(CNN) — Eighty-five years ago today, Emmett Till was born in Chicago and lived only 14 years before he was abducted and lynched while visiting family in Mississippi. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made the decision to leave the casket open at the funeral, to “let the people see.” More than 50,000 people attended his funeral services, and the excruciating photos of Till’s beaten and mutilated body, published in Jet magazine, galvanized the Civil Rights Movement. There are few other public images to represent his too-short life.
But what if, instead, he’d returned safely to Chicago and were still alive today? What would he have seen, and who would he have been? What if Emmett Till lived?
That is the premise and title of a forthcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) at Columbia College Chicago, which will open on September 10 with an accompanying book of the same name.
For “If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground,” the historian and curator Sarah Elizabeth Lewis collaborated with Till’s cousin, Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr. — the last living witness to see Till — along with the MoCP executive director Natasha Egan and chief curator Karen Irvine. Through images drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, the project imagines what could have been: a Black boy who grows up, who falls in love and becomes a father, who sees the decades he missed unfold. Time passes through images of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., disco nights, the Chicago Bulls, and the first Black president.
The photographs, by luminaries such as Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Dawoud Bey, Lyle Ashton Harris, Annie Leibovitz, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Robert Mapplethorpe and Carrie Mae Weems, each have their own established histories, but in “If Emmett Till Lived,” they are recontextualized and carry new meaning.
“It allowed me to honor Mamie Till-Mobley’s ethos to ‘let the world see,’” Lewis explained in a video call, alongside Irvine and Egan. “Through the selection of the images, I hope it is an effective invitation to do precisely that.”
The photographs of Till in the open casket served as evidence that was needed at the time, she said. As potent images of injustice, they laid bare the violence that was taking place in the Jim Crow South. But, today, she said, “images of injustice are common. It takes new approaches to insist on humanity and a fundamental right to life.”
This project, which they call a “creative monument,” is a collective imagining, and the curators asked cultural leaders to contribute as well by selecting an image. They include artists Amy Sherald and Hank Willis Thomas, filmmaker Ava DuVernay, musician John Legend, author and former first daughter Chelsea Clinton, US representative Ayanna Pressley and Smithsonian secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III.
“This is for everybody. And I think that’s really important to remember that Emmett’s story is a catalyst for all,” said Egan. “There’s such joy in many of the pictures. Joy of living, the joy of playing on the beach, the joy of going to prom. It’s about humanity, and it’s that collective humanity coming together.”
Below are some of the selected photographs, along with commentary from curators and contributors, which have been gathered from interviews with CNN as well as excerpts from the forthcoming book.
“Untitled” by Stephen Marc
This 1988 image, taken in Chicago, of a father tossing his child into the air took Lewis’s breath away when she first saw it. The boy is suspended in the air above the horizon of Lake Michigan, with no trace of fear as he looks over his shoulder. Who represented Till to her, she thought, the boy or the father?
“This photograph represented an emblem, an epigraph for the entire exhibition,” Lewis explained. “I realized in that moment that it’s not possible for him to be the father, and it was an image that represented loss and that pathos and pain, but it was a reminder of how an image can transform the imagination. I was suspended between the reality and what should have been possible.”
“Prom Couple, Navy Pier” by Tom Arndt
Like the portrait by Stephen Marc, this image by Tom Arndt of a high school couple attending prom is from the 1989 photo book “Changing Chicago,” which showed the lives of Chicagoans through the lenses of a range of documentary photographers. The couple stands close together on Navy Pier, the young man’s hands on his date’s hips as they smile.
Pressley selected this image to honor the life he “deserved to live,” she writes in the book.
“I imagine him here as a husband — loved, cherished, and afforded the dignity of growing old beside someone who saw his full humanity. I imagine the possibility of fatherhood, of laughter at the dinner table, of anniversaries, and of ordinary joy that should never have been denied to any child,” she explained. “To remember Emmett Till is not only to mourn what this nation took from him, but to affirm the fullness of the man he could have become.”
“Drinking Fountains, Mobile, Alabama” by Gordon Parks
Like the photograph of Till’s body, Gordon Parks’ seminal color photographs in 1956 of segregation in Alabama held a mirror to the US. “Drinking Fountains,” photographed in Mobile, was part of the series photographed for Life magazine. Taken the year after Till’s death, the climate remained highly dangerous for Black people, and Gordon wrote about his fear documenting the inequalities within the city. Still, he returned with lush images that showed the dignity of Mobile’s Black residents, shot in color intentionally to humanize their day-to-day lives.
