Recorded on Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2025
TRANSCRIPT
Chinyere Odim ’17 Again. Welcome, everyone. It's great to have you here with us today. Thank you so much for joining us for this SwatTalk about photography and the black freedom movement featuring Summer Sloane-Britt, Swarthmore, class of 2016. My name is Chinyere Odim, I'm the class of 2017, and I will be moderating the conversation tonight.
Before we dive into the talk, I want to go over a few luminary pieces of business. Firstly, SwatTalks is a speaker series brought to you by the Swarthmore Alumni Council, and I'm excited to share that as a part of the ongoing celebration of Black History Month tonight's SwatTalk is co-sponsored by the Swarthmore Black Alumni Network as a member of both SBAN and Alumni Council I'm delighted to be here with you tonight. We've been doing these talks for almost or about five years now, but I wanted to put a plug in for this particular moment given the weight of the world and all the stuff that we're wading through in this current moment. If you're here with us tonight, I'd imagine Swarthmore is a place that means something to you. It's never been more clear how important community, political activism and just togetherness is. And a moment like this one that we're living in now. So at these SwatTalks, we aim to create a forum in which we can have honest and supportive conversations about what's happening and what has happened in our social world. Sometimes we discuss moments in history, other times we talk present or future. In the case of tonight's talk, we will mainly discuss moments of the past. However, this conversation will also link past and present as freedom struggles remain ongoing.
We hope that you'll see this SwatTalk and those to come as a resource in this tumultuous world. We also hope you'll feel empowered by the content and continue to show up in the world, and to more SwatTalks as well. Tonight's session will be recorded, so you'll be able to find it online at the SwatTalks page on the Swarthmore College website. Huge thanks to the college's communications team that works hard to get these recordings up for your viewing. And also, if you're interested in watching previous talks, you can find those on the SwatTalks page as well.
For those of you who are new to SwatTalk or for our regulars who just need a reminder, tonight will go like this. I will get to ask some questions of our speaker for the first half of our time together. Then we'll transition into Q&A from the audience. Please use the Q&A feature to submit questions when prompted. The feature is at the bottom of your zoom screen, and be sure to include your name and class year when you do so, please. I'll do my best to get to as many questions as possible.
So housekeeping handled. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce our speaker for the evening. Summer Sloane-Britt, who is a doctoral candidate in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her research center is on the intersection of photography and liberation movements through a global lens. Summer’s doctoral dissertation explores the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee photograph, or photography department, emphasizing their innovative contributions to the 1960s black freedom movement and examining how SNCCs internal gender dynamics influence their photographic output, and a crucial decade that reshaped photography's position in US based organizing. Summer has held positions at the National Gallery of Art, the Great Art Gallery, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's also the case that Duke University Press, Open Book Publishers, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Modern Art have published her writing. Summer is currently serving as the program director of the Billie Holiday Theater's Black Arts Initiative, and we're so lucky to have her here to share some of what she's been working on and for just the purposes of framing the conversation, I'll also mention that I'm a doctoral candidate in sociology at Brown University. My scholarship examines the cultural practices of black elite parents as they build a social world for their school age children. So I'm excited to be a part of this dialog with Summer and have Summer here to share her work with us. I want to get the conversation going, by kicking things to you Summer, could you start off by just giving us an initial orientation to some of the photography projects SNCC was creating?
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 Hi. So thank you for that very kind introduction Chinyere. I was told just before this that it's not often that folks overlap. And when they were at Swat and so it's nice to see a familiar face in doing this. And thank you to the Alumni Council for inviting me to talk to you all today. And to echo your sentiments, there's so much happening in the world today, so appreciate folks making the time to be here. Also, because we're making a lot of choices about how to spend our time. And so as Chinyere said, we wanted to start by kind of introducing SNCC and their photography department as a bit of a foundation for then to kind of get into questions and dialog and talking about some things. And so in doing this introduction, I did want to share some images. So I'll share my screen. Can you see that Chinyere?
Chinyere Odim ’17 Yep I can see.
