Abstract
An iconic photograph of Ieshia Evans’ arrest at a Black Lives Matter protest went viral on Twitter. Twitter users’ textual and visual responses to it appear to show recurring patterns in the ways users interpret photographs. Aby Warburg recognized a similar process in the history of art, referring to the afterlife of images. Evaluating these responses with an updated form of iconography sheds light upon this tangled afterlife across multiple media. Users’ response patterns suggest new ways to develop iconological interpretations, offering clues to a systematic use of iconography as a methodology for social media research.
Highlights
During an arrest in the American city of Baton Rouge on 5 July 2016, a police officer shot and killed Alton Sterling after having rendered him immobile
Both events were part of a long string of police killings of African Americans during the past several years, and the tragedies were subsumed into the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest movement (Lebron 2017)
This paper looks at the textual and visual responses to Bachman’s photograph of Ieshia Evans
Summary
During an arrest in the American city of Baton Rouge on 5 July 2016, a police officer shot and killed Alton Sterling after having rendered him immobile. Video recordings of both deaths went viral on social media Both events were part of a long string of police killings of African Americans during the past several years, and the tragedies were subsumed into the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest movement (Lebron 2017). Evans and other BLM protestors marched through the streets; on the pretext of public safety, police threatened to arrest individuals who refused to clear the road Both Bachman and Becherer photographed the impassive Evans as she stood in the street while armored police bore down upon her, arrested her, and carted her away (Figures 1 and 2).. Both the phalanx of police and the tree form lines locking the viewer’s eyes to the center of the picture.
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