On Wednesday, January 22nd, the show “Close to Home,” presented by the Fall 2019 History and Theory of Photography class, went up in the Kresge Library Gallery. But if you missed it, don’t worry, the posters will be up in the chapel for the rest of February, in honor of National Black History Month. The members of this class, taught by Dr. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt, were tasked with finding a few images that were taken in Chattanooga during the Civil Rights movement. They then spent time researching and digging through the archives in order to find out as much as they could about their photographs and the events they represented. The class’s final project resulted in these eight posters, each highlighting a different aspect of how the Civil Rights movement affected Chattanooga.
Dr. Weichbrodt planned and researched extensively herself this summer in preparation for this project: “I believe that knowing the history of a place can shape how we interact with it, and I wanted students to get to know Chattanooga in a new way,” she said. “During the Q&A at the opening, students repeatedly described how the research in particular and the class as a whole had helped them practice the discipline of redemptive looking—seeing the fullness of the image of God back into photographs that were meant to flatten or dehumanize. They also described a sense of empowerment; doing research here not only changed the way they think about Chattanooga, but it also encouraged them to dig into the histories of their own hometowns and have new kinds of conversations with family and friends there.”
While most of the posters focus on specific photographs and newspaper clippings from the Civil Rights movement in Chattanooga, Nina Grauley ‘20 went in a slightly different direction. Grauley is an art major as well as one of the student contributors to this exhibit, and her poster focused on a historical overview of the Civil Rights movement in Chattanooga as well as the effects racial segregation still has on Chattanooga now. She expressed that “it was eye opening to explore Chattanooga’s history. It’s a city that we are very close to but not really involved in because of our location on the mountain...I think this was a very important show for Covenant because it makes people think about things they wouldn’t be thinking about otherwise.”
According to the research done by the students in this class, most of the iconic images from the Civil Rights movement were taken in places like Birmingham and Selma, not Chattanooga. But in his famous speech, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. specifically calls out Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, as a place that he prayed would one day be rid of the poison of racism. In doing this work to uncover some of the effects of the Civil Rights movement on Chattanooga, the students from the History and Theory of Photography class definitely brought these events “close to home” in more ways than one.