“That Photo”: Journalism and Bearing Witness to History

On August 31, 1970, the Philadelphia Daily News published a photograph snapped by Elwood Smith of several Black Panthers being forced to strip by gun-wielding Philadelphia police officers. Within days, Smith's image became known as “that photo,” widely recognized throughout the city. Through a visual analysis of Smith's photograph alongside reader and editorial responses to the image, this essay interrogates the role of journalism in mediating the relationship between the past and present. I argue that the “history” witnessed by Daily News readers extended beyond the violence sanctioned by Philadelphia police against the Panthers in that frozen moment. Invoking discourses surrounding a past of racial violence perpetrated by Whites against Black bodies, Daily News readers discursively linked the strip search to historic rituals of bodily trauma. In calling readers to witness Smith's photograph, journalists summoned the visual's power to challenge structures of police authority within the city of Philadelphia and to complicate rituals of violence endemic throughout the United States. Sanctioning the interpretive contestation of Smith's photograph, the Daily News legitimated readers’ competing, albeit interconnected, positions regarding the appropriation of police power within Philadelphia. In so doing, the newspaper undercut the potentially catalyzing power of Smith's photograph, emphasizing instead the necessity of bearing witness while containing the photograph's meanings. This case study thus offers a site to consider the ways in which Northern newspapers limited visual discourse and its opportunities to engage structural issues of racial inequality and police authority during the so-called “long 1960s.”