Date of Award
1-1-2021
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A. in Southern Studies
First Advisor
W. Ralph Eubanks
Second Advisor
B. Brian Foster
Third Advisor
Brooke White
School
University of Mississippi
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless,’” Arundhati Roy said during a speech after earning her 2004 Sydney Peace Prize for literature. “There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” These words help illuminate the tensions between dominant narrative and power, as well as photography’s role arbitrating both. This paper will explore those relationships and their impacts through existing documentary and sociological studies, but more pointedly will use the experience of making a body of work about social movements in Memphis, Tennessee. Over the last seven years, I’ve used critical race theory framework to make photographs rooting an urgency at the intersections of people power and broken systems in the city while also rejecting the ability for this work to “give voice” to anyone, thus attempting to embody an anticolonial perspective. The lessons of other photographers working in communities helped inform this work, such as Dawoud Bey, LaToya Ruby Frazier and most notably including Memphis’s Ernest Withers, but still could not prepare me for the reality of the complications between documenting and state surveillance in the present day. These questions are interrogated while recognizing that objectivity is a myth and that the photographic medium has a long history in helping us remember but also in helping to obscure certain truths.
Recommended Citation
Morales, Andrea, "Roll Down Like Water: Photography, social movements, and surveillance in Memphis, Tenneessee" (2021). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3335.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/3335