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 Perfect. Okay, so, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which is typically understood as SNCC through kind of the SNCC, shortening, was founded in 1960 and very quickly became kind of a crucial organization and group, within the black freedom movement, which is commonly referred to as ‘the movement’. And so initially, this group was organized as a multi-racial group of young people working for a sense towards a centralized mission, which was black liberation at the time and they really focused their kind of political energies on sit ins, as we kind of know more commonly, but also voter registration and literacy education and grassroots organizing in both rural and small town, rural, southern, southern communities. And that was supported by a national network of offices and volunteers who supported fundraising, putting more people on the front lines and things of that nature. And so I wanted to first bring in this one of the first pamphlets that was made that described the photo department after it was founded. And so photography is a really significant part of SNCC’s history and function as kind of this integral instrument for communication, publicity and media relations, particularly at a time when a lot of groups and organizations were being labeled as militant and militaristic in very negative capacities. And so a significant mission of the SNCC photo department was documenting the student movement from the young activist perspective. So kind of maintaining control over their external image, while also having materials to disseminate to a variety of audiences that had a kind of visual attachment to them, which I think we can all agree, images really do. You know, an image is worth a thousand words, and I think that they really demonstrate how photography can really buttress and further a message visually. And so SNCC’s photographic practice really differs from other movement organizations in that they dedicated a whole department to this and had staff photographers who were paid specifically to document what the group was doing. And so there are many texts on movement photography, but I really wanted to understand why SNCC was different and if they were actually different. And so I very quickly discovered that they indeed were a very unique photography program. And so, you know, we take for granted photographers being part of organizations and organizing groups that really was not the norm in the mid 20th century. That was more so the work of photojournalists. And so people who were working with publications like The New York Times, but within kind of black organizing histories, even before SNCC, there's a lot of kinds of projects sending news stories to black publications like Jet Magazine or the Chicago Defender. But SNCC took this to another level by establishing this department and establishing a commitment to photography. And that commitment was reflective of the kind of organizational structure that they had, which emphasized nonhierarchical leadership. So members kind of were rejecting the impulse to centralize a specific kind of iconic figure, the sentiment of, you know, the person who will come to save us in some capacities and moving past that into really thinking about collective and people power. And so I wanted to include this image in particular, because the woman in the middle who's looking directly at the camera is Judy Richardson, and she's a Swat alum. And there were a few, actually Swat alums who participated in SNCC in either from some distance or on the front lines. And so the SNCC photography department was really disinterested in kind of placating a white liberal gaze that really dominated how other organizations had to engage with photography. And so, in officially launching a photography department in 1963, they established darkrooms in three cities and were kind of taking lessons from earlier approaches to media relations from different movement organizations and also the Farm Security Administration, the FSA, which was, a US Department of Agriculture, I believe, group that was kind of developed to for a nationalist purpose to show the success of the New Deal, when in reality, a lot of the photographers were showing what was actually happening, which was kind of a maintenance, as in public community, right? Sorry, that's my dog. Sorry about that. You know, they charge in when they feel right? And so SNCC implemented this radical photography program, and so they created these really innovative uses of the medium. And so one example of these things is the first photographer who was hired in the department, Danny Lyon, is arguably the most famous member of SNCC because he continued as a photojournalist into the 21st century, he is still doing work. But he was the first photographer that was specifically hired for this department. And so this is an example of how their photography led to direct action. The group that we see on the left was a group of underage teenage and pre-teen girls who were arrested demonstrating in southwest Georgia and then incarcerated for many weeks during the summer of 1963. And so, because there is no kind of information about where they were, even their parents didn't know SNCC through whisper networks were able to discern where they were. And so Danny Lyon hid in the trunk of a car to the location where they were being held, and had one person kind of distract them on one side of the jail so that he could take photos from the other side. And so immediately after sending this to Congress, two different publications, including Jet Magazine, which we see here, were released from incarceration. So it's an example of how direct action really showed up in the photography department.
And I think in a lot of ways, SNCC really functions as a generational bridge, between groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the SCLC. One of the most infamous members of that was Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. And kind of, an emphasis on civil rights and this transition to black power and kind of thinking about what black power looks like. And so part of that work was introducing the presence of women in a really active capacity. And so this is an example of the kind of field work that SNCC was doing in the countryside of Mississippi, going door to door, knocking on doors and asking people about voter registration and then they were able to use those images in publication materials, which we see on the right hand side. And so this really demonstrates how they were using photography in a really, like, really sensational capacity. And so another example I wanted to bring in as well is one of the only women photographers. So while, you know, this group was very forward thinking about the ways in which women participated, at the time there were only two women who are recorded as taking photographs during their time of SNCC. And so one of them has retroactively kind of been included in these SNCCs, like Departamental Records, but one hasn't. And so this one is Maria Varela, who very actively incorporated photography for utilitarian purposes, creating kind of literacy materials when at the time there were none that had black children, for example. And so bringing in these new kinds of visions of what was going on in the rural South.
