Seeing The Future in An Image From The Past

SEEING THE FUTURE
IN AN IMAGE FROM THE PAST
HANNAH ARENDT, GARRY WINOGRAND,

AND PHOTOGRAPHING THE WORLD
Ulrich Baer
1
Hannah Arendt (1959),
Reflections on Little Rock,
in The Portable Hannah
Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr.
New York, Penguin, 2004:
23143. Citations hereafter
in body of text.
arly on September 5, 1957, in an apartment

building in Morningside Heights, New York
City, the world arrived at the doorstep to Hannah Arendts post-war American home in the form of
The New York Times. Arendt stared at the face of a black
girl, in a black dress adorned with a long white ribbon
down its center, surrounded by a taunting, menacing,
jeering white mob. A photograph that would make history, the picture of Dorothy Counts in the newspapers
[was] the point of departure of [Arendts] reflections
on the question of race in America. Triggered by looking at this image by Douglas Martin, Arendt would
write in the essay Reflections on Little Rock that the
young womans face bore eloquent witness to the obvious fact that she was not precisely happy.1 Regrettably, the image in the newspapers which brought the
reality of racism into Arendts home and prompted her
to engage with the affairs of the world only resulted in a
deeply flawed and highly controversial argument where
Arendt failed to see how the world was set up to the
detriment of some and the advantage of others.
In spite of her immediate, almost impulsively empathic response to this photograph and one taken
the same day by Jack Jenkins of another young black
Seeing
the
Future
in an
Image
from the
Past
student, Elizabeth Eckford, the truth of these images

remained all but invisible to Arendt. But her failure,
I would contend, results not only from her muchcriticized narrow interpretation of the legal concepts
of private rights of congregation and public rights to
education; Arendt missed, as this essay will explain,
nothing less but the promise of the future held in all
photography.
As eloquent witness to black suffering at the hands
of the white racist mob, Dorothy Counts face was the
punctum of Arendts s analysis, that detail of the image
that due to its poignancy pricked and bruised
Arendt, what she could not simply dismiss and discard
with the rest of the morning paper on September 5,
1957.2 The picture stuck in her mind, and it took all
of her mental prowess to ultimately erase and bury this
original wound in a legalistic argument that failed to
address the lived reality of black Americans. Unless we
show why and how she failed to see these photographs,
however, her flawed thinking might persist or others
might overlook the import of similar photographs in
a similar vein. It is possible to pursue Arendts original
instinct and, against her conclusions, bring the faces of
both Dorothy Counts and Elizabeth Eckford back to
light. Strangely, however, it is precisely by drawing on
some of Arendts categories that we may honor photographys eloquent witness to the heroism of the Civil
Rights movement.
THE CONTROVERSY OVER ARENDTS ESSAY
Arendts Reflections on Little Rock was published in
Dissent with several months delay, as the editors disagreed with Arendts views. The essay unleashed a firestorm from critics who objected to Arendts opinion
that education is a private rather than a political right,
and that school desegregation was not a matter to be
ordered by the courts.3 Arendt made a case against the
court-ordered racial integration of Southern schools
which she viewed as a (private) matter of free association, rather than a (political) matter of equality. Arendt also criticized the use of children by their guardians and activists for political ends. As if to compensate
for what she regarded as a failure in parenting, Arendt
201
Ibid. 27. On the notion of

the punctum (that dimension
of the photograph that is
not encoded, and affects
the viewer due to his or
her experience), see Roland
Barthes, Camera Lucida:
Reflections on Photography.
New York, Farrar Straus
Giroux, 1981.
A veritable cottage industry

of Arendt critics has sprung
up around the controversial
essay, with very few mentions of the role of photography in it. An important discussion is found in Danielle
Allen, Talking to Strangers:
Anxieties of Citizenship since
Brown v. Board of Education. Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 2004.
202
The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55
Arendt, 1959: 244.
Ibid. 232.
See Hannah Arendt,
What Remains? The
Language Remains. A
Conversation with Gnter
Gaus, in The Portable
Hannah Arendt 325.
7
The foregoing of empathy
in favor of dispassionate
analysis in Reflections on
Little Rock is analogous
to Arendts Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report to the
Banality of Evil, where she
insists that compassion for
the victims suffering should
be taken for granted but not
shape an assessment of the
trial. Pointedly, Gershom
Scholem had questioned
whether Arendt had enough
ahavat Yisrael, [love for the
Jewish people], to which she
briskly responded that love
for the Jewish people, as for
any group, seemed an absurd
position since the only kind
of love Arendt knew and
believed in was the love for
individuals. See Hannah
Arendt/Gershom Scholem,
Der Briefwechsel, 1939
1964. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp,
2010. Feeling sympathy for
oppressed blacks seemed
as obvious to Arendt as it
seemed preposterous to her
to turn this sympathy into
the philosophical or political
basis of an argument. Differing from her response to
Ellisons critique of Little
Rock, Arendt did not budge
from her position that clear
thinking must not be muddied by emotions during the
polemical campaign attacking Eichmann in Jerusalem.
5
inserted herself into the position of the students caretaker: What would I do if I were a Negro mother?4
She then proceeded to imagine herself in the position
of a white mother, assuming imaginary authority over
the teenagers in these photographs whom she felt were
unduly cast by parents and political activists into a political struggle in which children have no part. After
this initial empathic reaction to the photograph, which
also prompted Arendt to view the struggle over equality as a generational issue between parents and their
children, Arendt dispassionately argued that school desegregation ought not to be decided by federal courts.
Arendts incisive engagement with the question of
race in America rested on her empathy with the young
black woman in the middle of a racist mob.
As a Jew I take my sympathy for the cause of the
Negroes as for all oppressed and under-privileged
peoples for granted and should appreciate it if the
reader did likewise.5
But Arendts solidarity did not lead her to demand an

end to school segregation as demanded by Civil Rights
leaders and her intellectual peers. She had experienced
anti-Semitic harassment as a Jewish schoolgirl in prewar German territory.6 But her empathic identification
with the black girl in the photograph was ultimately
eclipsed by her intellectual opposition to the legal enforcement of school desegregation.7
Arendt responded to some of her critics in print but it
took several pointed letters from novelist Ralph Waldo Ellison for her to eventually change her mind. Ellison admonished Arendt for failing to grasp the complexity of growing
up as a black American and faulted the political theorist for
not understanding the world in which she lived. American
blacks, Ellison instructed Arendt, do not use their children
when they enroll them in previously white schools as a form
of social climbing, as Arendt had superciliously suggested.
She has absolutely no conception of what goes on
in the mind of Negro parents when they send their
kids through that line of hostile people. Yet they
are aware of the overtones of a rite of initiation
which such events actually constitute for the child,
a confrontation of the terrors of social life with all
the mysteries stripped away. And in the outlook
Seeing
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of many of these parents (who wish the problem

didnt exist), the child is expected to face the terror
and contain his fear and anger precisely because he
is a Negro American. Thus hes required to master
the inner tensions created by his racial situation,
and if he gets hurtthen his is one more sacrifice.8
After Ellisons rejoinders, in a rare instance where she allowed herself to be corrected, Arendt revoked her views
on school segregation. She recognized that her divisions between the public and the private did not fully
hold, and that actual lives in the world like those of
Dorothy Counts and Elizabeth Eckford, photographed
in their charming dresses while confronting soldiers or
a menacing mob, defied her conceptual grasp.
The point here is not to rehabilitate empathy in
favor of dispassionate judgment, or to marshall the
power of photography against the abstraction of political thought.9 Instead, I want to show that when
Arendt was moved to think by a photograph she inadvertently pointed to the particular and irreducible
role that photography offers to an understanding of
the world beyond thread-bare political definitions. Arendt had provided a useful definition of the world, but
Dorothy Counts countenance tripped up her thinking. We should use that occasion to clarify the relation
between photography and the world, and to honor the
unforgettable witness provided by these photographs
against violent and, as in the case of Arendt, intellectual opposition.
203
Ralph Waldo Ellison, in

Robert Penn Warren, ed.,
Who Speaks for the Negro?
New York, Random House,
1965: 344.
Arendt devoted much of

her later work on a theory of
judgment that deconstructed
this opposition. See Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Why
Arendt Matters. New Haven,
Yale University Press, 2006.
THE USE OF PHOTOGRAPHS IN THE CIVIL

