THE ACCUMULATIONS OF IMAGES with which this essay opened are not reflections of some objective historical reality which stands apart from the violence of repression any more than the intensified forms of surveillance that have marred the reputation of new visual technologies in recent years. Under the modern aesthetic regime, every visualization becomes a site of enclosure. Yet even as the photography from the “summer of racial reckoning” could not help but play a part in taming and containing the spirit of “the moment,” the visual surfeit brimming from such multitudes will just as surely always overspill the parapets of the frame.

How then do we attend to this visual surplus—as a desire excessive to the image, as an aesthesis that cannot be pictured? How might we begin to recognize its immanent entanglement with the project of abolition, with the collective refusal of every expropriation and enclosure perpetuated by and for the state? The aesthetic discordance gathering beneath the surface of the photographs from the summer of 2020 marks the clash between a symbolic order which presumes to present the world as it is (or at least how it is supposed to be), and a symbolic disorder that cannot appear within this world as anything other than a problem, even as it holds out the possibility of forms of life beyond catastrophe.

Photography’s capacity to glimpse other political horizons is not divorced from its aesthetic regime but a function of them. Photographic techniques of cropping, retouching, and the rendering of perspective, for instance, effectively scale and rescale the world in ways that both expand and reify our sense of the world as such. The question that emerges is: How do we reconcile the radical movement toward abolition—which embraces, but cannot be reduced to, political strategies such as defunding the police; closing prisons, detention centers, and military bases; organizing rent and workplace strikes; and offering mutual aid in the face of structural abandonment—as an ongoing collective project distinguished by a commitment to reimagine and reconstruct social life, if our means of imagi(ni)ng remain bound to a history of photographic representation essential to modernity’s enduring project of worldmaking?

And yet, any contemporary extension of the Heideggerian problematic of the “world represented as picture” is not and can never be even half the story. For how do we attend to the ones who must continually bear the burdens of photographic overexposure, who are continuously tasked with mending political life while suffering the risks and costs of social morbidity, and who remain subject to an image economy whose phantasmatic projections mandate both the erasure and exorbitant visioning of blackness? How do we accompany those who, in Fred Moten’s words, enact a “criminal refusal” of a seemingly totalizing “world picture”? While it is true that we are living in the midst of the terrible culmination of techniques of world picturing, it is also true that those who survive the cataclysms of empire are already, by necessity, fashioning the means of inhabiting what Tendayi Sithole calls “the unmaking of the world.”

Perhaps we don’t need any more retrospectives, for every effort to return us to an image of the past is one which returns us to the image of the present, to the merciless directives of the racial metaphysics of presence. Perhaps we need, instead, to cultivate a kind of anti-retrospective attention which embraces the declivitous underside that undercuts every enterprise of world picturing, the wounding that refuses suture. To linger with/in this “tear in the world,” in Brand’s poetics, is to reinvent what it means to see.