The aesthetics and ethics of photographic Ekphrasis: Poetic representations of Emmett Till

As indelible images such as Nick Ut’s The Terror of War demonstrate, the medium of photography is singular in its capacity to linger on the abject and to testify to disconcertingly mimetic, graphic details of violence and suffering. Such iconic photojournalistic works have been both celebrated for increasing the public’s understanding of once-distant conflicts, but also criticised as desensitising and pornographic. This critique, exemplified in works by Sontag, Berger and others, contends that photography has done more to inure us to violence than to awaken us to the reality of suffering. Nevertheless, abject photographs clearly hold a great imaginative thrall and impetus for poets, as the vast body of poetic ekphrases of images of war, corpses and violence attests. In writing such poems, however, poets are confronted with fraught ethical and aesthetic questions such as: how can the ekphrastic poem emphathise and engage aesthetically and ethically with the suffering of others? How can the poet write in a position of witness when absent from the event itself? What techniques, stances and other strategies can the ekphrastic poem deploy to testify to the abject photograph? This paper addresses these questions via the timely case study of the abject postmortem photograph of lynching victim Emmett Till, which has prompted a large body of poetry, and has also been brought to renewed prominence by the furore surrounding Dana Schutz’s ekphrastic painting Open Casket. This paper considers a series of poetic responses to the photograph of Till’s corpse by contemporary poets such as Kevin Young, Roger Reeves and R.T. Smith, and identifies metapoeticism—drawing attention to the poem’s status as a poem, and to the poet’s necessarily piecemeal and partial knowledge of the event—as a key strategy that fosters ethical engagement with the abject image