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Ekphrasis, Photography, and Ethical Strategies of Witness: Poetic Re- Sponses to Emmett Till

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Ekphrasis, Photography, and Ethical Strategies of Witness: Poetic Re- Sponses to Emmett Till This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Holland-Batt, Sarah (2018) Ekphrasis, photography, and ethical strategies of witness: poetic re- sponses to Emmett Till. New Writing, 15(4), pp. 466-477. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/116013/ c Consult author(s) regarding copyright matters This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2017.1421230 Ekphrasis, Photography, and Ethical Strategies of Witness: Poetic Responses to Emmett Till Sarah Hollan-Batt Published source: Holland-Batt, Sarah (2018) Ekphrasis, photography, and ethical strategies of witness: poetic responses to Emmett Till. New Writing, 15(4), pp. 466-477. Abstract Photographs that bear witness to the violence and suffering of history clearly hold a great imaginative thrall and impetus for contemporary poets, as the vast body of poetic ekphrases of such images attests. In writing such poems, however, poets are confronted with fraught ethical and aesthetic questions, including: how can the ekphrastic poem empathise and engage aesthetically and ethically with the suffering of others? How can the poet write in a position of witness when absent from the event itself? What techniques, stances and other strategies can the ekphrastic poem deploy to testify to the abject photograph? This article addresses these questions via the timely case study of poetic responses to the post-mortem photograph of 1955 lynching victim Emmett Till, a subject of renewed interest in the wake of the furor surrounding artist Dana Schutz’s contentious 2017 ekphrastic painting Open Casket. This article considers poetic responses to the post-mortem photograph of Till by contemporary poets Kevin Young and R.T. Smith, and identifies metapoeticism— drawing attention to the poem’s status as a poem, and to the poet’s necessarily piecemeal and partial knowledge of the event—as a key strategy that fosters ethical engagement with the abject image. Keywords: ekphrasis; poetry; photography, Emmett Till; ethics; metapoeticism 1. The Documentary Photograph as Ekphrastic Subject Ekphrasis is undergoing a revival at present among contemporary writers (Krauth and Bowman 2017), who are increasingly drawn towards the photograph, a subject of ‘very recent lineage’ (Hollander 1995, 69) in the long history of the ekphrastic mode. In particular, documentary photographs that bear witness to conflict, violence and human suffering hold a great imaginative thrall and impetus for poets, as they rob the viewer of ‘the alibi of ignorance’, and ‘demand not just our interest but our response’ (Linfield 2010, 46). Yet the photograph poses unique aesthetic and ethical challenges for the ekphrastic poet—challenges that arise from the photograph’s simultaneous status as both art object and document (Jussim 1989, 17). This article reports on the ethical challenges inherent in ekphrasis of photographs, and examines identifies key strategies contemporary poets adopt in order to undertake poethical ekphrasis of photography. The photograph, unlike the painting or the sculpture, makes claims to veracity and reality: the viewer ‘can never deny that the thing has been there’ (Barthes 1980, 76); as Sontag says, ‘from being “out there,” the world comes to be “inside” photographs’ (1977, 80). Consequently, at first blush, the photograph seemingly eludes Heffernan’s seminal definition of ekphrasis as ‘verbal representation of graphic representation’ (1991, 299): Photography marshalled into the ekphrasis process something other than painting, etching and sculpture art forms: convincingly, photography put a ‘reproduction’ of reality itself – seemingly without second-handedness – into the minds of viewers. (Krauth and Bowman 2017, 5) While the photograph has an aura of truth and verisimilitude, it is as much a representation as any painting or sculpture. Its artistic, aesthetic and compositional qualities assure its status as an art object, even while it makes claims to truth that other mediums do not. Sitting at the uneasy nexus of evidence and art, the photograph, like the painting, is ‘neither a real object nor an imaginary object’ (Barthes 1985, 150). The photograph has been revolutionary as a democratic journalistic tool that has conveyed the scale of twentieth century atrocities to a distant public in a way that would have been unthinkable a century ago, but also a source of distinct discomfort among critics who have documented its rise. Among the most serious critiques levelled at the documentary