The Brooklyn Rail

One heartening development to emerge from the mobilizations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol is that so many more Americans now recognize the imperative of “cop-watching,” and have gotten used to practicing it in the street. They’ve reached for their cell phone cameras instinctively during this ordeal, often at great physical risk. Alex Pretti was filming ICE agents in the moments before his subjects killed him.

Documentation is terribly important, we know: the information in these images is pertinent in the moment to people who live in the neighborhoods under attack and to those organizing in defense of their neighbors. They’re important after the fact, too, as potential evidence to refute the state’s claims that such and such did not happen, nothing to see here, two plus two equals five. (“Are you going to believe us or your lying eyes?” as David Levi Strauss, pace Chico Marx, put it recently in these pages.)

That images aren’t just documents of this conflict but part of its terrain is self-evident. All sides keep their loupes at the ready for the moment a new image or harrowing piece of footage goes live; the killer’s gun becomes the starter pistol of a vehement contest of interpretation. Offline, meanwhile, the pictures may be physically moving their viewers already. Wretched as it is to watch the state kill a person over and over again on video—whatever this does to our brain chemistry and our souls—such images still retain their power to draw large numbers of people into the street in subzero temperatures. The political utility of these bystander recordings of violence is grim but impossible to discount. To say that they function as a kind of civic pornography is in no way to diminish the reality of what they document or the depth of feeling they inspire; it’s only to observe that the stimulation they provide to mass politics seems unique in the absence of institutions (a major party, militant unions) with leaders much practiced in the art.

For a long time, organized photographic “sousveillance” (or surveillance from below) was something only radicals did. It belonged to larger struggles against racist policing in a tradition extending at least as far back as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the South and the early Black Panther Party in Oakland, through the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis and on to the Coalition Against Police Abuse in Los Angeles and ad hoc cop-watching groups nationwide. Photographing the police was risky and courageous work, then as now. Something has changed, though, when the New York Times runs an editorial exalting the cell phone camera as “The Best Weapon You Have in the Fight Against ICE.” One hopes that this instinct to record will endure as civic common sense.

And yet, wariness of the camera is more warranted than ever. The durability of certain assumptions and aspirations that Americans are used to investing in photography—especially in images of state violence—is being tested by the implacability of this administration and the familiar difficulty that social fragmentation, online and IRL, poses to the work of moral appeal.

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We have to ask, as the government’s body count grows: What do we expect our cameras to do for us—for our side—in this conflict? When we rely on cameras to document state violence, how much are we actually relying on other people to do something when they see those images? How do we preserve the potency of these images and direct their interpretation without manipulating or fabricating them, as the state has already demonstrated its willingness to do, and without dishonoring the people being assaulted, kidnapped, or killed, which the state has already gratified itself by doing?

In thinking about questions like these, which are hardly abstract for the movement on the ground, we are also again discovering and debating what photography itself is for. We are participating in the latest iteration of an old contest surrounding photography’s intervention in the exercise of state power and in political affairs at large.

No one thought more expansively on this subject in the American context than Frederick Douglass, believed by historians to have been the most-photographed person of the nineteenth century. “This picture-making faculty is flung out into the world like all others—subject to a wild scramble between contending interests and forces,” Douglass advised in his “Lecture on Pictures,” delivered early in the Civil War. “It is a mighty power, and the side to which it goes has achieved a wondrous conquest.”

Review of the state’s more recent claims for itself in the “wild scramble” yields a pretty dismal portfolio. Put aside the incorporation of facial recognition scanning into this policing (or is it counterinsurgency?). No need to ask for papers with a mobile rogues gallery in the pocket of your tactical vest. Put aside, even, the tawdry media savvy of Border Patrol “Commander-at-Large” Gregory Bovino and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who bring the cameras and costumes with them whenever they drop into conflict “theaters”—their term—of their own making, marking their territory with what Nikhil Pal Singh, writing recently in Equator, called “a stream of propagandistic slop, movie trailers, and ‘meme’ videos.” Don’t think the tail of “content creation” doesn’t sometimes wag the dog (a frothing German Shepherd).

The “reform” offered us after the killing of Pretti was no one’s prosecution or resignation, but body cameras that all Homeland Security agents in Minneapolis are supposed to wear. This is a time-tested hoodwink. Install a facial recognition app on those suckers and the problem of surveillance only intensifies—the volley of images accelerates. While agents can work with impunity, all a body camera ensures is second unit coverage of the next snuff film.

No, as of this writing the bleakest image—no more upsetting than the footage of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, but more chilling in its implications—has surely been the AI-doctored photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong posted by the official White House X account. Armstrong and several others were arrested in January for interrupting a service the Sunday prior at a St. Paul church whose pastors include the local ICE field director. The “meme” of Levy Armstrong’s arrest—as some wet-mouthed Millenial comms director called it—replaced her stolid, dignified expression in the moment with a rictus of humiliation, fabricated by circuitry.

