Andrew Malekoff

There are images, no matter how troubling, that defy description – “the shadow of dark hangs over them, making whatever narratives we construct around them seem sentimental and beside the point,” observed poet Mark Strand.

Demetrius Haley, one of five Black Memphis police officers charged with murder in the Jan. 7 assault of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, used his personal cell phone to take photos of  Nichols as he sat slumped over on the ground, handcuffed and leaned up against a police vehicle.

The men who participated in the savage beating were black, as was Nichols. However, “this is not a case of individual racists,” as The Guardian newspaper explained on Feb. 7, “but another example of a policing system rabid with brutality and death.”

“It is a culture that relies on a spectrum of aggressive tactics, racial profiling [and] the actual use of often unnecessary force,” concluded Ram Subramanian for the Brennan Center for Social Justice on Feb. 3.

Haley acknowledged texting at least one of the photos to five people, including two other Memphis police officers and a female friend. His motivation for sharing the image has not been publicly disclosed.

Images of human carnage in the aftermath of violence can be used with righteous intent or for prurient purposes. Still photos and videos help to raise awareness and motivate action to fight injustice.

As for images used for more prurient purposes, lynching postcards produced from the latter 1800s through the early to mid-1900s were shared widely. They became collectibles, gruesome keepsakes and reminders that served to further dehumanize the deceased, as opposed to documenting the horrors of white supremacy and need for racial justice.

Rather than use photographic images alone, Mamie Till-Mobley made a bold decision soon after her 14-year-old son Emmett Till was abducted, tortured, and lynched by white supremacists during a visit to Mississippi in 1955 when he was accused of whistling at a white woman in a grocery store.

At Emmett’s funeral in Chicago, Till-Mobley insisted on an open casket. “I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby,” she said.

Almost 70 years later, Rowvaughn Wells, Nichols’ mother,  viewed the remains of Tyre’s lifeless body and the video that captured the savage beating that led to his death. “They had beat him to a pulp. He had bruises all over him, his head was swollen like a watermelon,” she remarked.

In the spirit of Till-Mobley before her,  Wells supported the public release of the police videos that captured the excessive use of force against her son. She insisted that the world see the video of what they did to her baby.

As for the motivation behind Haley’s decision to share his photo of the battered Nichols, did one of Haley’s photo recipients know Nichols? Or did he send the photo as a souvenir, a hunter displaying his kill, as was customary practice when postcards of lynchings were manufactured for broad distribution more than 100 years ago?

In turn of the century lynching postcards, victims were posed centrally in the photos. Smiling spectators gathered around the borders of the frame to verify their presence. “Sometimes they line up in an orderly fashion, as if they were at a class reunion or church picnic, [positioned] around the victim, hoisting children on their shoulders so that they can see. too,” according to photographer Shawn Michelle Smith, professor of visual studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois.

Lynchings were family affairs that advanced “the intergenerational reproduction of white supremacist violence,” Smith added.

Once the lynching victim was pronounced dead, spectators “fought for shreds of clothing, body parts, pieces of rope, or anything that they could get their hands on to act as souvenirs and trophies,” wrote Meghan Lynn Jordan in her 2017 thesis, “Lynching Photographs and Their Aftermath: The Overlay of the Gaze.”

Lynching postcards often included handwritten inscriptions such as: ”This is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it, Your son Joe.” Another postcard contained in Jordan’s thesis depicted four Black men hanging from a tree. The inscription included this line: “I read an account of the night riders affairs where it says these men were hung without any apparent cause or reason whatever.”

It has not been openly revealed if Haley wrote an inscription to accompany the photo of  Nichols that he texted. However, “sending the photograph to acquaintances, including at least one outside of the Police Department, violated policies about keeping information confidential,” according to a Feb. 7 report in The New York Times.

Police officials asserted that the unauthorized distribution of the photo was part of “a pattern of mocking, abusive and blatantly unprofessional behavior by the officers” that included cursing, laughing, and boasting about the assault.

Wells said of her son that he was “loved by his community and known to be gentle, kind, and joyful, had never been in trouble with the law, not even a parking ticket. He was an honest man, a wonderful son, and kind to everyone.”

It is unlikely that Haley shared photos of a dying Mr. Nichols with righteous intent to right a wrong or advocate for police reform. The police videos and Haley’s cell phone images are part of a different kind of narrative about the law enforcement system, one with a long and sordid history rooted in a culture of white supremacist violence.