On social media photography: memorializing #BlackLivesMatter in Kris Graves's 'A Bleak Reality'

Abstract

This article looks at the work of Kris Graves and the circulation of his photography on his social media accounts to promote social progress and racial justice. I focus on Graves’s A Bleak Reality photoseries for Vanity Fair from 2016. The series consists of eight images that address the haunting specters of police brutality against eight African American male citizens who lost their lives at the hands of the state. Looking at Instagram, I posit a threefold claim about the social media photograph. First, I argue against the association of the social photo with the everyday. I examine a photoseries that initially participated in an economy of art but then migrated across a network of social relations in order to enhance its visibility—its abundance ushering the social life of the photograph that undergirds Black Lives Matter. Second, I suggest that the affective residues of Instagram’s content linger in an indexical trace that transcends the transplatform network’s digitally composited, modified, duplicated, and disseminated images. This dual focus illuminates how social media function, on the one hand, as a technology of race while they allow Graves, on the other hand, to document instances of police brutality against African Americans. In so doing, third, this article locates A Bleak Reality in genealogy of civic media that explores how the co-optation of photography’s reproductive qualities by African American photographers, artists, scholars, intellectuals, and abolitionists has allowed them to construct a counter-archive of Black cultural production around historical movements for racial justice. Here, A Bleak Reality not only depicts these memorials but enacts them photographically.

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ORCID for Jaap Verheul: orcid.org/0000-0001-9344-6252

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