The political, technological, demographic, legal, and cultural landscapes of the United States have undeniably changed in the century since the birth of modern photojournalism. And without a doubt, there are innumerable confluences of religion and race in the history of photojournalism, from overt white supremacy to tacit racist coding to deliberate tactics of liberation. My point is not to name a single story of religion and race within this history but rather to identify their power within photographic practices. Indeed, if anything, over the past century photographs have become even more central to American public life and culture. Digital media have breathed new life into visual technologies and visual modes of communication, dramatically increasing the ability to produce and to access images of events as they unfold.
President Trump seems to instinctively understand the power of digital media and photography. He is, after all, a reality television star and a veteran cover subject for tabloids. Even from his first day in office, he was debating—and doctoring—photographs that showed the size of his inauguration crowds. In the past, he has fixated on his (real and fake) covers for the Luce-founded Time magazine. That he staged a photo op at St. John’s Church amid protests should perhaps be no surprise, even if the brutal methods to get there were. Not long after his appearance, the White House tweeted a 29-second edited video of the events, minus the removal of protesters. Set to soaring music, it begins with a shot of the White House and then transitions to Donald Trump walking off the grounds, leading a group of white officials (all of them unmasked, despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic). After a few seconds of Trump standing in front of the boarded-up church with the Bible, the footage cuts to him returning to the White House, through lines of law enforcement in full riot gear, and concludes with a long shot of the executive residence, its roof dotted with Secret Service and the Washington Monument towering in the background.
This moment, as others before, compels accountability for systemic anti-black racism that the nation’s special solicitude of whiteness has harbored since its founding. The president’s photo op at St. John’s may very well have been a pageantry of deflection. It may have been a page from his reality TV script. It may foreshadow more pernicious anti-democratic tendencies. Whatever the case, the work of racial justice requires far more than careful scrutiny of pictures. But for however long we catch ourselves looking at these pictures, we would do well to attend to the ways in which photographs are matrices of power. They are cultural artifacts caught up in histories, and in contexts of race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion. By taking the cameras at St. John’s seriously, by looking beyond the Bible on display and the symbolism it invokes, we are better prepared to understand just how deeply visual productions of religion and race have been ingrained in American life and culture.