So in this example, we see at the Greenville Air Force Base in Mississippi, a group of sharecroppers enacted a sit-in at the Air Force base, which was not being used at the time. And instead of finding ways to support them in the ways that they need, the federal government called the National Guard, I believe, on them and evicted them. And so the photographs that Maria Varela used were able to be used as a fundraising material, which we see on the left and supporting a book published by Charlie Cobb in kind of visualizing what he was writing about at the time.
And so to emphasize that generational bridge of it all, the Black Panther Party was actually really started in some capacities in rural Alabama as a third party program trying to organize farmers and organizers at the time, who were already doing kind of, activist oriented work, but in creating a third party, they needed an image in order to kind of reflect that. And they chose a black panther. And that not only stuck, obviously with SNCC, but obviously in moving into the Black Panther Party's founding in Oakland, California. And so the other female photographer who is part of SNCC was Doris Derby, who additionally completed work alongside her field work. And so this is an example of the kind of photographs that Doris Derby was making. And I really focus on her images of black owned land, in encountering students who have said to me, well, black people have never owned land before or, you know, what does it mean to have this relationship to rural space or even plantation spaces? Doris Derby was documenting what black owned land looked like and how it functioned, and was actually quite essential to the success of the movement, because that is where people were housed, that is were the people who took care of them, made sure they were safe, and all these different kinds of things. And so that's just like a very brief look into some of the things that SNCC was doing with their photo department. And so I'll, I'll turn it back to you Chinyere.
Chinyere Odim ’17 Thanks Summer. I would love to, so I'm actually really intrigued by this collection of photos and how you sort of web together these ideas and these themes of whole community effort. Photography is like a communication tool and a media outlet as well. And then also this thread of women as, like, a central role or a safe landing space, in these efforts. And so I'm wondering if you can kind of walk us through your process of curating or collecting these photos, and perhaps how your own context or your own positionality shows up in your process for analyzing and curating.
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 Sure. So when I started graduate school, I actually was pretty fervent that I was not going to focus on the civil rights movement or the 1960s. I was interested in looking at photographers that were white and how they engaged with nonwhite people. Whether in kind of the 1960s, but a bit detached from the movement itself. And very quickly, I think that that signifies in the back of my mind as an interest, the fervent, I'm not doing this. And so I was doing research specifically on Richard Avedon, actually who's a very famous kind of 20th century photographer, and he completed a project with James Baldwin called Nothing Personal. And one of the photos in that book was of SNCC members. And so from there, I started looking more into SNCC, which I had heard of, but I didn't know too much about them. And so in doing some of that research, I actually came across and have a slide for this that speaks to this, a quote from Kathleen Cleaver, who is the first communications secretary for the Black Panther Party. And so she, before doing that, was a volunteer with SNCC in the New York office. And so I found this quote where she talks about seeing a photograph in a Philadelphia newspaper, and she ends up saying, I said, these are girls, they're high school girls, and I'm a high school girl. And I was extraordinarily impressed by them. I mean, it was more than impressed. And I wanted to be like them. And so I became really interested in the difference between how images can convey the sense of I feel bad for them versus I want to be them. And so that was kind of where the initial interest really sparked up for me. And so you can see them in the photographs at SNCC, like Danny Lyons photo on the right hand side. Right. Like while under arrest, there is a sort of joy and steadfastness in that decision. And so I was really curious about how that kind of maybe appeared and found out they had a department. And so in doing some of that research, there is not a single kind of monographic text focused on their photography department. There's some writing and there's some writing on specific photographers, and that's changing. But I was really particularly intrigued just by how rich the archives are. I mean, they're everywhere. They're very spread out, but they are very much they're. And so I think a lot of it is just collecting as many as I can find and trying to track people down, both in photos and who are participants in SNCC. And so it's also just been such an honor, frankly, to work on them and the work that they were doing, particularly these women. And I don't necessarily think I wanted to be them, as in on the front lines, but I think it reflected the desire for their attempts at trying to build a different world. And that's a phrase that they used very heavily. Like ‘come join us to build a better world’. And so I think that's a lot of why I decided to focus on this.
Chinyere Odim ’17 That's super helpful. And I think it's a really interesting tension that you framed here. I think it was you said wanting to be like them and feeling bad for them was that it? And I'm really curious, you know, based on that, how you think about whom the photos are speaking. Is it those who are like them? Is it to allies? How are you understanding that tension between highlighting, you know, black life or black agency or black participation? And then also, you know, a sort of diverse movement that is speaking to allyship, or to those who are outside of the movement.
