In August of 1988, the activist Clayton Patterson used his VHS camcorder to capture the actions of police officers during the Tompkins Square Park riot. He was later jailed for refusing to turn his tape over to the N.Y.P.D. The video depicted officers in riot gear, first breaking up a demonstration against the imposition of a curfew on the park, then violently clubbing protesters and residents in the East Village streets surrounding the green space, with its tent city of homeless people. The police used horses, helicopters, and hateful words. “Move along, black nigger bitch,” an officer reportedly told a woman named Tisha Pryor before assaulting her companion. In the video, we see Pryor in tears, blood trickling down her neck. Dozens of others were injured. At the time, nearly two decades before cell-phone-camera video came into widespread use, this footage was the nation’s most damning evidence of police brutality. After Patterson was released from jail, he appeared with his camcorder on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” “This is a revolutionary tool,” he said. “Little brother is watching Big Brother.” The evidence captured in Patterson’s video led to the indictment of several police officers—according to the Times, fourteen were tried on police-brutality charges—the removal of the captain of the precinct, and a complete reorganization of the N.Y.P.D.
Three years later, in 1991, George Holliday used his newly released Sony Handycam to record, from the perch of his balcony, L.A.P.D. officers mercilessly beating Rodney King. The officers were charged for their actions in the California Superior Court, but none of them were found guilty. And we all know what followed their acquittal. The six-day riot, or uprising, in Los Angeles stemmed directly from public access to Holliday’s video, which aired repeatedly on national TV. It was one of the first videos to go “viral,” more than a decade before the age of YouTube. The court decision seemed not to jibe with the evidence: How could the cops do this, with all of us bearing witness, and still go free?
Today, prompted by more and more such evidence, we are still asking the same question. Holliday and Patterson’s graphic moving pictures are both on view, until the end of the month, in an important exhibit at the Bronx Documentary Center called “New Documents,” which collects twenty-four examples of eyewitness footage, spanning more than a century. The show presents each photograph and video clip through a small window in a long, dark gallery wall, emphasizing how each document provides a glimpse of a larger horror. Since the advent of social media, in the past decade, ordinary people have sparked grassroots movements for social, economic, democratic, and environmental change by uploading and sharing videos via YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. But, as “New Documents” shows, recent examples of eyewitness testimonies are part of a wide-ranging and long-standing lineage of citizen journalism from across the globe.
If you walk the exhibit in reverse chronological order, as I did, you will start with the footage that Diamond Reynolds live-streamed on Facebook, earlier this summer, as her boyfriend, Philando Castile, bled to death from a policeman’s bullet in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota. You will end with a devastating photo that Alice Seeley Harris, a missionary, took in 1904 of a Congolese man, Nsala of Wala, posing with his five-year-old daughter’s severed hand and foot—a result of King Leopold of Belgium’s brutal colonial rule. The two documents are connected, first, by a shared reliance on brand-new technologies. Reynolds’s video screened in real time on July 6th, just three months after Facebook introduced live-stream capabilities. It was reposted widely with the hashtag BlackLivesMatter, and by the next morning Castile’s shooting—which occurred just a day after that of Alton Sterling, in Baton Rouge, also at the hands of the police—was the lead news story across much of the world. (The Bronx Documentary Center postponed the opening of “New Documents” so that it could incorporate responses to these two tragedies.) Harris, who had no prior experience with photography, took her picture using a Kodak dry-plate camera, just four years after the first consumer camera went on the market.
The recordings are united, too, by a shared moral imperative. Like Diamond Reynolds, who calmly narrated events to her camera as the policeman who shot Castile continued to aim a gun through the window of her car, Nsala of Wala, by posing for Harris's photograph, was fighting against the atrocious injustice he suffered. His son and wife had also been mutilated and killed, the victims of a common punishment for Congolese laborers who didn't harvest enough rubber to meet the Belgian regime's quota. In the face of this sickening loss, Nsala carried his daughter’s appendages in a small package to Harris’s mission. The portrait she took of him is hauntingly unsentimental. Whereas the two young men at the left of the frame look, to my eye, angry and discomfited, Nsala looks steady, dignified, resolute. He stares squarely at his daughter’s remains, as if to emphasize that sitting for the photograph is an act of bearing witness. Harris toured North America and Europe with that image and others she took in the Congo, giving presentations to thousands of people in an effort to turn popular opinion against King Leopold. Mark Twain was so influenced by her work that he wrote a scathing satire, “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” published in 1905. “The kodak has been a sore calamity to us. The most powerful enemy that has confronted us, indeed,” Twain wrote, in the voice of the king. In 1908, in response to public pressure, Leopold relinquished control of the Congo. Harris’s documentary project is often credited as the tool that was most effective in dismantling his regime.
With these bookends and the many other photo and video recordings that fall in between, “New Documents” demonstrates the citizen journalist’s special ability to incite moral outrage over events that might otherwise pass unnoticed. The exhibit includes Alberto Errera’s 1944 photographs of the moments before and after an extermination in the gas chamber at Auschwitz, which reached the public after his roll of film was smuggled out by the Polish Resistance in a tube of toothpaste; Sergeant Ronald L. Haeberle’s images, from a 1969 LIFE photo spread, showing piles of dead Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children, after the attack by U.S. soldiers that came to be known as the My Lai Massacre; Tami Silicio’s 2004 photograph of the coffins of American service members killed in Iraq, sitting on a cargo plane at Kuwait International Airport; and Kimberly Roberts’s intimate camcorder footage, from 2005, showing Hurricane Katrina’s rising floodwaters in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, which exposed government indifference to the lives of the black poor.
In many of these cases, the act of recording images was a dangerous, or even life-threatening, act of defiance. In a video released this March by the Swedish newspaper Expressen, two anonymous Syrian women, with a camera hidden at hip level, gave us a peek of their terrifying reality in the ISIS-ruled city of Raqqa. As they go about their daily business of walking, shopping, riding in a taxi through the city, they discuss the beheadings and public executions they’ve witnessed, the murder and persecution of homosexuals and women, the houses billeted by ISIS fighters after the owners were kicked out or killed, and the indignity of covering—by mandate rather than by choice—their bodies and faces under the niqab.
In the aisles of a pharmacy, one of the women almost loses her composure when she sees that the models on packages of hair dye have had their faces scribbled out with black marker. Later, when interviewed by Expressen at home, she removes her head covering with her back to the camera. We see her dark hair unloosed, a cascade of black. “I want to live the way I want,” she says. “Nothing matters more than freedom.” She seems to speak for all citizen journalists, from Alice Seeley Harris to Diamond Reynolds, whose recording of Philando Castile’s dying moments sits right next door in the long exhibit wall.
