How one startling photo opens a viewer's mind

By John Edwin Mason

Most people I know seldom look carefully at photographs. I count myself among them, except when I wear my photo historian's hat. After all, we see hundreds of photographs every day—above all, on our many screens. We live in the midst of an unceasing stream of images, unseen, half-seen, and quickly forgotten. 

Occasionally a photograph virtually compels us to stop and look with care. We sense that it can reveal more about our world than the small slice of it that we see within the frame. Photographers Victoria Razo and Paul Ratje made two such photographs in September, in Del Rio, Texas, from the same vantage point, at almost precisely the same instant. The images (shown above, and below) are so similar that I will speak of them as one.

The photographs show a Haitian migrant being apprehended, on the U.S. bank of the Rio Grande, by a Border Patrol agent, who was mounted on horseback. Ratje's image, which was widely distributed by AFP, went viral. 

It is easy to see why. 

Little in its stark composition detracts from the central drama. A Black man, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, struggles to escape the grip of a white man with bridles on horseback, who towers above him, while wearing a military-style flak jacket and a cowboy hat. The horse's muscles strain to keep the animal planted amid the chaos. Fear, desperation, and anger are palpable. The issues of race, power, and inequality—flashpoints of American politics—are unmistakably present. So is the question: How should we respond to this image? 

While dismay over the migrant's plight was almost universal, the more engaging responses came from people who saw beneath the photograph's surface. Many African Americans, for instance, connected the violence on the border to their country's history of racist violence. Angela Byrd, a resident of Washington, D.C., told BBC News that the photograph was "very disheartening, because of the historical connections that we—whether it be Haitians, Cubans or African Americans—have with a man, on a horse, with a whip." The NAACP made the connection between southern slave patrols and the Border Patrol visually, tweeting an early 19th century illustration of a mounted white man whipping a Black man in chains (below), labeled "Then," presented side by side with a cropped version of the border photo, labeled "Now."

Others saw the encounter between the Haitian migrant and the Border Patrol agent as a visual metaphor for the historical relationship between Haiti and the U.S. In an article titled "Haiti Isn’t Cursed. It Is Exploited.," Marlene L. Daut, a University of Virginia professor who writes about Haitian history, used the photograph as an opportunity to show how natural disasters, such as devastating earthquakes, and human-made disasters—for instance, the 1915-34 U.S. occupation of Haiti—have created the conditions that the migrants in Del Rio hoped to escape. 

The emotional power of Ratje and Razo's photographs—with the cautionary note that the details of the event are still being investigated—invite us to pause the unceasing flow of images and to respond to them as active viewers. We will find that they open vistas that stretch far beyond the frame, in both time and space.

Active, focused viewing, like slow cooking, is not easy. But the rewards of finding our own meanings in photographs, like the joys of a deliberate meal, are immense. 

Editor’s note: John Edwin Mason, who teaches history and photography at the University of Virginia, is writing a biography of pioneering photographer, writer, and filmmaker Gordon Parks.

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PHOTO OF THE DAY

For Stonehenge we protest: England’s famous Neolithic circle fascinates Nat Geo readers—we got more than 500 emails when we wrote about plans to dig under and around the monument to ease the traffic jams and noise from the increasingly busy highway abutting it. Many of those notes urged British authorities not to disrupt or destroy artifacts below the surface for a tunnel. The planned tunnel, approved in November 2020, has prompted protests, including a summertime action along the highway. The person above was one of those protesters.

PRESERVING STONEHENGE 

TODAY IN A MINUTE

The theme was fire: A global award for photography and sustainability went to photographer Sally Mann for her series on wildfires, the Guardian reports. The theme of this year’s Prix Pictet was fire, and Mann explored both the devastating wildfires in and the racial history of southeastern Virginia, where the first ship carrying enslaved people to the United States landed in 1619. 

Dealing with Kentucky’s tornadoes: Emily Evans covered last weekend’s twisters with a lesson from her family of first responders. “When you get overwhelmed, you focus on one thing at a time, break it down, get the job done,” the photojournalist for Louisville’s WDRB told Poynter. “But you have to have a lot of compassion … These people are grieving, and I still believe that journalism is a public service.” 

Drought: It’s an image no photojournalist wants to take. Ed Ras was in the air when he saw the bodies of six giraffes that had died in Kenya’s drought. Already weak, the animals had gotten stuck in mud on their way to a nearly depleted reservoir, Getty Images said. Severe drought is threatening more than two million Kenyans as well as the animals in Kenya, according to the United Nations. 

‘The sky is like yellow amber’: That’s photographer and Nat Geo Explorer Lynsey Addario talking about the California wildfires she covered earlier this year. She spoke with Nat Geo’s Peter Gwin on our final Overheard podcast of the year, on what it was like taking some of the most memorable images of 2021. If you want to hear the cost of stretching your limits to get some of these pictures, listen in!

For photography lovers: Have time for a few stunning photo books? Here’s BuzzFeed News’s list of 24 published this year, including Elizabeth Ferrer’s Latinx Photography in the United States, Robert Clark’s Friday Night Lives, and Mel D. Cole’s American Protest: Photographs 2020-2021. Another pick: Diana Markosian‘s “autofictional” Santa Barbara.

IN A FEW WORDS

LAST GLIMPSE

Piece by piece: What’s that coming down the track? One half of a Redwood tree in California’s Humbolt County, headed to the mill. This image illustrated a 1907 National Geographic article entitled “Saving the Forests.” In it, the Forest Service’s Herbert A. Smith detailed the economic value in preserving America’s natural forests. He argues deforestation should be properly managed to keep ecosystems in balance, particularly amid flooding and drought. Sara Manco, senior photo archivist at the National Geographic Society, chose this image and found Smith prescient. “Though it’s over 100 years old, I found this article still relevant today,” Manco tells us.

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