RIGHTS STRUGGLE
I think no one will find it easy to forget the photograph reproduced in newspapers and magazines
throughout the country, showing a Negro girl, accompanied by a white friend of her father, walking
away from school, persecuted and followed into
bodily proximity by a jeering and grimacing mob
of youngsters.10
Arendt assumed that all viewers would be equally compelled to respond to this photograph. The photograph
impressed itself upon her as if against her will, the way
the jeering mob follows the girl in the photograph
10
Arendt, 1959: 236.
204
See Julian Cox, Bearing

Witness: Photography and
the Civil Rights Movement,
in Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights
Movement 19561968.
Atlanta, High Museum of
Art, 2008: 1946.
11
Maurice Berger, For All the

World to See: Visual Culture
and the Struggle for Human
Rights. New Haven, Yale
University Press, 2010: 111.
12
into bodily proximity. This immediate response to

an image was directly in keeping with the Civil Rights
leaderships strategy of using photographs to shape
public opinion.11 In the 1950s the Civil Rights leadership realized that many northerners, including generally well-disposed and progressive people like Hannah
Arendt, considered the color question or race question (Arendt uses both terms) to be a southern problem. Many northerners like Arendt refused to visit the
South as a form of passive disapproval of Jim Crow realitiesand as a convenient way to avoid confronting
a reality they could criticize from afar. The Civil Rights
leadership realized the power of photographs to eclipse
that distance and bring the struggle of American blacks
into the homes and minds of northern whites. They
understood that [photography] was also an adept messenger of ideas, able to illuminate the causes and effects
of a problem, give a human face to abstract thoughts,
and illustrate complex realities.12 They considered
photographs of well-dressed black children, stoically
enduring the victimization of white mobs and southern policemen, to be particularly effective. In 1955 the
mother of Emmett Till, a teenage boy from Chicago
who had been brutally lynched by whites while visiting his family in Mississippi, decided to allow major
magazines to print images of her sons mutilated body.
The images prompted outrage and sparked political urgency among many viewers. The appearance of photographs of children in the school desegregation struggle
was part of an explicit campaign to sway people like
Arendt, who had refused to see the racism that they
imagined occurred only very far away. Photography
put white viewers closer to the position of Dorothy
Counts being followed into bodily proximity by a
hostile mob.
But Arendt, after experiencing it as a call to conscience, ultimately viewed this news photograph in
direct opposition to the effort to end school segregation. Photographs, as this makes clear, can support diametrically opposing views on the same situation. Thus Arendt, the Civil Rights leaders, and
many Americans including some of the individuals
Seeing
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shown in the images, disagreed fundamentally on

the meaning of these photographs. Once she had recovered from being bruised by Counts eloquent
face, Arendt viewed the figure of Dorothy Counts
as a minor whom she could protect from a political
reality beyond her control by first imagining herself
first in the role of Counts mother, then in the role of
the white students mothers, and finally as a political theorist. But for Arendt this meant recommending that Dorothy Counts and Elizabeth Eckford be
kept out of the schools where they would be exposed
to the mob. She failed to read in these images that
Counts and Eckford, even prior to the forced desegregation of schools, were already embedded in the
world of politics. Americans lived as political beings
long before reaching adulthood, even if adulthood
remained for Arendt a criterion for full participation
in the public sphere.
Arendt regarded these photographs as direct results of the court order to integrate the schools.
She was not entirely wrong: the events shown in
these photographs resulted from a concerted campaign, including legal maneuvers, to get these issues to the Supreme Court and turn desegregation
into a national cause. But Arendt erred in thinking that without court orders such scenes would
not have occurred: the camera only brought to
light what was already happening all over America,
what most of white America, like Arendt, wanted
to keep in the dark.
What remains perplexing in Arendts inability to
read these images is that she had created some conceptual tools that could have prevented such a glaring failure. Arendt had developed several concepts
and categories that greatly aid in a more general understanding of photography beyond the example of
these pictures. If Arendt had applied these concepts
of world, visibility, and the in-between to the images of Elizabeth Eckford and Dorothy Counts, she
would have discerned something remarkable in these
two photographs.
205
206
The New York Times, cover

page, September 5, 1957.
Reproduced with permission
of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited
without permission.
Seeing
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in an
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THE MEDIAS USE OF PHOTOGRAPHS

The dresses. These wonderfully proper, carefully sewn,
knee-length dresses. I imagine Elizabeth Eckfords
beautiful white dress with a pale pink trim, and I see
her standing with her mother in a fabric store in downtown Birmingham, fingering the checkered pink muslin while an amply bosomed, gum-chewing, and terminally bored saleswoman stands by with a wooden ruler
in hand. Zip, the saleswoman slides the shears through
the bolt of salmon-colored fabric to mothers precise
instructions, and a few minutes later with a bit of
bounce in their steps for having made such a fine purchase mother and daughter leave the store. Elizabeth
spends long evenings tracing, marking, cutting, stitching and finally sewing a dress after a pattern in Womans
Digest. At the swiftly approaching end of the sweltering
Alabama summer, even her father takes an interest in
the cut, design and color of the dress, his eyes passing
over the cloth which his daughter has chosen to face
the nations fundamental self-contradiction of simultaneously legislating liberty and inequality. The official
letter admitting her to Central High School rests in
an envelope in the kitchen, its crease deepened from
repeated un-foldings.
You will be the most beautiful girl in school, her
aunt says when Elizabeth shows off the finished white
and pink dress on a hot August afternoon. Unspoken
is the fact that she will be one of only eight AfricanAmerican students in the white high school, the boys
in white shirts and dress pants, the girls in dresses, all
carrying their books and the mountainous burden of
representing an entire race.
While Elizabeth is getting ready on the morning of
September 4, 1957, several tense and exhausted community leaders in another part of Little Rock fear violence upon seeing the mob that has formed outside the
school. After some deliberations they telephone the
eight admitted African-American students homes to
call off the planned integration for that day. Seven of
them stay home. Only Elizabeth Eckfords parents do
not own a phone and, as agreed upon so as not to provoke violence, send their daughter to school without an
207
208
adult chaperone. She arrives alone, is denied entry by

armed soldiers, and is ultimately rescued from a threatening and increasingly hysterical mob by a journalist
who helps her onto a public bus. Her courageous attempt that morning is chronicled by the national media as a milestone in Americas slow and sacrificial path
to social justice.
On the same day some 800 miles to the North in
Charlotte, North Carolina, Dorothy Counts decides to
add a bit of style in the form of a long white ribbon to
the maroon gingham dress that she made from the designs of a different issue of Womens Digest. After the
first horrible day, so much worse than anything she had
expected, Dorothys mind is focused only on getting
through this ordeal. The white ribbon flutters around
her neck (though she will not surrender!) and she strides
forward, out of the school and away from this pack of
wolves in the form of school boys that shes seen many
times around town. Her teeth are clenched in anger,
determination, and fear. She had made a choice to put
herself in the middle of this scene and yet she was unprepared. Dorothy Counts remembers that day:
Interview with Dorothy

Counts on the 50th anniversary of her first day at
Harding High School, 2007.
Available on youtube.com.
13
It was a choice, but there had not been a plan at

place here at Harding [High School]. If there had
been a plan in place some of the things that happened to me wouldnt have happened.13
By Friday of the first week, Dorothy withdraws from

Harding High, where no authority figure will vouch
for her safety, Her fathers explanation is that it is
with compassion for our native land and love for our
daughter Dorothy that we withdraw her as a student
at Harding High School. Dorothy Counts moves to
Pennsylvania to finish high school.
Counts and Eckfords brave acts that day would ultimately be seen as important victories among the many
skirmishes, setbacks, and deaths in the bloody struggle
for justice and equality in America. They both knew
that they had stepped into a media-prepared political
drama. Regardless of the outcome of their actions, their
pictures traveled the country and the world. And precisely because neither Counts nor Eckford could know
the extent of their role in this historical moment, their
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209
Detail, The New York Times,

cover page, September 5,
1957. Images courtesy of the
Associated Press
210
photographs contain something that is yet to be seen.