In the book, Bunch writes on the vibrancy of the photograph that made it so compelling. “The richness of the color photograph captures both the daily indignities of segregation, and the manner in which the subjects’ clothing speaks of resiliency and an unwillingness to accept second-class citizenship,” he explained.
“Cliff Joseph: Artist, Activist, and Art Therapist” by Terry Evans
Evans’ portrait of the late artist, art therapist and activist Cliff Joseph, who tirelessly advocated for major New York museums to include Black artists, was taken in 2015 when Joseph was 93 years old. Evans’ portrait was taken just a few years before the artist died, his hair bright white. He faces the camera with resolve.
“It’s such a powerful reminder of the fact that Emmett Till should have aged, and it’s particularly poignant this week that he should be celebrating his 85th birthday,” Irvine said.
“Stars” by Keith Carter
As the renowned American painter Amy Sherald considered this photograph of two children taken by Keith Carter in 1995, she thought about how Till’s story has been understood, disputed and reframed over time. In the image, two young children hold blocks with star patterns over their eyes, anonymizing them.
“I chose this image for how it holds innocence and obstruction at once — children seeing through symbols, yet partially concealed, echoing how Emmett’s story is both witnessed and continually filtered through history,” she writes in the book.
“Boy by Pool, Chicago” by Paul D’Amato
In D’Amato’s portrait of a young boy by a pool in Chicago, taken in 2005, the expanse of blue stretches behind him. It’s that connection and what it symbolizes to Leonard that caught his eye, as he thought about the significance of water to the Atlantic Slave Trade.
“I find it difficult to look at any photo of a Black American in front of a yawning blue body of water without immediately thinking of the Middle Passage,” Leonard writes in the book. “That the body of water here is a pristine swimming pool only sharpens it.”
“But what strikes me most about this Paul D’Amato image is the boy’s gaze: Assertive. Directly into the lens. History behind him. Daring you to define him by it,” he continues. “Daring you to see him as anything other than who he’ll be on his own terms.”
“Railroad Yards, South Chicago,” by David Plowden
Photographer David Plowden took this image of South Chicago’s railroad yards in 1966, and it’s one of several images of train tracks that appear throughout the project, symbolizing the trip back from Mississippi that Till never took.
“The railroad is important to the story, and Emmett should have been on that train back to Chicago,” Egan said.
Plowden spent his career photographing small-town and rural America, from farmlands to towering grain elevators and locomotives. Egan reached out to the 94-year-old to ask to include the image in the book. He died shortly after their conversation, Egan said, giving its inclusion additional significance.
“Barack Obama” by Dawoud Bey
Columbia College Chicago, which the museum is part of, commissioned this portrait of then-Senator Barack Obama in 2006, before his historic presidency. It represents the milestones that Till missed, including the ones that came from Chicago, Lewis said.
The color portrait is by the artist Dawoud Bey, known for his portraits of Black life. The conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas selected it for the project both for what the portrait and their collaboration represents.
“Here is a Black man, born at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, photographed by a Black artist with the dignity and gravity of formal portraiture. For generations, this exchange — a Black photographer making an image of a Black president — would have been unimaginable within the structures of American power,” Thomas writes in the book.
“This photograph allows us to sit with one version of what history fought to make possible: a Black man looking directly into the camera, and into us, with the full force of his humanity intact.”
“Highway to the West ‘They keep the road hot a goin’ and a comin’” by Dorothea Lange
This 1938 landscape by the great 20th-century photographer Dorothea Lange shows a seemingly endless view of US Route 54 in New Mexico, one of many images she took of highways that represented migration in the American West.
As the final image presented in the book, it takes on new meaning. “It symbolizes the unfinished work and the ongoing journey to honor the humanity of all on American ground,” Lewis said. “We are living in a moment in which we are questioning what were once settled histories, and the ground is a metaphor for the narrative of who belongs and who has access to claim their right to be here. It’s deliberately an image that points us to the vanishing line. It’s an image of possibility, of hope, of shared destiny.”
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