On a balmy summer day in Mississippi in 1955, a 14-year-old Black child named Emmett Till made the fatal error of walking into a convenience store owned by a 21-year-old married white woman named Carolyn Bryant. Precisely what happened between Till and Bryant is disputed, but it is agreed that it was at a very low level: Till may have flirted with her, whistled at her or perhaps touched her. Whatever he did, it was contrary to the code of behavior for Black males around white females in the segregation-era South. And so, Till paid. With his life.
A few nights later, on 28 August 1955, Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother abducted Emmett Till. They tortured and mutilated him while he was still alive. They then shot him in the head and tossed his body in a river. A few weeks later, the killers stood trial and were acquitted by an all-white jury. Later, because of the United States’ double jeopardy rule, which says that you cannot be tried for the same crime twice, his killers admitted what they had done and sold their story to a newspaper for a few thousand dollars.
How a Photo Transformed a Killing into a Turning Point
The Emmett Till lynching became an international story and one of the best-known examples of post-slavery abuse of Black men in the American South in the pre-civil-rights era. But while the facts of the case were horrifying, it was a decision by his mother that turbocharged the Till case from regional news into an international cause célèbre: she decided that his funeral would have an open casket, so that the world could see what had been done to her son.
The photo was not widely published internationally, but its appearance in just a few media outlets was enough. Till’s death was transformed from a local crime story into one of the animating moments of the civil rights campaign.
The Nowak Photo
It is not inconceivable that the photo – actually a still image from a video – that adorns this article will have a similar legacy. It is much less graphic than the Till image, but perhaps more chilling for how clinical it is. The photo is of the hand of Henry Nowak, visibly white and cold from exsanguination, surrounded by the clinically gloved hands of the police officers who were arresting him on charges of potential racism against his murderer at the very moment he was bleeding to death.
To look at the image by itself, one might think that one was looking at a close-up of a medical setting – that the gloved hands belonged to surgeons trying to save his life, for example. It is this incongruity that makes it so powerful. The gloves add a degree of coldness to the photo that demonstrates the barrier between the state and the victim: Henry Nowak, in his last moments, was being treated as contagious. A potential contaminant. A being that was dangerous to touch, lest he infect his tormentors. At the moment of his death, Nowak is not simply denied compassion. He is also denied human touch.
Of course, this imagery would be incidental if it did not so closely match the reality. The facts of the Nowak case indicate that this is precisely how police officers did see him on that fatal night as he was dying: that he was a contaminant, a creature that had offended the highest values of the modern British state by potentially having engaged – he was innocent – in crimes against racial harmony by, in defending himself, having knocked off his murderer’s turban. How the state treated Nowak physically is how it treats so many of its own people rhetorically: as infectious pests whose behavior must be modified and from whom the governing class itself must be protected, lest the disease of what Orwell called wrongthink might infect the state.
A History of Photographic Impact – and Fear of It
As World War II ended, it was the American Photographer Lee Miller who brought the world the first images of the concentration camps – her famous image of starving inmates in Buchenwald in 1945 showing the world the reality of the holocaust more vividly than words on a page could ever manage.
Indeed, the state is conscious of the power of images and often seeks their suppression. For example, in Germany, WELT journalist Robin Alexander revealed in his book Die Getriebenen how, during the critical days of summer 2015 – when Angela Merkel had to decide whether Germany would open its borders to refugees – all existing police plans for securing the German border were suspended because the chancellor did not want to risk the emergence of disturbing images of police violence against refugees.
Alexander reports that Merkel had demanded assurances from her interior minister that there would be no images from the operation that would be difficult to justify publicly. Since no one could guarantee this, but everyone was aware of the power of images, the closure was abandoned, and it was ordered that, contrary to applicable laws, people from safe third countries – as well as those without identification documents – be allowed into the country if they sought asylum. The state of emergency from that time remains in effect to this day because no one wanted to take political responsibility for negative images, and Merkel wanted to portray Germany as a welcoming country.
When do images become powerful and lasting? The answer is that it occurs when what is depicted on your screen, or in your newspaper, aligns perfectly with an unspoken reality that the public can perceive, but perhaps lack the words to articulate. It is, for example, one of the reasons why imagery and photographs have been so central to the propaganda war in Gaza.
The 7 October image of Shani Louk, dressed in festival clothes, splayed face down in the back of a Hamas truck with her body broken and twisted while her murderers cheer their trophy, is a photo that will never leave many who saw it. It embodies the bloodlust of that day: Louk’s crime was simply to be Israeli, female and available. To her murderers, as the image attests, her death is a moment of triumph – not because of the person she was, the life that she lived or the deepest feelings of her heart, but because of the hurt her death might inflict on her family and her country. That photograph showed the world more about Hamas than a thousand speeches by Netanyahu ever could.
Similarly, Palestinians and their allies internationally have deployed endless photos of the war Hamas started in order to demonize Israel. Across the world, brutal regimes – which study democracy obsessively but would never permit it for their own people – have recognized the vulnerability of the Western public to images of suffering and distress, and have devoted almost as much time and money to building their propaganda and state media departments as they do to their conventional defenses.
A Story That Words Alone Cannot Tell
Yet these do not always work. For a photograph, a video or an image to cross the boundary between newsworthy and narrative-changing, it must speak to something greater. It must tell a story that words alone cannot.
The Henry Nowak photo, like the Emmett Till photo before it, does just that. It is powerful because, like the Till photo, it tells the viewer almost nothing about who Henry Nowak was. In it, he is reduced to a disembodied hand, just as Till is reduced to a ruined face. In both cases, the dead have been robbed of their identity, but those responsible for their deaths have been exposed not only for what they did, but for how they truly saw their victims.
It is unlikely that Nowak will get the public reckoning that Till deservedly received. The response of the American state to Till’s lynching is to its credit: within a decade, lynching had finally come to an end and civil rights were enacted. With Nowak, it will be for the British public, finally granted an image of how their authorities see them, to force the changes necessary. Whatever happens, few who have seen the image that adorns this article will ever forget it. Even if, in time, Henry Nowak’s name is forgotten. Something, for the record, which the public should not do.