As for the dress, Counts cannot bear to even lay eyes
on it; it will only live on in these black-and-white photographs, its white ribbon and maroon fabric carefully
folded in tissue paper and packed in a box not to be
opened for years.
On the cover of The New York Times, September
5, 1957, the two photographs of school desegregation
were vertically aligned. This layout told a particular
story about the forced implementation of the Supreme
Courts 1955 Brown vs. Board of Education decision.
The top photograph showed Elizabeth Eckford being
blocked from following a white student into Central
High School by National Guardsmen in Little Rock,
Arkansas on the first day of school. The governor of
Arkansas, Orval Faubus, had defied federal orders of
school desegregation, and ultimately prompted President Eisenhower to send in federal troops: this became
the lead story in The New York Times that day. The bottom photograph showed Dorothy Counts surrounded
by a jeering mob of young men and boys in Charlotte,
North Carolina on the first day of school.
The Times organized these two photographs, taken
in the moments before and after school that day, into a
single story that played itself out over several days. What
gets lost in this story, however, is the instant when two
young women are at the brink of stepping into worlds
to which they were denied access. These steps are also
metaphors of the steps that America had not yet taken
toward either freedom or the continuation of inequality. And with these step the world was transformed
from within, transformed in ways that nobody in these
photographs could fully imagine, though everyone in
these pictures inhabits the same physical space. The
photographs let us see the same physical space, but it
is seen in radically incompatible ways by the people in
the image. For us today, this incommensurability in the
same shot turns these photographs into images not just
of political conflict, but into photographs of the world
itself. For the world is nothing but our latent awareness that we all see reality from different perspectives,
and that this reality never coincides completely with
Seeing
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the physical space around us, nor to our own way of

looking at it from just a single point of view.
The Times, in the interest of telling a story, laid out
the images as illustrations. The top photograph in The
Times, shot by Jack Jenkins, begins the story of desegregation as a potentially violent conflict between state
and federal powers. Visually, it is a scene of strict demarcation by force: all four individuals are shown at
an instant when they are spatially isolated from one
anotherthe armed Guardsmen, the black student
being barred, the white student who has been permitted to cross the barrier. The picture subtly evokes the
armed conflict of the Civil War when a hundred years
earlier the United States was nearly torn apart by the
Southern states refusal to follow federal directives. By
way of its composition the photograph assigns to the
black student, the white student, and the guardsmen
in profile (none of whom face the camera head-on) the
roles of actors in a historical drama that exceeds their
individual actions. The soldiers in the background and
the military trucks add to the pictures overall mood
that these individuals are caught up in a drama beyond
their control.
The bottom photograph continues this story. Taken
at the end of the day and selected by the Times editors from several images shot by Douglas Martin during Dorothys first arduous day at school, it suggests
that the struggle over schooling may yet be resolved.
But it focuses concretely on the costs incurred by black
students who are supposed to benefit from this victory:
Dorothy Counts and her chaperone march toward the
photographer and it is a scene of private citizens, rather
than uniformed soldiers, in conflict. The photographer
chose a moment when the individuals were arranged in
a way such that the threatening mob, blocking literal
and political progress, looked as if it were already past.
The Times vertical top-to-bottom sequence tells a
story through these photographs before anyone has
read the article printed on the papers right. The top
photograph, with the soldiers standing guard, warns
that desegregation might trigger a rift in the Union
reminiscent of the Civil War; but the bottom photo-
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graph assures viewers that progress, embodied by Dorothy Counts passage through and ahead of the white
mob, can be achieved at a cost. The world of the top
image is divided by a white post into left and right,
black and white. With his raised hand the guardsman
directs Elizabeth Eckford away from school, and she
has to stay on the right of the picture, forever locked
out. But in the bottom photograph Dorothy Counts
finds herself on the side of the image that is defined as
off-limits to blacks by the compositional logic of the
top picture. The jeering mob, with its threatening hand
gestures that seem to amplify the guardsmans hands
above, seeks to divide her and her chaperone. But in
purely visual terms Dorothy has already passed over to
the pictures left, which according to the top image and
its strict visual demarcations and actual borders, is the
white side of the world.
Visually, the white post that divides the top image
into two worlds is echoed in the white ribbon that flutters down the front of Dorothy Counts pretty dress.
The white line of the military border barring black
students from school in Little Rock has migrated onto
Dorothy Counts actual body. The political and legal
struggle of the body politic may be resolved, The Times
says, but will now be played out upon the bodies of individual students. Dorothy has crossed into the white
school but now her body has become the lightning rod
of white aggression.
An additional element underlines this shift from the
political to the personal. The top photograph shows the
soldiers and white students only in profile, Elizabeth Eckford with large sunglasses concealing her face. This is a
scene of political conflict where people simply play their
assigned parts. The bottom image, by contrast, shows
everyone facing forward: Dorothys stoic expression, her
chaperones grimace of controlled anger, and around them
the toothy confidence of the white students that their violent and dehumanizing racism will outlast this conflict.
But The Times only identifies Dorothy Counts and Dr.
Edwin Tompkins by name. Perhaps the white students
agreed to be photographed but did not reveal their names
to a reporter; either way, by leaving out the names of the
Seeing
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white students, The Times suggests that these men are everymanthat they, in their nameless omnipresence, constitute the world of the contemporary American South.
The naming of Dorothy Counts and Dr. Tompkins is thus
a double-edged gesture: it bestows dignity and singularity
to the black people in the image, but it also singles them
out and isolates them from everyone else, from those not
asked to identify themselves. Even if the caption suggests
that private citizens might part the nameless sea of ignorance, it leaves the viewer with a sense that some people
are different and stand out, while others are simply part
of the world.
To be sure, the segregation of schools in the American
South is a thing of the past, much like black-and-white
photography. This reading by historical hindsight assumes
desegregation to be a foregone conclusion. But rather than
confirm the narrative of the inevitable march of justice
already hinted at in the layout of The Times cover page,
these photographs open up a contested moment: they depict a reality that is viewed in such incompatible ways by
the people pictured that they show not just a specific event
but a representation of the world as the infinite plurality
of life-worlds created by people with different agendas and
seen from different viewpoints. I would argue that it was
this dimension of these photographstheir way of showing the uncontainable plurality of the world beyond The
Times effort to fit them into a precise storythat unwittingly prompted Hannah Arendt to write her essay.
At the moment when these photographs were printed
the struggle had not yet been won, the issue had not yet
been resolved. The Supreme Court would have to revisit
the issues of Brown vs. Board of Education in several cases
to quicken the desegregation of schools, and end other
instances of discrimination in housing, transportation,
employment, and marriage. It was not until 1966 that
the Court declared laws against interracial marriage to be
unconstitutional; as the 45th US President Barack Obama
poignantly noted during his Inaugural Address in 2009,
his parents could not have legally married in the state of
Virginia at the time of his birth.
The struggle is not over. Dramatic inequalities in
education continue to exist for children from differ-
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ent racial backgrounds, and there are other struggles

yet to be won, in schools, in the streets, in city halls,
in police precincts, and in the courts. Each victory or
defeat changes the landscape of political struggle in
unexpected ways, because nothing less than the entire
world is at stake in such fights, if we understand the
world as the reality that people see from radically different perspectives. No single victory in the struggle to
change the world results in a unified perspective from
which everyone sees reality in the same way.
14
Arendt, 1959: 244.
THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Upon seeing these pictures, Hannah Arendt thought
she had grasped it all. The pictures show the situation
in a nutshell because those who appeared in it were directly affected by the Federal Court order, the children
themselves.14 Indeed, the situation appears to us today
as if it fit into a thimble. In Southern states whites did
not want blacks to attend the same schools as their children but the federal government thought such a stance
was incompatible with constitutional rights. So what
did Arendt get wrong?
It turns out that no amount of historical context, in
the form of newspaper accounts, eyewitness testimonies, or legal documents can fully explain these images.
This is because these photographs, contrary to a common understanding of photography shared by Arendt,
do not show the past as frozen. The moments of time
captured here do not become fully comprehensible by
consulting the historical context through other sources. Instead these images keep open several outcomes
that never unfoldedin the sense of the future as the
dimension of hope and promise itselfrather than
documenting the particular story that we now know as
history. These photographs offer no indication of what
might happen before or after. Indeed the two images
lead to different futures, since Elizabeth Eckford could
not enter school on the first day but ultimately graduated from Central High, while Dorothy Counts withdrew after four unbearable days and moved to another
state.
The images also do not freeze time in the historical
past. The photographs of Elizabeth Eckford and Dor-
Seeing
the
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in an
Image
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Past
othy Counts do not settle the question about school

