The Birmingham Project and Ethics of Mourning

Abstract

Through skillful reflection on the medium of photography, working in community, and visualizing loss and presence, Dawoud Bey’s The Birmingham Project forms a ruminative series of images. As a visual memorial, the series exposes questions of the ethical responsibilities in the wake of grief and mourning that result from violence while resonances of the past echo in the present moment. To explicate these questions, the contemplation of The Birmingham Project that follows utilizes work by Judith Butler to examine the political transformations possible through processes of mourning. In addition, reading these works together allows an exploration of the ethical responsibilities that arise from both a shared precarity of life and the opacities of self and other that are revealed through differentiated experiences of mourning.