The future portended by state-propagated forgery like this picture is unsettling enough, but so too does it evoke an abysmal American past: Stalinist airbrushing would make a more apt point of reference if Levy Armstrong wasn’t a Black woman, and if the doctored image hadn’t also darkened her skin. This “meme” is in essence a quotation of white supremacist caricatures and cartoons of the nineteenth century—precisely the sort of representation that Douglass trusted photography to extirpate.

We may be used to feeling cynical about the idea that any photograph necessarily tells the truth (insert quotation marks, if you like), but the state’s open mockery of that association is especially tragic in light of Douglass’s hope that that capacity of photography was one and the same with its potential as an emancipatory resource. See, with your own eyes, the truth about Black people as they really are, and a truth is revealed about the equality of all humankind; so the camera becomes instrumental in solidifying a new democratic basis for society. This, at least, was the ambition Douglass and other early idealists placed in the so-called “democratic art.”

Instead, the terminally online sons of former slave owners dispatch a “meme” from Pennsylvania Avenue and smirk: “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

A fitting epitaph.

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Where stands the people’s photography?

The administration is obviously hostile to anyone who would challenge its furtive, empty assertions of a monopoly on image-making. Noem has called recording ICE agents “violence” and “illegal.” It’s not either of those things, of course, but in conflating documentation with outright interference, the state is more or less conceding that those acts have been de facto elided. (Both are grounds for summary execution, apparently.) To record the state is to indict it, morally if not legally; Noem seems aware of this.

“Violent” and “illegal” to record, though? I don’t think you would have heard this kind of self-pity from a police spokesman in the sixties—and not because his fellow officers in Birmingham or Chicago were especially sensitive to the physical safety of photographers in their midst. Southern police routinely beat photographers and destroyed dozens, probably hundreds of cameras during the Civil Rights Movement. Outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, police clubbed photographers with abandon; the glint of a camera lens on Michigan Avenue was like red cloth in a bullring.

What makes Bovino and Noem so exasperating is that they will goad and taunt and kill and then cry bloody murder if a bystander so much as blows air on one of their boys’ cheeks. As an extension of the state’s prerogative to be as violent as it wishes, Bovino and Noem want the privilege to surveil without the liability of being watched themselves. Such an exemption from the stickiness of photography has always been elusive in this country, though. Certain qualities of photography—certain qualities of Americans, maybe—have kept it so.

Some have asked pointedly how much longer the noble if passive ethic of bystanderism will suffice in the face of the state’s escalating violence. It isn’t hard to imagine the avenues of legal redress decaying further and the situation becoming altogether more delicate. We should be realistic in granting that the political returns of documentation may be diminishing before our eyes.

Relatedly, inevitably, the subject of armed self-defense arises here, whether it pleases anyone for it to or not. It’s also appropriate, since the metaphor of the camera as a weapon is nearly as old as the affiliation of photography with democracy. One of the camera’s most consistent identities over the years is that of a proxy firearm.

In the middle of the sixties, Bob Dylan prophesied that you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and at the end of the sixties a militant tendency within Students for a Democratic Society agreed that this was so and prepared accordingly for a people’s war that the people ended up sitting out. In the days after Renee Good’s murder, it happened that a similar forecast came out of Philadelphia. The messengers, this time, were not the representatives of a resurgent white New Left, but another cohort conjured from the vapor of historical memory.

Images of stoic young Black people holding long guns in the street, a small cadre, circulated online to agitate rumors of the return of the Black Panther Party—or just to affirm that we had arrived at the high sixties period of the low twenties. Here was a group, evidently stirred from slumber by the killing of a white woman, that knew what time it was—that was ready to “seize the time,” even, as Bobby Seale exhorted long ago. What stronger indication could there be that the primacy of the camera was poised to give way to the primacy of the gun? It was the state that had decided these terms in Minneapolis, after all.

The promise of these pictures was not all it seemed, however. For one, this Philadelphia group calling itself the Black Lion Party for International Solidarity, modeled after the original Oakland formation of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was only the latest in a long line of pretenders to the rattan throne of the original sixties/seventies group, whose surviving members have always been wary of new franchisees. At the time, I felt the Lions’ impropriety was forgivable: they were right to emphasize, by the contrast of their arms, the unbelievable, actually unreasonable restraint with which these federal incursions had been met to that point. A few days later, though, the murder of Pretti, while he carried both a camera and a pistol—which he never touched—dispelled any easy ideas about what a gun might achieve in these circumstances that a camera wouldn’t.