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 Sure. I think that part of the power in having a department is that they were able to cater to multiple audiences. So going back to Richard Avedon, actually, and doing some of the archival research, and there's some folks who have mentioned this in their own scholarship as well. Richard Avedon had donated materials to them and helped create a network so that they had cameras that were accessible to them. He hosted some of the SNCC photographers in a workshop to help them kind of better use their tools. And so I think in having a number of cameras floating through the organization in the hands of both official photographers and other folks as well, they were able to create materials that say the New York Times would publish or Jet Magazine would publish, but they were also able to amass so many photographs of behind the scenes movement work and kind of the reality of movement work, where a lot of the times we see images of protest or images of kind of a moments of action when a lot of the work was planning. There is a lot of planning work. There is a lot of talking to people, a lot of things that means stream media as you know, people have to say today, we're not particularly interested in spending the resources at best or not interested at all at worst. And so part of what they were able to do is create things like brochures specifically for kind of local citizens in, say, Mississippi. And so catering then to a black audience and being able to do these different kinds of things means that they had a number of audiences in each project that they were working on was for a different end. And there's, you know, different ways that tensions came up. Not everyone thought this was a good use of resources, right? I mean, it's still today. there's debates around if spending money on photographs is worth it, essentially. And I think those are very valid debates. But what the archives really demonstrates to us is that, you know, now there's a lineage that we can see, there's like actions that they were doing that we can see. We can see their offices. We can see the kinds of homes that they were staying in and these internal meetings that they were having. There are a lot of photographs where folks look stressed just talking to each other. And I think even seeing those is helpful, especially in this idea of, you know, we don't always have to get along to organize together. Yeah.
Chinyere Odim ’17 Yeah. I feel like you're speaking to things that remind me of time on campus, so.
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 Definitely.
Chinyere Odim ’17 So something that you're also reminding me of is some of the threads between the challenges that the students of SNCC were dealing with and how they relate to, freedom struggles in the contemporary. Can you talk a little bit about how you see SNCC's role or the photography department here as an example of how we can make sense of freedom struggles in a contemporary? What students say who were on campus when we were on campus or students who are on a college campus now, how they can use this sort of framework to, to make sense of what they're going through in this moment.
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 Sure. I mean, I think it's a very pressing question for many places, including college campuses, including Swarthmore, frankly. And I think that part of why I decided to work on this was so that young people like us when we were in undergrad, especially, had kind of a sense of lineage in terms of organizing. So, you know, how the students engage with organizing efforts like, you know, the Swarthmore Students for Justice in Palestine or Black Lives Matter? And kind of how do we both learn lessons from what SNCC was doing, while not trying to replicate what they were doing. But to be able to see lineage is something that I feel is very important. I don't necessarily fully subscribe to the idea of using photography as a means to build empathy, but I do think that it's a way to not feel lonely in the struggles that one is going through. And I think that's not a small part of what SNCC Archives offers us. For as much as there is this very long lineage of, you know, the ways in which photography is used as a means of suppression, violence, marginalization, and kind of, you know, utilized to, dehumanize people. There is an equally long lineage of those working to resist colonialism, imperialism, hegemonic powers, and being able to see those things I do think matters. And I think that it was important to me to expose students and whoever else to the lineage that SNCC offers us, both as kind of an organization in the United States that was working and that was more left than some of their counterparts. And also, you know, thinking about the torches that young people hold. And being able to understand that they are not alone in that process, that there are a lot of people who have done similar kinds of work. And so I think that's part of what the photographs can do and what photography does. And I think another reason why this is really important to me, I mean, I think about this every day. It helps keep my cynicism in check when it feels like, oh, this is bad. And like there's no chance of things getting better. You know, it's through, I think it's James Baldwin who talks about that. It's the love of very few who holds the world together. And I do really believe that. And I do think that he was pointing towards a kind of revolutionary love.
