw attention to what is so profoundly tragic about violence.

In “Mary Parker and Caela Cowan” (2014), two 40” × 64” pigment prints mounted on dibond sit side by side. The images are rendered in stark black and white, referencing both the thematic racial undertow and a connection to the historical time frame of the 1960s. On the left sits Mary Parker, who appears to be around sixty-two years old, the age the twelve-year old victims of the Birmingham bombing would have been had they survived. She is leaning comfortably over a pew, five rows from the back of a church. Her face is in focus, and her gaze, framed by a pair of spectacles, is fixed squarely on the camera. As Bey explains, “part of the process in The Birmingham Project involved constructing the circumstances by and through which his sitters could reassert their rights to the gaze” (Platt 15). For Bey, even if they cannot reclaim total agency, part of the goal of memorialization is to empower victims such that they too can look, and look back at those who see them. The irony, of course, is that the images do not feature portraits of victims, but rather substitute models playing victims. On the right hangs a portrait of Caela Cowan, a twelve-year old surrogate for Collins or McNair, perhaps. Cowan is seated in roughly the same position, and in what appears to be the same church as Parker. Though her gaze is also trained on the camera, the expression on her face is more imposing, perhaps more accusing. Her gaze is sharper than Parker’s, which is more resigned by contrast. One notices also that where Parker is posed in three-quarter view, a casual posture, Cowan sits square to the camera, shoulders hunched, engaged. Compositionally, both Parker and Cowan encounter the viewer directly, but Cowan’s body language introduces greater tension.

The same tension can be found in “Braxton McKinney and Lavon Thomas” (2014). The diptych features McKinney — who represents Virgil Ware, perhaps, or Johnny Robinson — on the left, and Thomas on the right. Where McKinney’s right arm is draped over the pew, Thomas’s left dips in front, giving the impression that the two are mirror reflections of one another. As with “Mary Parker and Caela Cowan,” the younger model’s facial expression conveys scorn, even as the older model’s gaze suggests something more tender. This tension is key to the mode of memorialization that Bey’s photo project presents, which aims not only to stimulate remembrance of a past event, but also to attune viewers to the particularity of the victims of that event, and to their irreplaceable value.

A third pair of photographs, “Taylor Falls and Deborah Hackworth” (2012), displays models seated in another area of the church. A mural, or perhaps an ornate spread, adorns the backdrop. Though out of focus, the pattern of the backcloth on each side of the diptych coalesces above the shoulder of each model; swirling, climbing, reaching, almost touching at either side of the model, serving as a bridge across time, connecting the younger and the older iteration of each surrogate. Rather than leaning in over the pew, which simultaneously positions them as encroaching upon yet also barricaded against the viewer, the models in this photograph are sitting upright. Notably, the models are seated in chairs whose rigid armature recalls prison bars, though it is unclear whether the furniture’s cage symbolically protects or confines (or both).

By substituting the actual victims with images of proxy residents of Birmingham, Bey underscores the irreducibility of the individuals who were killed, and also draws attention to the utter disposability suffered by all victims of terrorist violence. What distinguishes terrorism, some scholars have argued, is that it includes the deliberate killing of innocent people, where the substitution of one victim for another does not significantly alter the objective of violence.¹⁴ Anyone will do, so long as the victim happens to fit generically into a broad identity category targeted for attack. In this way, terrorism violates what many deontologists refer to as the immutable, intrinsic value of individuals. By photographing proxy models, Bey highlights the way the Birmingham bombing reduced its victims to mere use-value, and simultaneously affirms how deeply brutalizing this was for them. By selecting surrogate models to pose as if they were the victims of the bombing, Bey uses displacement to establish the victims’ value, inducing intimacy with them. This is ironic, of course, given that intimacy is often understood as a quintessential function of proximity. Yet with Birmingham, as with THTK, intimacy is foregrounded through sundering. In the case of Birmingham, this is achieved through distancing, and the severing expanse interpolated between who is here (the models), and who should be (the victims).

