“If Emmett Till Lived,” the newest exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, weaves together a possible ‘what-if’ future for the 14-year-old instead of focusing on the tragedy of his lynching.
The exhibit opened on Thursday, Sept. 10, with the collection featuring more than 110 artists brought together by Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., Till’s cousin, in collaboration with Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, associate professor of African American Studies at Harvard University.
The pieces chosen honor Till’s life and legacy alongside words from Parker, fondly recounting memories of time spent with Till and visualizing the future he could have had, emphasizing that this is not a space to romanticize tragedy.
“I think that a lot of media focuses on Black trauma porn, and I feel this exhibit is the direct opposite of that while still honoring what happened to him,” said Nakayla Newson, senior fashion photography major.
The exhibit features works that symbolize Till and his family, notably a photograph from Carrie Mae Weem’s Kitchen Table series. The piece featured in the exhibit depicts a woman sitting at a table with three young girls next to her. The text above it was a quote from Reverend Parker fondly remembering Mamie Till, Emmett Till’s mother.
“We can learn a lot from how she prepared to have her opportunity,” it read.
Newson felt that works like these were a way to honor the family around Till.
“It didn’t just showcase Emmett Till’s life but his family. It connected the stream of consciousness between everybody,” she said. “Emmett Till was a product of his mother and his father and everyone who raised him, so I think it’s really beautiful to depict and include them in the story.”
Emmett Till was a 14-year-old Black teenager who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman.
The exhibit also features some work from a project led by Chicago photographer Stephen Marc who brought together Chicago-area seniors and high school students through a two-day workshop this summer to create photographs responding to Till’s life and the possibilities of the future he never had.
Marc’s photo at the exhibition also serves as the cover to the book, “If Emmett Till Lived: A Creative Monument”, published by the guest curator of the Emmett Till photo exhibition, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis. The image is of a Black father playing with his son at the beach, tossing him into the air and catching him.
The rest of the project, which includes the work by the seniors, will be added in January.
“Of course, that exhibition is imagining the life he could have lived,” said Alayna N. Pernell, community engagement fellow at MoCP. “But, I think what’s exciting about today is it being this first workshop step to people that would have been around the age he would have been today and seeing that perspective from that age demographic.”
Pernell said she was particularly interested in seeing how participants responded to working with cameras and to the project’s larger question.
“And seeing their excitement with even playing around with the camera in here, I’m just looking forward to what it looks like when we see the images afterwards,” Pernell said.
For Walter Stegall, an ambassador to Chicago Commons, the summer workshop offered seniors an opportunity to reconnect with memories and experiences from their own lives.
“So you bring back a cognitive skill for them to be able to remember some of the things that they did back in their day, their journey,” Stegall said. “So they might go home today and ask their loved one to say, man, we got some old photos from such and such. So some of the families might be dead and gone, but they might want to see them photos. And y’all just jog their memory of bringing that back.”
Stegall said the project also encouraged participants and their families to revisit the history surrounding Till and other figures from the Civil Rights movement.
“You know, we were sitting in the library, and they showed us Emmett Till pictures, you know, and then the family might just go up and look up the story of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, and Dr. Martin Luther King just to bring some sociability back to their brain,” Stegall said. “So once they forget with the dementia, it’s good that y’all bring this skill back because actually it’s a cognitive skill for them.”
Marc also saw an opportunity for the students and seniors to learn from one another.
“So it would be really interesting if you have, like, a senior working with, like, a small team of high school students and, you know, working with some of the images from their archives, from some of them they just shot, and actually have these students engage and learn from that senior and actually build,” Marc said. “And actually potentially build a piece from that.”
Krista Wortendyke, an assistant professor of instruction in the School of Visual Arts, said she visits the MoCP frequently but has never seen a collection of this size.
“The sheer volume of work is definitely different from most of the shows that I’ve seen here,” Wortendyke said. “There’s a lot of text, there’s a lot to see and read, and it’s something that I’m going to have to come back and visit multiple times to understand it all.”
Though the exhibit featured art from a high number of participants with unique perspectives, Imani Harmon, a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, still had questions about the message being shown.
“I think there are a number of really brilliant and masterful Black artists and aspects of Black life that are captured in the exhibition, but I also think I have a degree of skepticism around the curation,” she said.
Harmon agreed with views expressed in an essay posted by Zora J. Murff, a photographer who retracted his work from the showcase. The essay expressed that having no depictions of death would not be an accurate depiction of the current political landscape.
“A number of Black people have been killed this summer due to racialized violence. So we have our answer of what would happen if Emmett Till was alive because we see it everywhere,” Harmon said. “I’m curious to see how this exhibition will engage with that truth and that reality.”
Senior photography major Samaya Norman said the collection was a great way to make sure no story went forgotten during a time when history is seemingly being erased.
“I think that the way America is now, it’s very important that our history and these stories, both the good and the bad, are brought forward throughout time,” Norman said. “I think it would be really easy to leave behind the more gruesome events in the past, but I think it’s really important that these stories are remembered and talked about.”
The exhibition runs at the Museum of Contemporary Photography through Dec. 19.
Copy edited by Isaac Russo