And so for as long as photography has existed, there have been black and nonwhite thinkers who have thought a lot about what it does, not kind of just, you know, the white photography scholars, theorists and practitioners who are very emphasize there is a really rich history of black folks engaging with photography in innovative ways and thinking about what they can do, what is the limitations? And so I don't necessarily subscribe to thinking about representation politics, when it comes to consumerism at the moment it's just not a focus that I have. But I am really interested in what Frederick Douglass kind of thought about as how photography can spark imagination and can spark things of what is possible. And so when I look at images like this one, for example, of people really trying to create new realities on even land that were plantation scenes, insights of enslavement always point towards that this does not have to be what the world is. And there are always people working to change what that world is. And so that's a lot of why I was really invested in this. And, you know, photography can really collapse space. There's a really beautiful testimony from Maria Varela talking about showing a group of black farmers in the rural South, photographs of the United Farm Workers in Southern California and getting a very emotional response ‘we are not alone in this’. It's not just us who are being subjugated to, like, racial violence, classist violence, but feeling united with a group that was very far away from them. And I think social media shows us that that's still reality. But SNCC in particular thought of themselves as, you know, in relation to the world and particularly the Third World. And so, for example, in 1967, one of the Student Voice newsletters, I believe, their publication that they circulated amongst those who signed up as members. There is an article that was about Palestine and connecting the targeting of Arab communities and land theft actions specifically and directly to the Black American liberation struggle. And so, despite kind of internal disagreements about this and the actual risk of losing the support of Jewish organizations that did provide a lot of financial support, they still felt the need to engage with understanding themselves as part of an international movement in the international world. And that shows that multiple times, like I found in doing archival research in Mississippi, an interview between two SNCC members, one of whom was a sociologist, Joyce Ladner, and Clr James, and talking to him about connecting the Caribbean struggle for liberation with the American South. And so I think that these are ways and materials that help learn lessons and that we can learn from for today, in the future. And thinking about what it means to try to change the world.
Chinyere Odim ’17 Thank you. Summer, I feel like I'm excited to continue this conversation. You're giving us so many great ideas. I do want to invite the audience now to begin submitting questions, if they have them to keep this conversation going. I can start off with Tom Gilbert's question here that's already been submitted. Tom wonders whether Summer thinks of herself as a photographer. And if so, how has your own photography been influenced by your academic work or the current political environment?
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 Sure, I’ll stop sharing my screen for now. I was telling, I think Megan, earlier, before we started that, you know, my dad's an artist and my mom worked in the arts, and they both very much believe that you should not write about things that you've never tried before. And so, because I knew I was really interested in photography in a general capacity. I started learning photography, and I was in high school and so I think in some ways I consider myself a photographer, but grad school really eats up time, so I haven't had a huge amount of time to work on that. But I am working on a project with a friend, photographing where our families are from that we've never been to before. And so we're going there together and kind of thinking about that. And she's writing and I'm taking photos. But I don't think photography would ever be my primary focus as a practitioner.
Chinyere Odim ’17 Cool. Yes. Oh, we have another question coming in. From Gavin Wright. Have you looked at the photo archives for the Swarthmore Summer Studies Program of 1964?
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 I haven't looked at those specifically. But I would love to. I think I can only imagine what's there. Yeah.
Chinyere Odim ’17 Yeah. And there are a few folks who have, put some comments as well asking for more photos from you. So I don't want to put you, that's for sure. Yeah. Okay. So
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 Yeah, I can share another slide that I had here. So one of the young women who comes up made a suitcase, and her name is June Johnson, and she was a local Mississippi resident who felt kind of isolated from her high school life at 15. And so she joined SNCC, and she had been arrested multiple times. But part of what the photo archives that they have shows us in this, too, is that because they had this department, there are so many photos of her specifically. And so the top one is from 1963 and the bottom one is from 1964, both of which would have been when she was still under age, I believe. And after a particularly traumatic arrest that she had experience alongside Fannie Lou Hamer, the famous organizer, who was very participatory with SNCC, and so she kind of was never dissuaded from being arrested. And that's part of what I'm really interested in is kind of, what sustained people and what kept people going and how we can see them keeping going. And so these are some of the other photos that I had. But, I mean, there's a million photographs and I'm kind of always surrounded by SNCC things. And so I do want to spotlight that part of the power in doing these projects is that there are a number of publications like photography, library backgrounds, photographer specific publications from like Dany Lyon or other SNCC people have done them. And even in having to not deal with kind of copyright materials you there's like they're used on covers of books written by each other and peers. And so there's a lot of ways that the photos show up. But I think if you're really interested in seeing more photographs, a great example would be the SNCC Legacy Project. They've worked a lot with Duke University on digitizing a lot of materials, and so a lot of the images that I shared, I wanted to make sure were on that website. And so I believe most of them are. So they're accessible. And that's a great resource to find kind of a lot. There's a lot of photos on there.
Chinyere Odim ’17 Cool, thank you. We do have another question about, what you've, what you've engaged with or who you've met. Have you gotten to meet Andre Jackson, who's a Swarthmore grad and a mentor in photography and whose work is in the Philly Art Museum from Wilbur Boykin Junior?