segregation and declare the court-ordered integration a
failure or success. I am not viewing these photographs
as proof that Arendt was wrong; instead I read these
pictures as preserving the possibility of an unimagined
futurewhich is precisely that dimension of photography that no amount of contextualized knowledge or
historical hindsight can provide.
In her analysis Arendt relied on a conventional understanding of photography as offering up frozen slivers of the past. But this still prevalent conception of
photography limits images to the role of capturing the
past and drains the potential for an alternative future
from these images. Photographs, contrary to this dominant understanding, do not only capture the living as
already deadthey do not simply freeze the past, but
keep the present open to different outcomes beyond
the depicted moment. The historical context accounts
for one such outcome; the inevitable death of the depicted subjects at some future time is another. But these
are not the only ones. Each photograph exposes us to
the very possibility of the future rather than simply leading us to outcomes that are known from other sources.
Thus the photograph of Dorothy Counts pursued
by the white mob shows more than a frozen moment
from the past. It does not lock in the past but opens
up the future still nesting inside that image as its unredeemed, unrealized potential. Photography captures an
excess of time, or time as excessive to a single moment.
From within the picture Dorothy Counts looks out at
us, and no matter how much we want this image to signal a great step forward in the Civil Rights struggle her
gaze wins out. Her eyes are focused not on the bright,
desegregated future we presumably inhabit; her gaze is
still searching, still today, for a spot just beyond us that
trembles with an uncertainty, a hope, a fear and a confidence that we can only imagine.
None of the iconic photographs from the Civil
Rights movement shut down these eyes. None of them
show the end of segregation. Instead, each photograph shows a world that is in the process of changing
from within itself into another world.
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THE FUTURE NESTING IN AN IMAGE

Herein lies the significance of these photographs. They
document a past that is over, surely. But these photographs also let us see how a long-gone moment, or a
specific moment, could have led into a different present. These photographs preserve a particular moment
in history but, more importantly, also the possibility of
a different outcome. These photographs hold open the
promise and the threat of a different future from the
one weve come to accept as the present. These pictures
are so powerful not because they document the past
but because they keep open for the viewer the possibility of another future. And it is this possibility to think
of a different future, and to imagine the future differently, that is the condition of political action.
To look at the Times photographs as historical documents that chronicle a step toward the known outcome
of our present negates their power. Even when displayed on museum walls it negates these photographs
power to allow us to imagine our history as other than
inevitable, and by implication our present as other than
ineluctable.
What is critical about photography is that it suspends and thus opens up timenot that it freezes it.
Photographs allow the future to be imagined as a time
worth waiting for, even if history went in a particular
direction known to us today. If we accept the photographs of Elizabeth Eckford and Dorothy Counts as
chronicling moments in a long march to victory, we
might momentarily feel superior to Arendts flawed
understanding of the question of race in America. But
when we regard these photographs as simply frozen
moments from the by-gone past (including Arendts
superseded views), we fail to see how uncertain the
struggles outcome was, how enormous the sacrifice
Dorothy Counts and Elizabeth Eckford endured, and
how many of its visions went unredeemed. If we fail to
see the images in this way, we betray the acts of Dorothy Counts and Elizabeth Eckford, and we give up on
hope itself.
The point of this essay is thus not to correct Arendts
lapse in critical thinking. Ellison already achieved this.
Seeing
the
Future
in an
Image
from the
Past
Instead, by reinterpreting these images it is possible

to allow the pasts undecided momentsof which
Arendts lapse offers curious testimonyto inform
and inspire actions in the present. Since photographs
preserve a moment as radically open to a future yet
unknown, they allow us to track the ways in which
history evolved. History, when viewed from within a
photograph, never appears as the inevitable succession
of recorded events but as the result of forces and acts by
individuals and groups.
So how do we view these photographs correctly? It
is not enough to say that Arendt failed to read these
images properly. These images teach us how the world,
as the network of relations that allows us to establish
meaning, does not coincide with our physical surroundings. These photographs reveal that there is no
absolute relation between the world as the environment around us and the shared worlds of meaning that
are different for all of us.
In several works written before and after her misguided analysis of the events in Little Rock, Arendt
provided concepts that are highly germane for an understanding of photography. Especially in The Human
Condition, Arendt adumbrated existing definitions of
the world, particularly those developed by her teacher
Martin Heidegger, by defining the conceptual pairs
of visibility and obscurity, permanence and in-between, and humanity and inhumanity. In addition,
all of Arendts thinking about politics relies heavily on
the notion of natality as the promise of a future makeup of the world that is not yet known to us, and on the
figure of insertion as the possibility of mans action
altering the course of the world. With these concepts
Arendt provided the tools for understanding photography as a way of preserving the future. By relying on
Arendts categories we can shed light on photographys
relation to the world.
Regardless of the legal, political, educational and
moral arguments for or against court-ordered desegregation, these photographs show Elizabeth Eckford and
Dorothy Counts at the border of a world where they
are unwanted. If it were up to the inhabitants of the
217
218
In terms of my understanding of photography (though not in my

understanding of the
intellectuals task of critical
reading) I here differ from
Ariella Azoulays claim that
the space opened up in
photographs is the space of
political relations between
people. I think it is possible
for photographs to capture a
space that is not governed by
political relations, and that
photography challenges us
to imagine the possibility of
relations rather than assume
them. See Ariella Azoulays
important The Civil Contract
of Photography. Cambridge,
MIT Press, 2008: 16.
15
white world of the South, these women would neither

enter nor belong there, and Southern states indeed devised different methods of Massive Resistance to federally ordered desegregation.
Photography powerfully registers such forms of exclusion from a world, some of which might be perfectly benign. Something or someone is out of place,
unwanted, unwelcome, scorned and rejected. A photograph with apparent neutrality captures this extraneous presence in the juxtaposition of people who
do not seem to belong together: the shutter clicks, a
scene is framed, and suddenly peoplesome of whom
wouldnt want to be caught dead in the same place
are preserved in one spot, together forever. Thanks to
the mediums capacity for capturing contingent objects
without integrating them into a setting (as a painting
would), photography most effectively exposes this state
of non-belonging.
The photograph of Elizabeth Eckford being kept
out of a social setting reveals the invisible limits of
a particular world. But how do we define the visual
space into which Eckford, Counts, the soldiers, and
the screaming mob are placed? It is not an inherently
neutral place, where all people may occupy the same
positions at different times.15 But neither is it simply
our physical environment.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE WORLD
To understand how there can be different worlds in the
same picture, it is helpful to return to Arendt. Going
back to Aristotle, Arendt defined the world as that
which opens up to an individual without being either
the product of that individuals personal imagining or
fantasy, nor something absolute that is equally valid for
everyone.
This doxa comprehended the world as it opens
itself to me. It was not, therefore, subjective fantasy
and arbitrariness, but also not something absolute
and valid for all. The assumption was that the world
opens up differently to every man, according to his
position in it; and that the sameness of the world,
its commonness or objectivity (as we would say
from the subjective viewpoint of modern philosophy) resides in the fact that the same world opens
Seeing
the
Future
in an
Image
from the
Past
up to everyone and that despite all differences between men and their positions in the worldand
consequently their doxai [opinions]both you
and I are human.16
The world is not someones personal invention, and yet

it is also not something the individual receives from
the collective. The world opens up to everybody differently, depending on his or her position in it. It is
not the aspect of what in particular opens up, but this
aspect of opening up to everyone differently and from a
position that can never be occupied that constitutes the
world. But somehow we all know that the same world
opens up to us, despite these differences. This, according to Arendt, is what makes us human. But how do we
know that the same world opens up to everyone from
their respective position? Why not simply assume that
one and the same worldwhich is my worldopens
up the same way for everyone else?
In the context of the Civil Rights era photographs, it seems that the whites in the photographs
assumed that certain physical spaces, demarcated with barriers and signs, were their world only.
Eckford, Counts, and others viewed things differently. They saw the same physical space differently
as also the setting of their world. Since their world
happened to be in the same location as the whites
world, there was conflict. For Arendt, what makes
us human is the awareness that others see the world
open up from different positions but that this opening up of the world is the same for all. So where does
the failure in the American South occur? Why dont
the whites recognize that the world of the American
South may open up differently for American blacks,
but that ultimately the fact that it opens up at all
obligates the whites to recognize the blacks as fully
human with their attendant rights to fully participate in that world?
The failure has something to do with the relation
between visibility, recognition, and humanity. Before
we turn to these concepts, let us consider another aspect of Arendts definition of the world. The existence
of a world, Arendt writes, depends on
219
Hannah Arendt, Philosophy and Politics, in Social

