If you’re interested in sharing your opinion on any cultural, political or personal topic, create an account here and check out our how-to post to learn more.
____
Photographs by Drew Reid
____
I believe in the liberation of the camera.
Cameras captured George Floyd's bluing lips, Sandra Bland's terrified eyes, Michael Brown's hands reaching for heaven on earth and so many deaths that never went viral.
Long used as an instrument of Black oppression, the camera now has the potential to protect us. It shows the grisly underneath of a nation built by slavery. From the daguerrotypes of "negroid" skulls that once questioned our humanity, cameras can now immortalize the sanctity of our breath.
Cameras cry out for truth. Images can be manipulated, yes, but they can also liberate. When court justice fails to protect Black life, images and videos still advocate for our worth.
Recently, the President labeled "Black lives matter" a form of hate speech. Today, I thank the photographers who still believe in Black pain.
But the burden to capture the truth feels especially heavy when the Black body is both documentarian and victim. Black photographers of Black pain face a life lived in double-time. They are both in and out of the moment, both behind and in front of the lens.
What does it mean to photograph your own oppression?
Like me, my younger brother Drew is a photographer. Unlike me, he was able to manage the dissonance of double-time and photograph the protests that are slowly shifting the soul of the nation. When I could barely stomach another image of Black death, my brother found the strength to walk among the afflicted and capture their righteous anger.
I look at these shots and I see my brother's soul. I see him in the man walking past a store boarded up against people who look like us. I imagine my brother standing in midtown Manhattan, Sony camera trained on a list of names that could easily include his. I see him in the crowd of Black men who made the same calculus many Black folk do: does this mask make me look too threatening? Will it be the reason police question my innocence today?
White photographers of Black pain will never know the ache of this double-time life.
Today, I speak to the Black photographers, though you may listen in. I wonder if they're tired. I wonder if they're spent. I wonder how they live in the gray of being both the judge and the accused. I honor the labor of documenting their own pain. And I elevate their images that know true justice.
Black lives matter.
Black life has always mattered.
But it's absolutely exhausting to prove that it's so.