The images we view in the Birmingham collection are gathering places for the ghosts of the past, and also the ghosts of the victims’ futures, and in this way the photos convoke haunting. They are all the more haunting by virtue of the fact that these photographs feature phantasmagorias that serve as analogies. For the photography critic Kaja Silverman, all photographs are ultimately structures of analogy: “Photography is . . . an ontological calling card: it helps us to see that each of us is a node in a vast constellation of analogies” (11). We are “each of us” connected to one another through a vast interlocking similitude composed of relationships that we cannot extricate ourselves from: “analogy runs through everything that is like a shuttle through a loom” (Silverman 11). Coming to terms with this ontological fact is both relieving, in that the burden of solitude is leavened, but also threatening, in that our autonomy, agency, and primacy are radically called into question by our mutual reliance. “Photography,” Silverman argues, “is the vehicle through which these profoundly enabling but unwelcome relationships are revealed to us, and through which we learn to think analogically. It is able to disclose the world, show us that it is structured by analogy, and help us to assume our place within it because it, too, is analogical” (11). Such analogies do not collapse one into the other, or otherwise reduce difference to sameness; rather, they point both to similarity and difference: “Similarity is the connector, what holds two things together, and difference is what prevents them from being collapsed into one” (11). Through analogical thinking, for Silverman, we enter into a more responsible relationality with one another because we recognize the undercurrent of reciprocal entanglement that frames our being-together in the world.

Birmingham invites spectators in the gallery to conceive the world in these analogical terms. Precisely because the models are not actual victims, spectators must engage the fact that they are viably who the victims could have been, but were not. The adults in the images represent what the victims could, but would not, have looked like. And in the very moment that they realize that these images do not truthfully reflect what the victims would have looked like, spectators must ask themselves who these victims might have become. The viewer is, in this sense, hailed by the distance between virtual and actual, between could have and would have. The effect is powerful. Unlike THTK, where the question to which viewers must imagine a response is what happened?, Birmingham’s question is who might these victims have become had they survived? Where the former induces intimacy by virtue of the frustrating inability to empathize, the latter attunes the viewer to a counter-factual: what might have happened had these bombs not destroyed these particular lives?

3

In the opening essay of On Photography, dedicated to the theme of the ethical response elicited by photographs of suffering, Susan Sontag describes the personal experience of being twelve years old and opening a book of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau photographs: “Nothing I have seen – in photographs or in real life – ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously.” What in particular left Sontag so grieved was the feeling of moral inadequacy: “They were only photographs – of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve” (19–20). In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag would later describe this as the “unappeasable past,” indicative of the suffering we come to recognize only too late that results in a disabling sense of bearing an insufficient response. In his well-known essay “The Uses of Photography,” and later in “The Photographs of Agony,” John Berger echoes this sentiment. Reviewing images of the Vietnam War that were circulating in mass media at the time, Berger argues that pictures of suffering produce the dislocating feeling of being both sympathetic to another’s pain but simultaneously lacking the agency to alleviate it. As Deborah Nelson puts it in her reading of Berger,

What the viewer experiences, then, from the shock of the photographs (we are ‘seized’ and ‘engulfed’ by suffering) is yet another shock, the shock of her own moral failure, which overrides – even suppresses – the suffering and violence depicted in the photograph. This produces, [Berger] says, either despair or a compensatory penance, like donation to a charity, but it does not produce political will. (109)

In Berger’s terms, witnessing can become a form of moral trauma when agency is “vacated, incomplete, or incommensurate with the viewer’s moral dilemma” (qtd. in Nelson 109). This places the viewer in a position of losing their faculty for responsiveness and its attendant agency. Embedded within such photographs is an invitation to act, even if this appeal remains an impossible demand because — by virtue of their tragic moral irrelevance — there is nothing viewers can possibly do in response.¹⁵

Remarkably, THTK bypasses such concerns. Though viewers of THTK may experience the pains of sympathy, and may also feel unable to respond to a condition of loss because they cannot know its origin or content, the sense of moral inadequacy is proportionately eroded. One may feel traumatized by one’s own lack of agency when viewing images of war or genocide because one recognizes the genre of suffering but cannot respond. But with THTK what precisely is lost, and what suffering was caused by this loss, remains clandestine. As a result, viewers are not subject to the same unassumable responsibility because they cannot even know what it would mean to issue an adequate response.¹⁶ To be in the THTK gallery is to inhabit a world of ambiguous causes, while entering the Birmingham gallery means engaging with inscrutable effects. In Birmingham, spectators are confronted by an undeniable imperative to conceive the lives of the departed. This indeed remains an unassumable responsibility for spectators who, after all, cannot engage directly with the victims or their unrealized futures. For Bey, this is precisely the point. Knowing they are bound by an epistemic limit –that they will never know for certain what the lost lives of the victims of the bombing would have been like – spectators are solicited to imagine. Far from losing their faculty for responsiveness, spectators regain agency through the exercise of imagining the other. Though they may not be able to retrieve their lost futures, spectators can reckon with what might have been, and in so doing honor the irreplaceable value such futures held for the children who died.¹⁷