photograph is that it is pornographic (Sontag 2003, 85), bombarding the viewer with a spectacle that incites either excitement or detachment from the events it depicts. This conception of photography argues that the photograph has done more to inure us in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to violence than to awaken us to the reality of suffering (Sontag 1977, 20-1). Barbie Zelizer agrees, stating that photographs of the injured or dead ‘achieve what [they should] stifl[e]— atrocity’s normalisation’ (Zelizer 1998, 212). Compounding these concerns is the secondary question of the photograph’s inherent ahistoricity and amorality, its dependency on how it is ‘identified or misidentified; that is, on words’ (Sontag 2003, 29). Despite its ‘seemingly intrinsic bias toward realistic representation’ (Jussim 1989, 12), the photograph is ‘contingent’ (Barthes 1980, 34) insofar as it exists without a caption, date or place to anchor it to its historical moment. As John Berger says, ‘all photographs are ambiguous…[and] have been taken out of a continuity’ (1995, 91). The photograph poses profound ethical conundrums for both photographer and viewer which are magnified in the case of documentary photographs of pain and suffering: The ‘taking’ of human subjects by a photographer (or a writer) is a concrete social encounter, often between a damaged, victimised and powerless individual and a relatively privileged observer, often acting as the ‘eye of power’, the agent of some social, political or journalistic institution (Mitchell 1994, 288). The subject’s privacy is invaded, often without consent, at a moment of vulnerability, injury, or death; the corresponding image endures, reminding us ultimately of the ‘death of the photographed’ (Cadava 1995, 224). Sontag defines the power dynamic even more bluntly: ‘to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed’ (1977, 4). Photographs of the dead and dying pose the most acute ethical questions, both for the journalist or photographer, who must often decide whether to intervene or to document, but also for the viewer, who must ask why they are looking, and the ethics of doing so. The ethical quandary documentary photographs pose reach further degrees of complication when considering the added layer of interpretation and artifice of the ekphrastic encounter. If ekphrastic texts are intrinsically ‘about learning to see, to read visual texts, [then equally] they also concern domination and power’ (DuBois 2007, 46); the ekphrastic poem affords the poet hindsight, a privileged perspective on the past borne of distance and time. Poets are often compelled to write ekphrastic responses to documentary photographs, invariably (although not always) writing in the position of a witness to an event neither experienced nor witnessed firsthand. John Berger articulated the ethical conundrum of ekphrasis most powerfully: In the relation between and photograph and words, the photograph begs for an interpretation, and the words usually supply it. The photograph, irrefutable as evidence but weak in meaning, is given a meaning by the words. And the words…are given specific authenticity by the irrefutability of the photograph. Together the two then become very powerful; an open question appears to have been fully answered (1995, 92). The stakes for the ekphrastic poet are high. In seeking to respond and ‘lend a voice to suffering’ (Adorno 1973, 17-18), the ekphrastic poet risks not only crassness or sentimentality, but charges of unethically appropriating the image for their own artistic effect and gain, and of attempting to monolithically impose meaning onto the image. This poses the question: how might the poet engage with the abject and traumatic history such a photograph testifies to without risking gratuitous sensationalism? What techniques, stances and other strategies do poets deploy in writing about the testimony of abject photographs? How can the ekphrastic poet, to borrow Sontag’s phrase, comprehend and represent the pain of others? This article seeks to answer these questions by looking at the timely case study of poetic ekphrases of the iconic post-mortem photograph of lynching victim Emmett Till, a frequent subject of ekphrasis in literature and art brought into renewed debate by the recent exhibition of American artist Dana Schutz’s contentious ekphrastic painting Open Casket at the 2017 Whitney Biennale (Tomkins 2017). In particular, I examine two recent contemporary ekphrastic poems that respond to the historic image of Till’s body—Kevin Young’s ‘Money Road’ and R.T. Smith’s ‘Dar He’—and identify poetic strategies at work in each that allow ekphrasis to move beyond re- presentation of representation, and into engaged witness.
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