On September 10, 1968 at 1:30 AM, some thirty hours after Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton was convicted of killing a member of the Oakland Police Department, two members of the force reportedly fired more than a dozen bullets at the Panther’s Oakland headquarters, seeming to take deliberate aim at posters depicting Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Hutton, who earlier had been killed by the police in April. An act of iconoclasm in which party leaders and those who follow are “killed,” the hole in Cleaver’s mouth also “silences” the Panther message. Cleaver’s image, moreover, appears above a bumper sticker advertising his candidacy for President of the United States on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket; his iconographic eradication thus forecloses participation in normative frameworks of political action.

Though carefully crafted, the Panther image was one that the party struggled against. As Singh argues, “[rather] than seeing the Panthers as the vanguard of a visible, guerilla insurgency in the country, they might be better understood as practitioners of an insurgent form of visibility, a literal-minded and deadly serious kind of guerilla theater, in which militant sloganeering, bodily displays, and spectacular actions simultaneously signified their possession and yet real lack of power” (emphasis mine). In short, writes Raiford, “[their] emergent visibility… represents not only an exhibition of power but a display of a true lack of power as well.” The violence enacted upon the image thus signals less the symbolic displacement of the real violence against the party onto the visual field than its metonymic instantiation. Disproportionate and deceitful, it carried a brutal lesson: only the state can justifiably exercise violence, and only the corporate media can legitimately inform.

The spectacular mediascape that was only coming into mature existence during the postwar period now informs our daily lives. Austin’s provocative question—“whether the impact of such [imagery] is a help or a hindrance to today’s activists”—may thus be expanded to encompass larger questions about the sociopolitical “visible.” To wit, groups like SNCC and the BPP evinced a visual sophistication that proves their conscious exploitation of political spectacle, however limited its ultimate impact may have been. They mobilized not only bodies on streets and helped build communities of self-empowerment, but did so within a swiftly changing public sphere characterized by mass mediation’s global reach. For Caddoo, this form of “media consciousness” constituted “their awareness of their positionality and place in a political and representational landscape that extended far beyond the borders of the United States.” Indeed, understanding political struggle and solidarity to be born of the interstices between nations and peoples and the ability of images to simultaneously overcome and acknowledge those very distances may be one of the most lasting legacies of postwar liberation movements.

That said, the contingent, unstable nature of the digital image threatens to void Civil Rights era film and photography’s iconographic ballast. Austin is right to point to images such as Iesha Evans’ confrontation with absurdly armored police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as exemplifying a potent form of #blacklivesmatter visuality, one that links, Teju Cole argues in the Times, to a history of political obstinacy from Gloria Richardson to Tiananmen Square’s Tank Man. Such images share an iconography with contemporary Hollywood, and they may even awe, but they pale in comparison to the wild, unruly, and decidedly lo-fi videos of police brutality that demonstrate with exacting precision how little black lives actually matter. Feidin Santana’s phone footage of Watlter Scott shot five times in the back in North Carolina, the surveillance camera that captured Tamir Rice’s death in Cleveland, Ohio, and Ramsey Orta’s video of Eric Garner’s suffocation at the hands of New York City police on Staten Island, among many others, are images of ruthless, racialized injustice seared into the public consciousness. Their contingency, crudity, and cruelty give them a credibility otherwise forsaken by empowering displays of agency.

As images and sounds of such atrocities proliferate, their evidentiary values prove increasingly important to formal legal processes, which more and more rely on such media. In this context, organizations such as WITNESS play a crucial role in not only training citizen activists in the proper use of new media to expose abuse and advocate for change. Orta’s four-year prison sentence for crimes unrelated to his capture of Garner’s death on video is but one particularly egregious example of the legal battles such witnesses may face after the fact and points to the necessity of WITNESS’ initiatives. Creating and sustaining stronger networks that coordinate between media activists, lawyers, and NGOs is one way to ensure more safety, exposure, and, ultimately, justice. As WITNESS’ Deputy Program Director Tanya Karanasios epigrammatically argued, in the fight for human rights, “more video = more rights.”

While it is imperative to create networks of support and distribution for such imagery, as WITNESS advocates, we must likewise be mindful of the limitations of this visibility. In fact, a paradox endures: how do you depict people of color as agents of empowerment, of political change, and at the same time as the victims of institutionalized racial violence?

We have an investment in the real and its representation that assumes that if people witness an atrocity, they will act on this knowledge and demand its curtailment. But images are ambiguous. Their meanings are mutable. And they never speak “for themselves.” One beholder’s barbarity is another’s civility. The most compelling of images refuse interpretive stability. Of course, this is why they are political.