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 I don't think so. I haven't been. I interned at the PMA when I was in undergrad during my time at Swat, but I haven't worked with that person in particular, so I'll have to look into that. There's so many folks who are doing really brilliant work in that time period and after. And I just, I can't keep track of everyone.
Chinyere Odim ’17 And we also had a comment from Ann Tory Grocer who said that photographs in the Saturday evening Post and others totally touched me and motivated my life's work when I was a high school student. I would not have gone to law school, or worked as a public interest lawyer to this day at 80 years old without seeing those motivating photos. And so can you … maybe I'll tackle this comment question. Can you talk a little bit more about how you see photos as an inspirational venue or a vehicle for something that can also pull people into a movement or yeah, be inspiring?
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 Yeah, absolutely. There were a number of SNCC participants who in their or his oral histories, talk about images as being a really impactful, aspect to why they joined the movement in varying capacities that ranged from, you know, going to law school, like the person's comment or kind of helping with fundraising things of that nature. And I do think that photography has a really important role to play, especially in the 1960s, when the technology itself was more accessible to people. It was the time when it became affordable to use a camera in large quantities and to take rolls of film, and I think this also is the generation which probably inspired, I think, why they started this department in the first place of people who had TVs in their house, where it wasn't just kind of reading the newspaper, it was reading the newspaper and then also seeing things on TV, seeing things in media that perhaps, you know, at a young age didn't necessarily entirely make sense, but reflected a feeling that they had. Or reflecting the realities that surrounded them. There's a really great oral history, too, with Doris Ladner, the sociologist who I mentioned, and she talks about how and a number of people will talk about this as well. The very infamous at this point, photographs of Emmett Till that his mother permitted and pushed for publication, first in Jet Magazine and then was disseminated in other publications as really impactful to them because of his age and being in such close age to them themselves. And so I do believe that photography has a really profound impact on people's imagination and like understanding of themselves not only as individuals but living in an inherently social world. And photography reflects that social world, for better or for worse. And I think for a long time I had my own kind of beliefs that photography didn't necessarily have the best place in movement work and organizing work. This idea that if you have to show someone to compel them to care, that's I don't know how strong that carries, right? And I think that I do still believe that to an extent. But I also think more now about who matters in that, right? Does it matter necessarily the person who maybe has kind of a flimsy empathy, or the person who then decides to go to law school because they saw photos, right? And there's a lovely scholar. I can't remember her name right now, but she writes about war photography and she writes and asks the question of, well, was the world better before photography existed? Like, is there evidence that it is doing something inherently damaging to the world to have photographs of civil conflicts, international conflict, colonialism, imperialism? Or does it help make better sense of what people are experiencing? And I don't think there's a clean resolution to that, but I do believe it's an important question to ask and an important thing to interrogate, with always thinking about audience. Yeah.
Chinyere Odim ’17 I feel like I'm going to if I don't, if I walk away with nothing else, it'll be the question of was the world better before photography? I feel like I need to invent time thinking about that.
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 That haunts me every day, Chinyere.
Chinyere Odim ’17 Yes. It’s like a really heavy question [laughs]. I do want to continue to encourage folks to drop more questions in the chat. We have a few more coming in, but now is your time to add more. We do have a question from Judith Romilly. Which is “How are the messages from photos compared to written stories, in your opinion?”
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 That's a good question. I do think that we as people, and I don't think this is people's fault, I think it's just this way our senses work, believe things. We can easily believe a photo before we believe something that's written down. I don't think that's always true or inherently true, but I do think that we depend on our eyes a lot. And we depend on what we see in substantial ways, that's, I think part of how people can be manipulated around the news is seeing something, even if it's true or not. Especially because photography is, you know, something that can mutate. It can be used in multiple forms, in multiple ways that can be quite harmful, as well as quite useful. And I believe that some of the written stories that SNCC published, for example, or poetry books, were always in relation to the photographs. So it kind of functioned almost like extended captions for some folks, right? Where, you know, there's some people who obviously would just read text and absorb it, but having images with them, as, you know, looking people for the most part, and seeing people in a world that privileges what we see to sometimes our detriment. I do believe that still, they were able to really engage, not just kind of written literacy, but also visual literacy, because visual literacy is very important to have. And particularly in working with groups of people who were potentially not literate in the first place, having images really mattered. So having, you know, the black Panther is a logo really mattered for folks to be able to identify what party to vote for in that Alabama election. And part of the voter registration was literacy education, where, you know, being able to read the forms and fill out the forms correctly was a way to throw people's voter registration away very easily. There's still a practice that happens today and so I think that images not only for kind of a national or international audience, you know, had a really, utilitarian application for them where it was able to both show, kind of and demonstrate visually what they were trying to teach, and then also to visually demonstrate the participants power in a lot of ways and wanting to build up the kind of self conscious and self-actualized futures that people were working towards, and to recognize that they were as important as some of those iconic figures. And that relates to SNCCs overall, Michigan, which really centralized people power and collective power. They were invested in giving people the tools to organize themselves and giving people the tools to really thoughtfully, engage with the world around them, but to feel empowered and to feel seen. And that was very real in where they were working.
