The violence in archival images transfers to the photographed subjects’ descendants

Evidence

Her interpretation helped me understand the physical pain I experienced every time I saw Renty’s or Delia’s image being used, whether as a backdrop to a lecture or on the cover of a pamphlet or book. Each time, I felt the violence Renty and Delia experienced in that Charleston studio in 1850. It was as if the act of forcing them to strip naked and be photographed as “human data” for a scientific experiment to prove their inhumanity was directly transferred to me. The violence lives in those images—it happened not only to Renty and Delia, but was passed down to their loved ones, their families, their descendants. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 1220

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Posthumous martyr images of ordinary victims can unite a divided public — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 215