The original Panthers’ embrace of guns is still often remembered incorrectly as pathology—a narcissistic, (revolutionary) suicidal choice that guaranteed the Party’s violent repression by the state. Their commitment to guns rose to the level of exaltation, to be sure, and if it was masculine and showy, that was only because the Panthers’ genius for self-representation was present from the very beginning (one of a few inheritances from Malcolm X). But their fidelity to guns was the product of more than their recognition of Black American historical experience, more than their identification with Third-World liberation movements or their refusal to die on their knees in Amerikkka. It was in part the result of a determination—reached analytically and early on—about how the Party should orient itself to the “media environment” of the sixties. It wasn’t unrelated to cameras.

Among the very first activities of Newton, Seale, et al. in Oakland, when the Party’s membership was still in the single digits, were cop-watching trips. They equipped themselves with guns, yes, but also cameras to document police interactions with Black people on the street. They ditched the cameras before long, but not because they lost faith in photography—quite the contrary. They let other people photograph them, whether mainstream photojournalists or white allies in media collectives like Newsreel and Liberation News Service. This freed the Panthers up to focus on the community survival programs and enact the oppositional spectacle and style that Singh and Leigh Raiford have each described as “insurgent visibility.” They were agile and dialectical in their thinking about images; the choice between cameras and guns was not neatly binary.

The camera made sense to carry at the beginning, then it didn’t, and then—if one takes the long view of the Party’s projects after its formal decline—the camera’s prestige was reclaimed and refined on a new basis. Michael Zinzun had been a Panther in Los Angeles before he cop-watched with the Coalition Against Police Abuse and embarked on a host of multimedia projects focused on police accountability, including a public access television show and documentary films. I once cop-watched in West Baltimore at a community farm organized by a Panther veteran who had survived many years behind bars. There was no great valor to it. Even now, I don’t do it every time I might.

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“The whole world is watching”: another misremembered cue from the sixties.

The demonstrators at the 1968 Convention chanted this line in part to steel themselves before the police batons, in part to admonish the establishment, and in part, perhaps, to remind the rest of the country and the world beyond Chicago that a moral interest ought to be taken in the crooked and bloody proceedings, which resolved in a renewal of the bipartisan consensus to annihilate the people of Vietnam.

The country, for its part, watched all right, and was unmoved by the brutalization of these longhairs and fairies in the street. A poll conducted shortly afterward suggested that less than 20 percent of Americans believed the Chicago Police Department used “too much force” during the Convention week. Americans weren’t indifferent to these protesters; they saw, most of them, justice in the beatings. To Black Chicago, said the photojournalist Robert Sengstacke, “White people were just getting a taste of what we’d had for years.”

I don’t remember anyone chanting “The whole world is watching” during the protests at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, though I’ve read reports that some of us did. To have yelled it there would have been to commit a tautology: it would have reinforced the sense of shame and inadequacy that was hard to avoid around Union Park. The whole world had been watching the immolation of Gaza—even through Israel’s (ongoing!) media blackout—yet no deliverance was in sight. And before that, the pictures from Abu Ghraib: black-site Jesus hooked up to electrical wires. And before that: all the other documented atrocities, documented to no appreciable ethical end.

It doesn’t feel today like anyone watching will necessarily save anyone being watched from being killed. What it feels like to me, under the weight of all these clips, is that we’re watching the death of the whole world together. The terminal algorithm is on autoplay.

It could be that the final refutation of the old-fashioned faith in photography to tell the truth about the world and in so doing make it more just is near at hand. The integrity of whatever escapes the “memes” of Tucker and Tripp—poached straight from the New College of Florida to the White House communications staff—will be warped into unreliability and obscenity by the human or robot peanut gallery online. Definitely, we will all live long enough to watch ourselves commit unspeakable acts on video that can never be totally disproved. We may marvel that anyone ever trusted the “pencil of nature,” as William Henry Fox Talbot called the camera, this “weapon in the class struggle,” said the Photo League, this awful democratic art.

If there is consolation, it may lie not in the image, but the qualities of the image-maker. The photographer—who has gone the way of the farrier and the wheelwright—was at her best one of the great human types. A servant of truth and beauty, she was an artist as well as a scientist, recommended by qualities of patience, discernment, and positive interest in others. The camera encouraged her—even enjoined her, at her noblest—to confront the iniquities of the established order, including its violence in the street. Her best instincts were social, in other words: her images were messages about things that otherwise might be repressed or unsaid. It’s fitting, and true to the old ideal, that our cameras are now the same glass and metal ingots we use to speak to each other and to organize ourselves.

We work in quiet assurance, too, that on that great day coming by and by, there will be “no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay,” said Gil Scott-Heron. It won’t be tweeted, Twitched, TikTok’d, or televised. “The revolution will be live.”

So there may yet be that to look forward to: against a lifetime of live-streamed executions, one glorious day without screentime.