Research 57, 1990: 80.
16
220
17
Hannah Arendt, The
Human Condition. Chicago,
The University of Chicago
Press, 1998: 57.
18
Ibid.
things [to be] seen by many in a variety of aspects

without changing their identity, so that those gathered around them know they see sameness in utter
diversity.17
Put another way, the world is not the totality of our

physical surroundings but instead the way in which we
ascribe meaning to those surroundings as a whole. The
sameness of the world is not reducible to its objective reality or physical presence, but consists in the
same experience of the world opening up to us in different ways, depending on our position. Arendt calls
the world the common meeting ground for all, where
everyone occupies a different position.
The common meeting ground for all, those who are
present [and] have different locations in it, and the
location of one can no more coincide with the location of another than the location of two objects.18
Arendt stresses that the world opens up to being seen in

a variety of aspects. It is neither the fact that we all coexist in one space, nor that we occupy different positions
in this space, but the fact that we know that others see
sameness in utter diversity. But it is not a matter of the
actual seeing that is important here, for this could still
lead me to assume that others see the world the same
way as I do. What is critical is the experience of seeing the
world, not the act of seeing something actual. We have
an experience of seeing the world, and from this experience we can infer that others have similar experiences,
even if they exist in different locations. We know that
others also see the world because they see us. This awareness that others see us is critical for an understanding of
how different worlds can exist in the same space.
19
Arendt, 1959: 233.
VISIBILITY AND HUMANITY

In the same essay where Arendt so blatantly failed to
see what was happening in these two photographs, she
emphasized the challenge posed to the very survival
of the Republic of the [United States] by the way the
Negroes stand out because of their visibility.19 Her
claim rested on the erroneous and strange assumption
that Americans all looked alikea strange assumption especially for a woman who had endured racial
Seeing
the
Future
in an
Image
from the
Past
discrimination as a Jewish child in pre-war German

territory.20 But let us consider her argument as a more
general claim about the role that visibility plays in our
experience of the world.
In this respect, [black Americans] somewhat resemble new immigrants, who invariably constitute
the most audible of all minorities and therefore
are always the most likely to arouse xenophobic
sentiments. But while audibility is a temporary
phenomenon, rarely persisting beyond one generation, the Negroes visibility is unalterable and permanent. This is not a trivial matter. In the public
realm, where nothing counts that cannot make itself seen and heard, visibility and audibility are of
prime importance. To argue that they are merely
exterior appearances is to beg the question. For it
is precisely appearances that appear in public, and
inner qualities, gifts of heart or mind, are political
only to the extent that their owner wishes to expose them in public, to place them in the limelight
of the market place The point at stake, [since
equality is of greater importance in the political life
of the republic than in any other form of government], is not the well-being of the Negro population alone, but, at least in the long run, the survival
of the Republic.21
What is visible in the world attains political relevance

only, Arendt here contends, once someone decides to
exhibit it deliberately. What allows individuals to participate in the political and public life of our world is a
matter of something becoming visible and thus being
created, or emerging from a fundamental obscurity or
invisibility. The visibility of black Americans, in Arendts flawed reasoning, is permanent; in her thinking
blacks lack the possibility of emerging from a fundamental obscurity (of not being political actors in the
world) into visibility. They are visible whether they are
engaged in a political activity or not, Arendt contends,
because they already stand out. Other Americans, in
Arendts view, can pass into the political arena by making their attributes known and noticed by becoming
visible and recognized, and it is this process of becoming
visible that matters for a democracy where citizens can
play political roles.
Arendt failed to imagine an America where black-
221
It is a mistake to assume
that the majority of Americas population had been
white at the time shortly
after the Republics founding. The first US census in
1790 shows that in a total
population of 3,929,214
there were 757,208 Blacks
(19.3%) including 59,150
free African Americans.
20
21
Arendt, 1959: 233234.
222
ness might no longer be particularly visible but where

the populations overall diversity makes everyone look
equally distinctwhere everyone looks different, and
therefore difference is no longer noticed. But the concept of visibility in Arendts thinking should hold our
attention nonetheless.
For the world to be a space shared by all, something about us has yet to become visible. This becoming-visible rests on the basic assumption that our
fundamental humanity (our inner qualities rather
than our actions in the world) is hidden to us, and
that it depends on others for us to recognize it. Being
human, for Arendt, and being in the world with others means not being fully visible in all of our qualities.
Only by showing this obscured part of ourselves as
something visible do we enter the world. For Arendt,
black Americans do not lack inner qualities or humanity (which would be the Southern racists claim), but
in an America construed as homogeneously non-black
they lack the possibility of entering into visibility. For
this reason American blacks are deprived of the world
that they inhabit with others in a deeper sense than
being barred to enter places such as schools, hotels,
or neighborhoods. The world beyond these particular
locations is the common place where a persons invisibility can become visible through actionwhere we
see each other, in all of our difference and potential
disagreement, as different and therefore human. In a
sense, we are invisible until we assume a position in
the world, and only then, when we claim our position
in the world as a position that nobody else can occupy, do we become visible as fully human.
We live in the world precisely to the extent that we
step from our private perceptions into what Arendt describes as the common meeting ground shared as a
world with others. The commonality of this world is
nothing specific (it is not an objective reality) but is
rather the possibility of becoming visible to others.
But we do not render ourselves visible to others:
others see us regardless of all of our actions. This is as
true for white as for black Americans, and Arendt fell
prey to her own prejudiced belief that blacks are per-
Seeing
the
Future
in an
Image
from the
Past
manently visible in American public life. Visibility in

the larger sense as world-constitutingand not simply
as something that can be seenis not only a matter of
rendering oneself visible. As Arendt writes, American
blacks visibility is unalterable and permanent whereas any foreign immigrants audibility, in the form of accented speech, disappears with successive generations.
Arendt may be wrong about black Americans but she
is right about the way visibility is not something we
control. We may choose not to speak (and thus remain
inaudible) but we know that we will be seen by others.
When we combine Arendts comments about visibility with her thinking of the world, it becomes clear
that the world is constantly opened to a position from
which one is viewed and which one is not given in advance. The world is anchored in that place from which
we might be seen, but which we also know we can never occupy. Being human in the world thus means being
open to view from a place that is not our own. This
place, in our modern world, is not a supra-historical
or transcendent position but every possible location
[that] can no more coincide with the location of another than the location of two objects.22 And it might just
be that this position becomes most poignantly available
to us as the place of the photograph.
With the aid of Arendts comments about the world
and visibility, we can deduce that the world is the openness into which we are placed and where we can be
seen. To be in the world means to be seen from a place
we do not occupy. And being in the world means being
aware that we cannot simply conquer that position, and
then see ourselves, as it were, from the vantage point
of someone else. The world is the common meeting
ground for all not because we see the same world but
because we have in common the experience of being
seen from a position that we do not occupy.
In the photographs on The Times cover, the white
Americansthe smoking National Guardsmen, the grimacing and smiling boys harassing Dorothy Counts, and
the women surrounding and harassing Elizabeth Eckford
on her failed attempt to enter the schoolall take their
own visibility for granted. They defiantly assume that they
223
Arendt, The Human

Condition 57.
22
224
See, for instance, the essay

by Clarissa Sligh on her
understanding of photographs of herself used in the
press during the Civil Rights
movement. Clarissa T. Sligh,
The Plaintiff Speaks, in
Deborah Willis, ed., Picturing Us: African American
Identity in Photography. New
York, The New Press, 1994:
89105.
23
Photograph by Will Counts.

