On Independence Day, freelance photographer Cheney Orr snapped a photo for Reuters that soon went viral. Inside the confines of a D.C. metro car, masked men in the uniform of the white supremacist Patriot Front take up most of the available space. They wear khaki pants and the white hoods (though modernized) of their forebears, topped with baseball caps emblazoned with their group’s logo — a mash-up of fascist symbolism with a patriotic color scheme.
Among them sits a rider who got caught up in the crowd. A Black woman wearing a forest green shirt that appears to say “Originals.” She doesn’t look afraid. But she is trapped, no matter how temporarily, in a metal tube with a bunch of men whose very presence is meant to intimidate.
Commentators praised the photo, calling it “poignant” and “a defining image of modern America for Black Americans.” When Phil Lewis, president of the Washington Association of Black Journalists and an editor at HuffPost, posted the photo on Threads, a tidal wave of more than 1,000 comments followed. “That’s a powerful photo,” wrote one person. “This should win a Pulitzer!” gushed another.
But Lewis’s post also elicited a different kind of response: “This is traumatizing.” And: “I’m worried.” And: “Is Sis good?”
To Lewis, there was no denying how striking and necessary the image was. When he first saw it, his reaction was swift: “Oh we’re going to see this photo in a history book in 30 years.” But he also wasn’t surprised when the ethics of the image stirred up an informal debate among some members of the WABJ, who were concerned for the main subject’s mental and emotional wellbeing as her likeness circulated around the internet. His colleagues, he said, wondered: Did she know what the shutter click might lead to?
That question, it turned out, was prescient. Last week, NOTUS reporter Ellie Silverman spoke to the photo’s subject, Bernita Bowlding, and her family at a McDonald’s — her first media interview. When shown the image, Bowlding did not recognize herself. “She didn’t know she was strong and brave and a symbol of our division and a vessel for our fears,” wrote Silverman. Only after a closer look did Bowlding realize: “That was me.” Based on Silverman’s reporting, it appears Bowlding and the photographer didn’t interact. (Reuters and Orr did not respond to interview requests.)
All of this raises difficult questions that are inherent in the nature of photojournalism itself. As a Black female journalist, I can see this from multiple sides. There is, first of all, the question of whether an image’s power can exist independently of what the people in the photo are experiencing. Is it OK if their stories do not really match what we choose to see? There is also the related issue of consent. Yes, the image was newsworthy, but as journalists, our work does not exist in a bubble. There are always repercussions for the very real people we photograph, write about, opine about. Shouldn’t they have some say over whether or not they become historical symbols?
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Some context: America’s 250th birthday party was more complicated than any U.S. milestone in recent memory. What could have been a reflective celebration exploring this crazy democratic experiment and all its complexities (high ideals of freedom and self-government, but also stolen land, slavery, poverty) instead devolved into an executive branch temper tantrum. The National Mall was turned into a janky patriotic amusement park with all the joy sucked out.
Amid this red, white and gloom, a mob of white supremacists descended upon D.C.’s public transit. The same D.C. that abolished slavery in 1862, eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation. The same D.C. that flourished when the first Black president embraced the city and didn’t just lord over it. The same D.C. that is still more than 40 percent Black. The same D.C. where the chest-thumping African percussion of go-go music might as well be the soundtrack to the metro.
That was the fraught situation into which this image landed. It’s easy to see why it was so widely embraced. It seemed, at least at first glance, to concisely and directly explain our situation: a country in a grim moment; a city under siege. As Lewis told me soon after his post, “In the future we will have so many questions about this time period, and we need these photos because they tell the story.”
But the photo — again, at least on the surface — did so much more. It held a power that I doubt the Khaki Pants would understand. It was uncooperative. It was defiant. It was the opposite of erasure. Notice I did not say that the woman in the center of the frame was uncooperative or defiant or brave or revolutionary. She was simply a subject captured in a moment. Yet her mere presence in this image, among this mob, conveyed defiance. In that way, the photo’s power was unassailable and arguably remains.
When historian Aniko Bodroghkozy encountered the photo on Facebook — once, then twice, then too many times — her first thought was to question its accuracy because we live in the era of artificial intelligence. But after Bodroghkozy, author of “Making #Charlottesville: Media from Civil Rights to Unite the Right,” verified its authenticity, her next thought was similar to mine: We’ve seen this before.