Together, THTK and Birmingham make for unusual memorial rituals. Conventional memorials often attempt to make the parallactic shift of mourning possible by converting loss into an object. By rendering it a thing – a stone tablet, perhaps, or a commemorative statue – such memorials symbolize the desire for the past to truly become past.¹⁸ As experimental interventions in memorial aesthetics, both THTK and Birmingham resist this fundamental goal. In each case, what is lost is not foregrounded as a stabilized, inert object. We know not what has been lost, in the case of THTK, only that the effect of this loss is agonizing enough that its representative symbol – the picture – must itself become lost, and shared with a group of strangers. With Birmingham, we can only fathom what the consequences of loss entail, because we cannot know what the lives of those who died would have been. Rather than condense the loss into a thing, the loss is cast to the ethereal register of the imaginable. Imagination is the faculty that allows us to think the possibility of something beyond the epistemological distinction between true and false; it is the capacity to create forms or figures that are not always already given in the order of concepts.¹⁹ THTK and Birmingham appeal to this faculty to imagine as a source of rethinking what memorial aesthetics can do.

What can these exhibitions do for those who reckon with loss? The prospects for redemption might be limited for those who forfeit their emblem of too-muchness to an audience that cannot, after all, erase or repair damaged life, when the traceful ruins of that life are all that remain. Similarly, reconciliation is refused by Birmingham; no decathexis or moving on is conditioned by its aesthetic. The victims are gone, and with them their stolen futures. And yet the evocative effect tendered by these photographic memorials for those who behold them is undeniable. To be in the gallery spaces is to feel interrupted from the point of view of a reflexive past horizon. The audience clamors to grasp what they cannot understand about what they see, about what could have been or might still be. With THTK, a demos of witnesses gathers around a site of loss, but this assembly of late witnesses is not embedded in a sustained fidelity to melancholic attachment, because the event remains mysterious for spectators. Rather, these witnesses are attuned to the world of possibilities opened up by imagining what others’ pain might entail.²⁰ With Birmingham the loss, again, is not shared. Even if the source of loss is known, its impact remains fugitive, so long as these photographs enable the epiphanic flash of imagination.

Footnotes

1. It also recalls the current “decluttering movement,” which encourages the discarding of objects deemed to be excessive or otherwise overcrowding. If the decluttering movement embraces a Spartan minimalism characterized by divestment, THTK emphasizes what cannot be destroyed even if, or precisely because, it must be abandoned.

2. I do not claim that all of the photographs are connected to loss in the same way, nor do I assume that losses are homogenous across the photographic archive, as shall be seen. Rather, my comments are directed toward the general effect brought to bear by the project as a whole. In this sense, I follow Roland Barthes in focusing especially on what photographs disclose and how they might impact viewers, rather than on the intent of the artist. See Camera Lucida (26–27).

3. The girls were Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. The boys were Virgil Wesley, 13, who was shot by a white teenager, and Johnny Robinson, who was shot by poice.

4. Sometimes, if the former owners of the photographs indicate that they would prefer it, the images are kept in their envelopes when they are displayed, such that they are exhibited but remain concealed.

5. On the Confederate monument protests, see Okeowo. On the controversy over Dana Schutz’s 2016 painting, “Open Casket,” which appropriates the photograph of the murdered Emmett Till, see Bergere.

6. For more on the argument that the photograph, for the viewer, brings the world close in general, see in particular Andre Bazin; see also Gregg Horowitz’s response to Bazin (142–143).

7. I hardly have space here to explore in detail the vast history of mourning rituals generally, or the vast literature that attends this theme. Much of my conclusion below focuses on what practices of mourning are meant to engage generally. For more critical theory concerning the politics of mourning practices, see for instance, Eng and Kazanjian; and Hirsch and McIvor. Most photography that focuses on loss tends to fall into the genre of “late photography,” “after the-fact photography,” or “aftermath photography.” Aftermath photography has its roots in Roger Fenton’s images of the Crimean War, in Alain Resnais’ 1955 film, Night and Fog; and later, in Joel Meyerowitz’s images of Ground Zero, and Luc Delahaye’s, Paul Seawright’s, Lyndell Brow’s, and Charles Green’s photographs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Capturing the aftermath of war, terrorism, and other forms of human suffering, these images serve as what David Campany articulates as “the trace of the trace of the event” (185–186). For more on how I distance THTK and Birmingham from Campany’s critique of afterness photography, see below.

8. For the classic argument along these lines, see especially Scruton. This argument — that photography cannot be representational art — has sparked a historical debate that continues to this day. See, for example, Alward, Elkins, and Phillips.