Image courtesy of the
Associated Press.
know how and from what position they will be seen. Arendt thought that black Americans were too visible. But
the real problem was that the white Americans who opposed integration refused to acknowledge that they could
be seen from another position. This is our world, they proclaimed in so many ways, because we see it this way. But
the photographs printed in The Times, Ebony, Look, Life,
and other media outlets during the late 1950s introduce
the possibility of another vantage point. They located the
navel of America elsewhere, in a space produced jointly
by an ever-swelling army of freelance photographers bent
on capturing the plurality of our nation. In many of these
images the photographers position marks the elsewhere
from which people are seen and which nobody, whether
white or black, can fully assume.23
Seeing
the
Future
in an
Image
from the
Past
The photographers chose their position to make

various points about the scenes in front of them, as
The New York Times cover illustrates. But the cameras
point of view in these shots is ultimately what Arendt
described, in another discussion not related to photography, as the location of one [that] can no more coincide with the location of another than the location of
two objects.24 The photographers position could be
assumed by neither the jeering whites nor the courageous blacks. But neither was it, as Arendt mistakenly
assumed in her reaction to these images, the position of
an all-knowing judge. Instead the camera is located in a
place from which knowledge is yet to be born. Photography reserves a viewpoint for the future as the instance
of the world that is never available to anyone and from
which we are incessantly being watched.
Look at the faces of the girls screaming in hatred at Elizabeth Eckford. She wore sunglasses as if
to emphasize that the white students did not truly
see her, if we understand true seeing in the sense
of recognition. When black students attended white
schools, they became visible in the sense defined by
Arendt as taking political action, and they emerged
from the paradoxical and pernicious invisibility of
being trapped by the label of a marginalized and politically disenfranchised group.
Eckford became politically visible precisely by emerging from the ineluctable actual visibility that Arendt
deplored as the plight of black Americans and which
was really an invisibility or non-recognition: that of being of a minority in a place that had legally and socially
defined this status as unwanted.
As todays viewers of these images, we see the scene
from a perspective that was unimaginable back then,
one that is opened up by the camera. It was a perspective that could be assumed neither by whites nor blacks,
since nobodyneither the fear-mongering Southerners nor the visionary Civil Rights leadersknew what
an integrated America would truly look like. This does
not mean that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not have
precise political notions about the countrys future, or
that his metaphor of a Dream was mere fantasy. But-
225
Arendt, The Human

Condition 57.
24
226
still today, half a century after these struggles were documented in photographs, there remain schools with
nearly all black or white student bodies, and such enormous discrepancies in funding and achievement that a
fully integrated education system is far from a reality.
It is a goal yet to be achieved, but not something that
anybody in these pictures could see from a position
outside of the events.
Photography, then, assumes a particular role in the
struggles over the integration of various worlds into a
shared social space. Photographs reveal the presence of
many worlds from a position that cannot be assumed
by any of the actors within it. Clearly the photographers intentions and their framing of each image shape
the viewers perspective. But because photography preserves a given scene for future viewing without revealing what happens next, it allows the future to shine the
light of possibility on the pictured scene.
Photography does not lift a veil of ignorance from the
world and permit us, as contemporary viewers, to gaze
neutrally at a scene that was divided into different worlds
for its respective inhabitants. Instead, photographs place
us in a position that remains fundamentally unattainable otherwise, even after the passage of time, whether by
imagination, empathy, or solidarity. The cameras technical program, which is never completely identical to any
photographers intention or point of view, affords us a position that remains beyond reach. The Civil Rights movement achieved tremendous victories for all Americans.
But when we look at images from that period we look at
the events from a position that does not afford a complete
view of the various life-worlds captured in these photographs. We see white students and black students, and
guardsmen and chaperones trying to keep them apart or
bring them together. But our position is not attainable by
any one person or group in the image. We see them from
a place that they cannot know since it is the position of an
undecided future, rather than the smug perch of historical
hindsight. For a moment, photography reminds us that
there is a place in the world from which we are seen, but
which we do not ourselves know.
The people surrounding Elizabeth Eckford and Doro-
Seeing
the
Future
in an
Image
from the
Past
227
thy Counts were fully aware that there were cameras all
around. Most remarkable about the boys faces in the
mob surrounding Dorothy Counts is their lack of
awareness that their behavior could be condemned.
They look downright innocent in their cruel jesting.
They posed for these images, and yet in this posing
they failed to imagine that they could be seen from
a position not governed by their world-view. In fact,
they imagined themselves fully visible in the sense that
nothing about them couldnt be seen. But it is precisely
the fact that they could be seen from a position not
imagined by them that turns them blind, blind to the
fact that the viewers of these photographs will judge

them, that their world will soon be too small to last.
From a political perspective, the world of Southern
whites who opposed integration was too small to survive.
Its smallness was not a matter of physical limitations but
of the failure of these boys to imagine themselves as being
seen from a position they cannot occupy.
Arendt knew how worlds are constituted. She urged
the individuals need to harmonize the private and the
political dimensions of ones self, and she identified our
incessant emergence from invisibility to visibility as a fundamental component of participation in the public realm.
Though armed with these critical concepts, Arendt failed
to see what was right in front of her eyes.
Photograph by Douglas
Martin. Image courtesy of
the Associated Press.
228
25
In Eduardo Cadavas
words, the failure to read
a photograph amounts to
the failure to recognize the
noncontemporaneity of
the present, the absence of
linearity in the representation of historical time, and
therefore the fugacity of
the past and the present.
See Cadava, The Image, A
Monster of Time, in Time
Expanded, ed. Sergio Mah.
Madrid, LaFabrica, 2010:
31.
26
Arendt, The Public and
the Private Realm, from Vita
Activa, in The Portable Hannah Arendt 200.
PHOTOGRAPHY AS THE PROMISE

OF THE FUTURE: GARRY WINOGRAND
Instead of belaboring Arendts missed opportunity to put
her concepts to good use when seeing photographic evidence of injustice, I will here insert another photograph.
This image by Garry Winogrand usefully counters Arendts wrong-headed analysis, even if this optimistic image does not completely counteract the harrowing photographs of racial strife. Winogrands image powerfully
affirms photographys potential to show the future as the
advancement of life along divergent and unknown vectors, as our capacity to emerge from our essential invisibility in unexpected ways. Winogrand looked at the same
world inhabited by Arendt, but unlike Arendt he did not
succumb to the temptation of trying to understand. In
this way Winogrands ways of image-making provide a
much-needed corrective to Arendts failure to read.25
In the late summer days of 1957, Winogrand roamed
New York City, including Spanish Harlem where Arendt lived, to express his particular vision of the world.
At the same time that Arendt chain-smoked in her study
and pondered the photographs of racial strife that had
struck her conscience, Winogrand was making his own
observations on race. Ultimately she turned her eyes and
mind away from these photographs, buried their impact
in a flawed legalistic argument, and penned more political theory. Meanwhile Winogrand used his Leica to find
a personal vision of the world as never quite coinciding
with itself, as continually giving rise to new worlds from
within. He was armed with a burning faith that by rendering visible the crazy mash-up called New York, the whole
world would open up and allow an ever-greater future.
In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt described the
world in words quite close to the images Winogrand created with his camera:
Our feeling of reality depends utterly upon appearance and therefore upon the existence of a public
realm into which things can appear out of the darkness of sheltered existence, even the twilight which
illuminates our private and intimate lives is ultimately derived from the much harsher light of the
public realm.26
Seeing
the
Future
in an
Image
from the
Past
Though not giving two cents about philosophy,

