Chicago exhibition imagines the life Emmett Till never got to live
A new Chicago exhibition uses an imagined photo collection to explore what life might have looked like for Emmett Till, the 14-year-old murdered in 1955, had he survived. The show asks America to reconsider who it chooses to remember.
The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago is hosting "If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground," an exhibition running through December that presents an imagined photo library of the life Emmett Till never had the chance to live. Till, a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago, was tortured and murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after whistling at a white shopkeeper. His killers were acquitted at trial but later confessed to the murder in Look magazine.
The show was co-curated by Harvard professor Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr, Till's cousin, closest friend and the last surviving witness to his kidnapping. Parker says he often imagines what Till would have become, believing he "would have been the center of everything." Lewis says visiting Mississippi and witnessing continued resistance to honoring Till convinced her of the need to create what she calls a "creative monument."
Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in 1955, drawing nearly 100,000 attenders and forcing the nation to confront the brutality inflicted on Black Americans in the South. The exhibition features photographers ranging from Henri Cartier-Bresson and Gordon Parks to Till's own relatives, plus a Dawoud Bey portrait of former president Barack Obama, chosen by artist Hank Willis Thomas to represent the possibilities Till was denied.
Ahead of the opening, Illinois officially designated 25 July, Till's birthday, as Emmett Till Day, and the barn where he was killed was purchased last month for use as a memorial site. Lewis argues the exhibition also honors other young Black lives lost since, saying Till has become "a proxy" for understanding later cases.