9. For more on the way I am using “empathy” here, see for instance Dominick LaCapra, who argues against empathy as “overidentification” (102–103); and Lauren Berlant (641–642), who makes reference to “empty empathy.”

10. I borrow the phrase “touchstone of intimacy” from Stanley Cavell. For Cavell, the phrase refers to the effect some Symbolist poetry has on its readers. A touchstone of intimacy forms between “kindred spirits” when a shared sentiment is voiced, one that stokes the glow of fellow feeling, even if this sentiment is difficult to understand or represent. See Cavell (81).

11. As with what Barthes calls the “third meaning,” the connections forged by such touchstones of intimacy are “immanent, obtuse, and erratic, in contrast to the obvious meaning of semantic message and symbolic signification.” For more on this in connection to a theory of the affects, see Stewart. For the connection to photography, see also Brown and Phu.

12. I do not mean to exaggerate the notion that all human trust is born of authenticity, the product of accident. Clearly, one ought not always trust what appears by accident. Instead, I am arguing that part of the intimacy brought to bear by the images that make up the THTK archive derives from the fact that spectators expect that they were not meant to see what the photographs disclose. Thus, spectators suspect that what they behold in the photos is highly personal to former owners. This matters because, as I argue, the candid quality of the photographs contributes to the intimacy effect.

13. Though, in the case of THTK, it is possible that the photos were taken with the intention of sharing a scene of loss with someone else, perhaps even a future self. Whatever the case may be, the archive aestheticizes the epistemic distance between what appears to be the case, and what actually is.

On the question of galvanizing affinity, Elain Scarry is instructive. Scarry argues that “The human capacity to injure other people is very great precisely because our capacity to imagine other people is very small.” Thus, she calls for new modes of prompting “generous imaginings” of other persons that go beyond parochial subjectivism: “The problem with discussions of ‘the other’ is that they characteristically emphasize generous imaginings, and thus allow the fate of another person to be contingent on the generosity and wisdom of the imaginer. But solutions ought not to give one group the power to regulate the welfare of another group in this way” (106).

14. The classic iteration of this argument can be seen in Walzer (238).

15. This can be contrasted with what Peter Singer famously argues in his influential essay, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” namely that spatial distance between subjects ought not to excuse the failure to satisfy moral responsibilities between them. If I can alleviate the suffering of another I ought to, even if I do not personally know the other for whom I am accountable, and even if they may live on the other side of the planet. In point of contrast, on my argument, THTK and Birmingham draw on and make use of distance as an enabling condition for ethical responsiveness. For a related argument that develops my line of thought in a different direction, see John Paul Ricco, The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes.

16. Thus, in this sense, I would argue that the THTK photographs index not only the loss of loss itself (for the former owners of photographs), but also the loss of the loss of agency (for the viewers).

17. While acknowledging the uses of the contemporary aftermath photograph as a form of commemoration, many critics have questioned the ethics of the genre and its relation to the event it memorializes. One complaint is that such art creates too large a distance between the viewer and the atrocities it traces. See, for example, James. In failing to produce a confrontation with the brutality of the events that are the focus of aftermath photography, James argues that these images render the event “dangerously unreal, strangely theatrical, detached, inhuman” (15). Others like Campany argue that “There is a sense in which the late photograph, in all its silence, can easily flatter the ideological paralysis of those who haze at it without the social or political will to make sense of its circumstance” (192). For more on these debates, see Veronica Tello, Counter-memorial Aesthetics.

18. For a comprehensive review of this history of memorialization see, for instance, Harrison.

19. In “The Discovery of the Imagination,” Cornelius Castoriadis argues that imagination is “radical” in that it establishes new figures of the thinkable: “These figures would bring particulars into relation with each other but be different from the hypotheses or models of speculative theory, which seeks to form and produce knowledge of a complete object.” If Castoriadis is right, writes Linda Zerilli, “such figures are at the very heart of reflection, which is ‘the effort to break closure,’ that is, the domain of the instituted society in which we exist as subjects constituted by rules, norms, and laws” (63).

20. Another way of putting this would be to argue that THTK evokes the subjunctive mood, and substitutes it for the indicative, in its appeal to our sense of pathos. As a grammatical mood, the subjunctive is irrealis, that is, it evokes various states of unreality such as wish, opinion, possibility, hope, future potential actions, etc. (that which might be, but which is not yet factual). The indicative, by contrast, is a realis mood, in that it stresses statements of fact. Birmingham, by contrast, displaces the indicative by the conditional (“If they had lived, then…”) in its appeal to our sense of ethos.

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