Winogrand photographed people in New York by capturing them at the moment, as Arendt described it,
when out of the twilight of private and intimate
lives something burst into the much harsher light of
the public realm. This something, in his photographs,
was the potential for the lives of the depicted people to
take tiny yet unexpected turns and thus proceed along
an invisible vector into a different direction.
Masterful at capturing juxtapositions, Winogrand
caught people at the edge of their respective worlds
when they tumbled, often unaware and with varying
degrees of grace, into what Arendt calls the much
harsher light of the public realm. He photographed
them in their worlds (created by community, family,
or way of life) when others who were not at all part
of that world nonetheless were present in the same
space. But Winogrand created a vision of the world
where everyone had an equal right to occupy a space,
even if no two spots are interchangeable. Many of his
images of couples or individuals accrue their meaning from witnesses, bystanders, and spectators already
included in the scene, positions later doubled by the
pictures viewers. The world, as seen in Winogrands
work, is borne out of this variety of different viewpoints on the same occurrence.
With no knowledge of Arendts work, Winogrand
shared intuitively her insight that the world becomes
real to us when things emerge into the public realm, or
to use Arendts vocabulary, when our humanity emerges
from its essential invisibility. By photographing people
at the moment when their private selves became visible
in the public realm, Winogrands work created what
Arendt would define, in her later work, as the miracle
of a new action.27
WORLDS FAIR, 1964
In 1964, alongside 50 million total visitors, Winogrand
prowled the New York Worlds Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. Industry leaders and urban planners
had designed the parkland with the iconic Unisphere
sculpture to showcase an optimistic future strategically
located half-way between Manhattan and its major air-
229
[T]he passions of the

heart, the thoughts of the
mind, the delights of the
senselead an uncertain,
shadowy kind of existence
unless and until they are
transformed, deprivatized and
deindividualized, as it were,
into a shape to fit them for
public appearance. The most
current of such transformations occurs in storytelling
and generally in artistic
transposition of individual
experiences. The Public
and the Private Realm,
from Vita Activa, in The
Portable Hannah Arendt 199.
We can count Winogrands
work among such artistic
transpositions of individual
experience into a shape fit for
public appearance. I am also
referring to Arendts notion
of the figure of insertion
in The Gap Between Past
and Future, in Between Past
and Future: Eight Exercises in
Political Thought (New York,
Penguin, 2002) where Arendt
uses a parable by Franz Kafka
to explain how our actions
insert themselves into the
otherwise uniform flow of
time and thus create the possibility of true change and of
an unknown future. Creative
work has this potential of
slightly changing the direction of life, as if such work
halted time for a moment
and forced its progress along
a new vector that had not
existed before.
27
230
ports, LaGuardia and JFK. The Fair projected a time in

2024 where smooth roads would course through jungle, deserts would become pastures, and peace would
reign over a shrinking globe in an expanding universe. Ford introduced the Mustang here, and under
the slogan Challenge to Greatness the U.S. Pavilion
outlined the ambitions of Lyndon B. Johnsons Great
Society project to eradicate poverty and racial inequality. But not all was well in the land.
By opening day in November 1963, President Kennedy, who had broken ground for the Fair in 1962, had
been assassinated. The Fair, which was designed to be a
defining moment for the baby-boomer generation, fell
short of its lofty goal of providing a crisp road map for
America in decades to come. Members of the Congress
of Racial Equality were arrested during a protest at the
Fair and Johnsons aspirations of a fully integrated and
peace-promoting society were not uniformly shared.
In 1963 Dr. King gave his famous I Have a Dream
speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The bitter struggle of the Civil Rights movement was
far from over. Victory was uncertain. Various lawsuits
wound their way through state appeals and ultimately
to the Supreme Court to challenge the legality of racial segregation in transportation, accommodation,
marriage, and to enforce school desegregation in the
South with more promise of success than guaranteed
by all deliberate speed.
In this climate of a vast upheaval in American society, Winogrand came upon a bench at the Worlds
Fair, packed by weary women with flattened hair and
flat-soled shoes. One womans youth and beauty, something that surely caught Winogrands eye, seemed lost
on an older man reading the paper to one side. A bit
worse for wear, just starting to relax, and glad to have
secured a temporary spot to rest, the women stretched
their feet and nobody, as far as we can tell, was aware
of being photographed. It was a tangle of limbs and
craning necks, and in between this silent choreography
emerged the potential for new alliances, separations,
groupings, losses, even new loves.
From the young, tired, slightly sweaty bodies, a
Seeing
the
Future
in an
Image
from the
Past
231
young man on the other side of the bench elicits a current of interest as if his presence, sprawled comfortably in his neat khakis on the bench, could twitch this
weary line-up into life. It would be a life not yet legal

in all states and still frowned upon, two years before the
Supreme Court would declare the ban on interracial
marriage unconstitutional, barely a year after Sidney
Poitier had won an Academy Award for Lilies in the
Field, and years before he would star in the race-relations films A Patch of Blue and Guess Whos Coming to
Dinner? On this bench Winogrand glimpsed a reality
that many still considered impossible though countless
had lived it, even if outside the law: that of a life where
blacks and whites could be together in peace.
Winogrand captured a moment at the Fair for
which no proper visual grammar had yet been established. Worlds Fair, 1964 offers us time and space to
contemplate and envision several outcomes to a particular moment. It is an unguarded instant when from the
twilight which illuminates our private and intimate
lives the possibility of a yet-unseen future between the
young woman and the man on the far side of the bench
cautiously emerges into the much harsher light of the
public realm.28
The people in Winogrands image opt out of the
stream of people surging through the exhibits of the
Garry Winogrand, Worlds

Fair, 1964. Image courtesy of the Estate of Garry
Winogrand.
The Portable Hannah

Arendt 200.
28
232
World Fair. They opt out of the world, so to speak,

and Winogrand catches them in this odd moment of
detachment from the world when they do not pay attention to him. His widow Eileen Hale described her
late husbands practice thus:
I think part of the aim was to unsettle peoples
ideas, whether his own or other peoples. To move
people out of an unquestioning space and to some
less settled space in which the authority of rules and
structures was broken up a bit.
29
Arendt, The Human

Condition 55.
On the bench at the 1964 Worlds Fair, Winogrand

found such a less settled space where the script of
ones life could be altered. In between the people on
this bench, social and other relations could be unsettled and rearranged for brief momentsor for life.
Unlike Arendt Winogrand did not engage in metaphysical speculation. He photographed a bench as
something that was there before we came and [that]
will outlast our brief sojourn [on] it.29 He showed the
space between people as a fragile in-between that
could be negotiated and bridged or kept apart, and
that had no particular power to shape these outcomes.
His genius consisted in choosing a park bench as an
allegory for the potential world in which the authority of rules and structures was broken up a bit.
Things were possible on such a bench that could upset
the social order.
Winogrands pictures contain these unimagined
futures with humor and optimism. In this particular
image the young black man is engaged, interested but
relaxed: he is open to the possibility of chatting but
also at ease and full of self-control. The woman with
the white headband next to him is also engaged but,
while more animated than the man, is still guarded.
Winogrand also catches possible opprobrium and disapproval to this interaction on the benchs periphery,
with the two gossiping girls in the center.
Can you believe shes talking to him? And we just sat
down a second ago?
What can she be talking to him about? And to just
chat him up like this, right here next to us
Seeing
the
Future
in an
Image
from the
Past
But Winogrands non-judgmental eyes moved

right along without leaning in to hear the gossip.
Theres a girl resting her head in her friends lap, and
in addition to this weary indifference to the way the
world could change remains the older man whom
Winogrand did not crop from the image precisely
to show that not everyone is looking. And then there
are the two posing graces who look elsewhere for
what will happen next, whether its the end of America as anybody knew it then, or just another guy to
check out.
And ultimately, its only a bench which nobody
will sit on forever. Its a metaphor for the world as a
place though which you can move without constant
explanation or justification, without philosophizing.
It is a scene at once languid and yet bursting with
possibility, of limbs and lives shifted and unsettled
through the minutest alterations and producing unheard of new configurations.
Both Arendt and Winogrand aimed to show in
their respective genres that the world arises beyond
the things that outlast us. Regrettably Arendt remained blind to the great potential of America after
the photograph of the face of Dorothy Counts had
pricked her old-world conservatism. But like Winogrand, Arendt realized that the world is a shared
world only through our awareness that we can be
seen from a position we may never occupy. Put in
the language of philosophy, the world is not what is
given, but what we create so that it will outlast us.
In the iconography of photography, the world is the
setting for a multiplicity of futures that will never be
fully known but which are contained in an image as
its unrealized potential. Like the in-between that
links and separates people in a common world, this
uncanny preservation of the future inside the photograph has its own and objective reality that cannot
be grasped.30
Arendts failure to read the photographs of Dorothy Counts and Elizabeth Eckford are striking instances of an academic who could not apply her
intelligence to the world around her. It is also an ex-
233
Cited in Pierre Bouretz,

