In 2013, an exhibition of civil rights photography opened at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Curated by Martin Berger, UCSB professor of history of art and visual culture, it featured lesser-known and unknown photographs of civil rights activism. Published in conjunction with the exhibition, Freedom Now! catalogs the photographs that Berger contends offer “alternative pictures” and “a fuller account” of the civil rights era (11). The text reflects a current, vibrant line of inquiry in the study of the black freedom struggle concerning the role of visual culture, and especially photography, in determining how the civil rights movement unfolded and how we remember it.

The AD&A museum exhibition and Freedom Now! both stem from Berger's 2011 book Seeing through Race, which argues that northern, white liberal newspaper editors gravitated to photographs of the struggle that highlighted whites' power over blacks which, as visual evidence of white dominance and non-threatening blackness, induced sympathy among whites and “assuage[d] the racial anxieties of whites.”Footnote ¹ Circulated through mainstream visual culture, Berger concludes, these images solidified into a canon of civil rights photography that limits “the exercise of black power.”

The brief introduction to Freedom Now! situates it as a response to the call implied by Berger's previous book for “a more balanced canon” (6). A series of short photographic essays, the text is organized in seven sections that correspond to the museum exhibition categories: “The Canon,” “Historical Precedents,” “Doctored,” “Strength,” “Women,” “Children and Youth,” and “Joy.” The first three sections reiterate the thesis of Seeing through Race with an examination of photographs belonging to the established civil rights photographic canon, which Berger argues presents a civil rights story of “well-behaved black protestors victimized by racist and violent whites” (9). His examples include the iconic 1957 photograph of a stone-faced Elizabeth Eckford of the “Little Rock Nine” hounded by a crowd of spitting-mad white women opposed to her entrance to Central High School, which Berger describes as “a formulaic depiction of blacks victimized by whites” (21). The second part of the book comprises a visual counternarrative of the struggle. Its four sections contain photos that, according to Berger, picture African Americans as “effective agents” (14) and the civil rights movement as “driven by black action, not victimhood” (10). Among these is the photograph of Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the black power salute on the medal stand during the 1968 Olympics, which, as an image that “portrays assertive blacks,” Berger argues, is “one of the 1960s' most progressive [civil rights] images.”Footnote ² Although welcome enhancements to the canon, the photographs in these sections frustrate the broad organizing themes under which they are arranged. Most troubling is the final section, “Joy.” The images in this section include photographs of blacks taunting the police, a black female picketer smiling from the back of a paddy wagon, and blacks under arrest singing freedom songs. While these images arguably depict determination and satisfaction, to label them as representations of “joy” supports a triumphalist civil rights narrative and simplifies the complex experiences of the blacks pictured.

Rooted as it is in Seeing through Race, this catalog perpetuates the earlier text's problematic reading of black agency. Across the two texts, Berger often approaches the visualization of power in civil rights photographs as a zero-sum formulation in which depictions of whites' racial hatred toward blacks necessarily constitute representations of black powerlessness (which may explain how he does not view the Eckford photograph as a portrayal of “assertive” blackness). It is not surprising that contemporary white viewers would have read the now-canonical civil rights photographs as reassuring representations of white power, although many of the images make visible the control that black civil rights activists exercised over themselves, their circumstances, and their opponents as part of their nonviolent direct action. To understand how these images became canonical, then, requires considering how – in addition to white editors, photographers, and audiences – blacks made and manipulated the popular image of the civil rights struggle.

One can easily imagine the spirited, fruitful classroom conversations this text will encourage. A collection of seventy-one black-and-white documentary photographs, this catalog is a handsome album of lesser-known activists and their protest that prompts important questions of why certain civil rights images have circulated more freely. Author and activist bell hooks has argued, “The history of black liberation movements in the United States could be characterized as a struggle over images.”Footnote ³ In making sense of that struggle, students of photography and social movements will benefit from considering both the arguments and the images in Freedom Now!.