Chinyere Odim ’17 Yeah. Thank you for that, Summer. And you're also reminding me a lot of some of the critical disability studies that are coming out of the social sciences and this idea that print formats are going to be useful to different people. And with that, you know, notion of people power and community organizing and calling people in, you can call more folks in our diverse toolkit. So, I love that. We do have a couple more questions. We have one from Gerald McInnis. Gerald is curious about how the meaning or utility of photography has changed from your perspective as the technology to both take and distribute high quality photos has become vastly more widespread. Is the power of individual photographs in the context of movement documentation diluted by the enormous amount we are exposed to and do different kinds of photos catch public attention? How has movement photography evolved? Need to evolve to be effective today? Many questions and one question, but answer that one.
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 I think that it's a double edged sword in a lot of ways. Where, you know, we all now carry cameras with us all the time in our phones. Like, everyone has a camera. I think that there's very few folks who have never seen a photo of themselves. Which was, you know, that's not, an old thing. That's a new thing. Having all of these photographs of ourselves. And so I think just by way of it being more accessible, there are more photographs. I mean, they're more, I think there are more people who identify as photographers now than at any other point in time. But you know, what I would say is that while it does mean that there's, you know, an exponentially larger amount number of photographs, you know, there's also an unending amount of archival images, too, like, people have always been taking a lot of photographs, a lot of photographs of the work that they're doing.
And still they can be specific images that really puncture kind of, a movement or puncture kind of, you know, that circulates very highly. One photograph that I think of in the social media age that did not circulate in the same way in the 1960s. It's a photograph of an organizer in Cambridge, Maryland, a woman organizer who's pushing away a gun.
I see it every like, Black History Month. Like circulated white. Like pushing a wagon, with, like, a very defiant, stance. And look, that was an image that would not have been published in, like, a mean publication in the 1960s, because there is a desire to see a passive-ness from black people in particular, and an emphasis on white perpetrators.
So trying to kind of visually reflect this idea that it was white Southerners problem and that needed to be fixed versus kind of a systemic problem. And so in it being a white Southerners problem, that required for black people to be passive in the literal words of editors at the time. And so I think that what sounds and increasingly access to cameras does for us is gives more people more autonomy over images.
That has its limits, where now it feels like things have to be video recorded. And now that feels like it's not quite enough to believe that something happened. And that comes up a lot with something like Black Lives Matter of livestreaming, things that are happening, thinking about Eric Garner in that context, and kind of the video, of people being physically assaulted and murdered on camera.
And that's still not being enough. But it was enough for a whole new generation of organizers to start organizing. And so, you know, it has these pros and cons, and I don't know if the pros outweigh the cons. I really, really don't. I don't think there's a clean answer for that at the moment. But I do know that, you know, again, who matters the most, right?
Who matters in that context. And I think a lot of it should be about the communities impacted, should dictate what and how images circulate. And so, you know, now we have this live stream era where we have social media, we have endless updates on things going on in different contexts, including a place somewhere like Palestine. Like we have all these things that are amassing that brings a lot of people into organizing.
And it also comes with the other end of it, where, where what is the level of where's the limit of that? And where does that kind of slip into kind of dehumanization? Because that's very real. And that's a very real thing too. And I think it's something that will continue evolving. You know, I think AI scares me more, to be honest, but the ability to create fake images, people send me images and I'm like, this is AI like, I'm sorry, but it's not real, but I do.
Chinyere Odim ’17 I do try to stay away from AI. We do have a question here from Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot about art and, you know, intergenerational power. And so Sarah says you mentioned that your parents were artists and who they inspired your interest in photography. Could you say a little more about how your story inspired your interest in this project?
And Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot is writing as a classmate of 1966, Judy Richardson. And finds this history really fascinating.
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 I love that; that's amazing. Well, my life story. I think that I was raised … both my parents worked in the arts for a good chunk of my childhood, and my dad is still an artist.