Quappele-t-on philosopher?
Paris, Gallimard, 2006: 164.
30
234
31
Cited in Eduardo Cadava,

The Image: Monster of
Time, in PhotoEspaa 28.
32
Siegfried Kracauer,
Photography, in Alan
Trachtenberg, Classic Essays
on Photography. New Haven,
Leetes Island Books, 1980:
265.
ample of someone who chose not to do her research

when she boycotted the South out of disgust over
the Southern states treatment of blacks, instead of
visiting there or even simply looking from her window to witness inequality in the reality of Spanish
Harlem. It is also perhaps an instance of a European
who was stymied by Americas stubborn refusal to let
the world be completely ordered by laws.
But Arendt nonetheless provides remarkably useful tools for an understanding of the photograph as
holding the promise of an unknown future. When we
rely on Arendts concepts of visibility, in-between,
and world, photographs can be seen as more than
icons of death, mourning, and loss. Photographs
hold open a possibility of the future as a time worth
living for that extends beyond our present position.
This promise at the center of photography is, for instance, the moment captured when it was uncertain
whether Elizabeth Eckford, or any other student,
would be able to attend Central High School, even
if we know that President Eisenhower ordered the
National Guard to assist in desegregating schools.
This captured moment creates an opportunity to
think about the way progress is never assured, how
political action must aim for a future that cannot
yet be imagined. Photographs do not freeze the past,
but are instead, in the words of Walter Benjamin,
loaded to the bursting point with time.31 But this
dimension of the image remains closed to viewers
who look at the image as evidence of the past. Photographs attain historical significance when their
excess of unrealized time is recognized. This unrealized timefor instance the morning of September
4, 1957 in Birmingham, Alabamadoes not coincide with historical time, which is how we organize
events into a pattern of past, present and future.
It keeps the photograph open to the fringe of indistinct multiple meanings32 that surround each
photograph, since no photograph can guarantee only
one outcome to the scene. These multiple meanings
are not random events but the vectors along which
life may unfold in yet unknown directions from the
Seeing
the
Future
in an
Image
from the
Past
moment when the picture was taken. The great hope

of the Civil Rights movement was that inequality
in education would be ended through Court orders.
Today, in 2011, lawsuits have been filed in 40 states
claiming that the existing legally desegregated system continues to disadvantage black students, over
56 years after national troops secured Elizabeth Eckfords right to fair education.33
Only if we believe that history happens to us and
if we relinquish our option to take action, only then
do photographs look as if they freeze a moment
in time. The photographs of desegregation in the
South are filled to the bursting point with time,
filled with the unrealized potential to imagine other
struggles that will allow the world to give rise to new
worlds from within.
The way we experience time as if placed into the
present, according to Arendt, creates a gap where we
fight against the past bearing down and the future
pushing in. Tellingly, Arendt resorts to a metaphor
of sight when trying to conceptualize this gap that is
at once outside of time and yet strangely right in the
middle of time itself.
Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives
in the interval between past and future, time is not
a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it
is broken in the middle, at the point that is not
the present as we usually understand it but rather a
gap in time.34
Especially creative acts, in Arendts understanding,

keep this gap open even though it is empty and outside of time, being pinched on both sides by past
and future. Photographs offer us privileged access to
this emptiness. For with their capacity to keep both
the past and the future at bay, photographs plunge
us into the boundlessness of the present and allow
us to look from this otherwise unattainable vantage
point, an interval in time when the past is not alldetermining and the future forever unknown. The
photograph of Dorothy Counts being harassed after
school offers time where none was giventime for
reflection and thinking, time for communication,
235
See Linda Darling-Hammond, The Color Line in

American Education: Race
Resources, and Achievement, in Du Bois Review,
Vol. 1:2: 213246.
33
Arendt, Between Past and

Future 10.
34
236
and time for action today. Remember that Counts

said some things would not have happened had there
been time to prepare. Her photograph allows us to
go back to that moment and imagine different strategies and outcomes, rather than treat the shot as evidence of the lost past. The face of Dorothy Counts
in that photograph allows us to see the future and
the past as subject to transformation, because it suspends and holds us momentarily in the otherwise
unattainable fullness of time.
Winogrand happily rid photography of the pathos
that often colors pictures of ambiguous social situations. He opted instead for humor, irony, and sheer
wackiness in his approach to some of the pressing
social questions of his day. When he shot Worlds
Fair, 1964 Winogrand did not interrupt the flow of
time. He inserted himself into a time that he experienced in bursts of intensity: risky and thrilling like
the little flirtation thats starting on one side of the
bench; unstable and menacing like the girls jealous
whispers in the center; languid like the girl resting in
their lap; glued to the past like the man reading the
paper to the side. Winogrands shutter revealed the
human experience of time to be not a step into the
ever-changing Heraclitean river but a dance in the
Democritean multi-metric rain where the next thing
thats going to happen is radically uncharted.
Hannah Arendts disheartening failure to apply her own concepts to photography constitutes a
teaching moment. Her influence is too great and her
insights too valuable to dismiss this moment. But we
do not honor such a moment by imagining ourselves
emphatically into a photograph, nor by attributing
the power of an image exclusively to the photographers technique or artistry, or context and convention. We come closer to honoring the great promise
of photography when we understand photographs
to shelter unredeemed moments. Every photograph
remains addressed to a beyond that remains open
to transformation. This beyond extends past our
present time when we, the belated viewers, weighed
down by the past and pulled toward the future, look
Seeing
the
Future
in an
Image
from the
Past
at the image. Photography affords us the occasion to

claim this space for thinking, communicating, creating, and does not cede this in-between to mere
representations of what we already presume to know.
To look critically at a photograph means to maintain
the possibility that any photographs future may be
something different from its known outcome. Photographs suspend time and, when we seize this suspension as a political opportunity rather than an occasion to go numb, they allow us to be in the world
more consciously, more fully, and more alive.
New York University
237

Seeing The Future in An Image From The Past

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SEEING THE FUTURE

IN AN IMAGE FROM THE PAST

HANNAH ARENDT, GARRY WINOGRAND,

arly on September 5, 1957, in an apartment

student, Elizabeth Eckford, the truth of these images

Ibid. 27. On the notion of

A veritable cottage industry

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

Arendt, 1959: 244.

But Arendts solidarity did not lead her to demand an

of many of these parents (who wish the problem

Ralph Waldo Ellison, in

Arendt devoted much of

THE USE OF PHOTOGRAPHS IN THE CIVIL

Arendt, 1959: 236.

See Julian Cox, Bearing

Maurice Berger, For All the

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

into bodily proximity. This immediate response to

shown in the images, disagreed fundamentally on

The New York Times, cover

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

THE MEDIAS USE OF PHOTOGRAPHS

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

adult chaperone. She arrives alone, is denied entry by

Interview with Dorothy

It was a choice, but there had not been a plan at

By Friday of the first week, Dorothy withdraws from

Detail, The New York Times,

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

photographs contain something that is yet to be seen.

the physical space around us, nor to our own way of

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

ent racial backgrounds, and there are other struggles

Arendt, 1959: 244.

THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT

othy Counts do not settle the question about school

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

THE FUTURE NESTING IN AN IMAGE

Instead, by reinterpreting these images it is possible

In terms of my understanding of photography (though not in my

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

white world of the South, these women would neither

The world is not someones personal invention, and yet

Hannah Arendt, Philosophy and Politics, in Social

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

things [to be] seen by many in a variety of aspects

Put another way, the world is not the totality of our

Arendt stresses that the world opens up to being seen in

Arendt, 1959: 233.

VISIBILITY AND HUMANITY

discrimination as a Jewish child in pre-war German

What is visible in the world attains political relevance

Arendt, 1959: 233234.

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

ness might no longer be particularly visible but where

manently visible in American public life. Visibility in

Arendt, The Human

See, for instance, the essay

Photograph by Will Counts.

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

The photographers chose their position to make