There’s a long history of photography depicting “Black individuals, particularly Black women and girls, being victimized,” Bodroghkozy told me. The metro photo very obviously exists in this cannon. There’s 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford on her way to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957. There’s 6-year-old Ruby Bridges in Mary Janes and bobby socks being escorted to school by federal marshals in 1960. There’s 35-year-old nurse Ieshia Evans, standing stately as a statue, as riot police rush toward her in full tactical gear during a protest in 2016.
And yet those subjects or their families had all chosen to participate in major historical events. Bowlding did not. Even last week, before we learned Bowlding’s story, I already felt uneasy as I weighed the image’s newsworthiness against its fairness to the person at its center.
Dee Dwyer — a D.C.-based visual storyteller who began her work as a photojournalist covering the Black Lives Matter protests in the nation’s capital in 2020 — shared some of my reservations. “When you’re out taking these powerful photographs, what you should do if you’re centering humanity is have a conversation,” she told me, before Silverman published her piece about Bowlding. “Because that woman was just minding her goddamned business and now her life has changed overnight.” True, Dwyer said, the image is “striking and powerful,” and, as a photographer, “sometimes the moment calls for you to tell the story as it is.” Still, Dwyer said she hoped “that a conversation was had with that young woman.”
It now seems that didn’t happen. All the more reason, I think, for Dwyer’s human centered approach to weave its way into standard practice when applicable.
And how would such a conversation have gone in an ideal world? Perhaps the photographer would have given Bowlding his card. Perhaps he could’ve mentioned to her that he’d taken her photo and that he and his news organization were available with some kind of emotional support.
These are things that happen all too rarely. It is not the fault of Orr — who was within his legal rights to take this image — or any particular photographer. It is just the way our business works. News, after all, is happening right now and the race for relevancy, for clicks, is part of the job.
“The more I look at that photo,” Bodroghkozy told me, “what strikes me is there’s a level of dignity.” Dignity sounds like a good thing, but in this case, it is complicated, because it is related to agency. For instance, if I can face down a crowd of spitting-mad screaming racists while looking dignified, then somehow, I am in control of the situation. I am powerful while still being made to feel powerless. This is pain being repackaged as valor, a familiar American fiction for Black women. Bernita Bowlding may well have conveyed dignity in this photo — that is in the eye of the beholder — but she did not, it now seems clear, have agency.
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These questions reminded me — a Black American who recently moved to South Africa — of another historically powerful photo that South Africans would recognize instantly. It’s from the Soweto Uprising of 1976, when thousands of children took to the streets to protest the Afrikaans language being forced into the school curriculum.
The photo, taken by journalist Sam Nzima, features a young man named Mbuyisa Makhubu carrying in his arms a limp 12-year old Hector Pieterson who had been shot by the police. Hector’s sister, Antoinette Sithole, runs beside him with a look of complete anguish on her face. That moment shifted the world’s understanding of the horrors of the apartheid regime. It also changed the lives of everyone involved. Hector was pronounced dead at the hospital. Nzima was forced to leave the country and journalism. Makhubu fled, and his family never saw him again.
Sithole, Hector’s big sister, has said it took her years to recognize the photo’s power. “When I look at that picture, I cannot remove myself from what happened that day,” she told the Independent Online last month on the 50th anniversary of the uprising. “The photo itself did not only change our lives as such, but it was a turning point for all South Africans.”
Are the consequences of being an unwilling participant in history worth it? Sometimes the answer is unequivocally yes. Other times, it’s much messier. The real-life characters involved don’t always get a happy ending, and the narrator has to reckon with their role in the plot.
For Americans, our country is a story we keep telling ourselves. It is freedom and fireworks. It is also a National Mall surrounded by chain link fences and National Park Service exhibits sanitized of the country’s history of slavery. The new photo is part of that story, and in that sense, it was truthful and needed. Was it, at the same time, hurtful and exploitative? Yes. For all those reasons, and more, it is an opportunity to hold a mirror up to ourselves, and to hope for something better.
Helena Andrews-Dyer is a former pop-culture reporter at The Washington Post.
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