And so a lot of that merges with both of them being very invested in both kind of the black freedom movement and its history being very present in my life. So, you know, listening to James Baldwin speeches as a very young person and at the time being like, okay, can we listen to something else? But realizing and appreciating as they got older the presence of that.
And I think that encountering, especially students and younger people who are not taught these aspects of history was really distressing to me in some ways, and also became really important to not just work on art history. You know, any kind of, you know, in its own world space, but really being invested in art, like with a lowercase a and being really invested in creative practice.
There's a lot of research that shows that creative practice is a pillar of health for people, and having those outlets is really important to process things, to process the world around you, to express yourself. And for those reasons, it's kind of why I've done research on the different things I've done. As well as both my parents just commitment to liberation as both an ideology and as a practice.
And like my grandmother on my dad's side was part of the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia. And so it's, you know, partially a familial history merging with my own lack of desire to be an artist, but a desire to always have a connection to art and visual materials. You know. Thank you for the question.
Chinyere Odim ’17 I think we have time for one more. I want to take this question and kind of play with it a little bit. Could you somewhere just talk a little bit about the photo archives at Swarthmore and what you think of them, how especially from the time period of the 60s, what have you found? What do you like? What maybe. Don't you like, how can you some more like three minutes, but go for it.
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 I haven't really looked at. I remember looking at some photos when I was an undergrad, but I haven't gone back to Swarthmore and I have recently been thinking about why. And there's this really great quote in, oh, what is the book called? There's a book where it's about a teacher, a black teacher working in. And if the school that's invested in changing the world and changing the reality of, you know, black people and this woman quits because she feels like it's not progressing fast enough, and the principal responds to her by essentially saying that, in places that are dedicated to making things better or focused on making things better, it's more painful when it feels like it's not happening. And I do think I felt some of that in leaving Swarthmore, and that was paired with moving into the wider world and realizing like, oh, people really care about what? And that is not a given in the rest of kind of the world. And being able to spend so much time with people really engaged in kind of social justice oriented things through numerous vantage points, but also, you know, the arts and thinking about what it means to be, an active citizen in the world.
And so maybe it's time from these questions to look back on the Swarthmore photo archives, cause I haven't looked at them in a really long time. Yeah.
Chinyere Odim ’17 I wonder if we can squeeze in one more question and see if we can get away with that to you? I want to make sure I get to all the questions in the chat.
Okay, I'm going to ask one more question. That is, my questions. Selfishly. I think I might be coming. Sure. But this question comes out of, you know, a debate or a conversation that's been going on in the field of sociology. Over the last like two years. Which is about the responsibility of academics and contributing to discourse on everyday struggle.
And so can you share a bit about, how you make meaning from these photography projects created by college students who could hide away in, you know, an ivory tower, but instead they choose to, you know, engage in public discourse?
Summer Sloane-Britt ’16 Sure. I think that in my work, it's always been important to me for things to be relevant to today and also not focus on the sensational side of things, but instead really focus on the everyday side of things.
And so I think that the equal to what you're talking about in sociology in photo really thinks about vernacular photography. So things like family photographs and, you know, the photographs that people were taking in secrecy or that are in archives that whenever circulated very highly these different kinds of things. And I think those are really the materials where an everyday struggle becomes very present to me, where it's when I look at sneak photographs where they're just meeting and talking, or when Bob Dylan came to play for them, just the staff.
Right? Like those photographs, the photographs of parties that they had. You know, it's like a movement that is very much presented as the reality of chaos and kind of, disappointment, disheartening moments and despair. And there is also a lot of joy that people are experiencing by finding this kind of new family between them. And so I think it's, as an art historian, especially for a discipline that is very much ivory tower oriented, to do work that highlights the places, spaces and projects that people are doing that is, are often silenced or pushed to the side because people don't necessarily want to deal with it, or it's because it's about kind of leftist histories that are still swept under the rug as if they never existed. And so I think that, you know, the photos that we see from SNCC reflect things that are still present today. And that's part of their power. And therefore show us again what that everyday work looks like and that labor looks like. Yeah. And thank you for adding that.
Chinyere Odim ’17 I'm glad I squeezed that last question. And as some folks have said and, you know, in the chat, this has been wonderful. You've gotten training for a lot of us. We are out of time for tonight. On behalf of the Alumni Council and the Swarthmore Black Alumni Network, I want to thank you again, Summer, for sharing your work with us tonight.
Thank you to everyone who submitted questions. Also, thank you to those who were just listening as well. We appreciate you showing up and tuning in. So take care. Be well. Good night.
