(excerpt)

As one of the most powerful mediums during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, photography featuring Black women often probed the effects of Black beauty on the intended (white) viewer’s consciousness, illustrating the psychological fissures they created within the average pre-civil rights spectator.

Cast as the medium of the movement rather than its principal figures, Black women were more exposed both emotionally and physically than their male counterparts, less protected by outer garments and less defended from the viewer’s desires, intensified by the camera’s attention to the female form. But while the female figure was vulnerable to photographers, the subjects often seemed experienced at guarding their interiority.

The intimacy of photographs depicting indoor scenes produced a much different effect than other forms of photography. Whereas photos illustrating violent street protests demanded that photographers take immediate action, interior scenes in eating establishments allowed photographers time to make deliberate compositional choices. Photos shot in confined spaces made particular use of artificial lighting as it reflected off of fabrics, countertops, polished barstools, and richer tones of human skin.

The allure of sit-in photography was an alien genre to viewers, subjects, and photographers alike. The practice became a form of photographic portraiture while simultaneously being a site of political theater. Both “sitting-for” a painter and “sitting-in” for a photographer shared certain attributes as a means of art: seated among props such as the food and utensils they were so often denied, sit-in protestors dressed carefully for the event and remained calm and composed.

For the most part, photographers supported the political goals of the protesters, highlighting the significance of their presence at the counter. When reporting on the sit-ins, Ebony magazine concluded, “faces tell the story; in the burning eyes, in the set jaws, in the enigmatic smiles are the real meaning of the unprecedented student protest movement which shook the South to its foundations.”

The photographs that resulted from these sit-ins “reframed young subjects within a long tradition of self-affirming African American portraiture,” serving both to engrave a social identity and describe a certain individual. However, the conventions of the genre also place the viewer at a considerable distance from the photograph’s subject, exemplified in Calvert McCann’s famous image of sit-in protester, Nietta Dunn.

Reportedly the sister of one of McCann’s close friends, Dunn sits with one arm crossed over her mid-section at an H.L. Green’s lunch counter in Lexington, Kentucky during the 1960s. Her face is turned toward the camera as her presence feels both intimate and opaque; although fully revealed to the viewer, her face is quite unrevealing—a firmly closed expression mirrors the closed wicker basket perched on the counter, handle turned down in the same manner as her mouth. She is the sole focus of the frame as well as the only woman among men.

The camera’s angle and proximity highlight the tangibility of the scene to an unusual degree: in contrast to uniforms of police officers and still shots from action-packed marches, surfaces become a focal point. The diner’s fluorescent lighting turns the polished countertop into makeshift mirror, reflecting bright light onto Dunn’s serene, poised frame. This reflection turns the sheen on her one-tone sheath into a silky extension of her highlighted skin.

Asserting a self-contained presence with an upright posture, lips turned down in a firm expression and arm draped protectively across her midriff, Dunn presents a carefully guarded interior that holds viewers at a considerable distance. Shawn Michelle Smith discusses the photographic portrait and the “exteriorized discourse of interiority,” which has usually been a defining attribute of white, middle class subjects. Distance is often mandated by the perception of interiority, and the perception of surface differences stimulates audiences’ desire to touch. Because the allure of the photograph is a composite of shimmering skin that invites audiences to reach out and a somber face that simultaneously tells them to stand back, it offers a locus for a broader mediation, inevitably shaped by white female viewers’ own perspectives on the alternating current the image sets in motion.

Engaging in an attempt to characterize the viewing space along with the “effect of an obscured depth at the heart of a shining surface,” both participates in a diverges from a range of different “surfacisms” that seek to articulate a less unilateral exchange between the subject and object of the fetishing gaze (49). Dunn is demanding to be accepted as is, not requesting or (as in other sit-in photos) proffering money to an unwilling server. Her firm presence in the frame demands to be accounted for on its own terms.

When photojournalists collaborated with young activists who placed their bodies on the line at lunch counters, drinking fountains and other segregated sites, the camera exposed the arbitrary and unjust nature of Jim Crow laws. Photographs of well-dressed Black women drinking at segregated water fountains helped restore African American women to the category of ladies from which they were expelled at the beginning of Jim Crow, and depictions of Black women calmly integrating into “White Only” restrooms in 1961 Jackson, Mississippi also presented an example of dignified femininity. In a photograph of her arrest outside a white restroom, activist Gwendolyn Jenkins—not the flustered white male authority figures—is clearly in command. Similarly, Nietta Dunn appears to be in complete control of her sit-in protest, appearing as if she cannot, and will not, be moved, offering a new image of beauty, and arguably, power

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