Two hundred and fifty years is long enough for a nation to confuse memory with history. Anniversaries invite us to look backwards. They encourage us to revisit documents, monuments and familiar narratives that have come to define a country. Memory is never simply an accumulation of facts. It is an arrangement, shaped by what survives and by what disappears. The most revealing histories are often found not in what a nation preserves but in what it allows to vanish behind the scenes and in plain view.
During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, I learnt about the town of Elaine, Arkansas. Law and way of life operate differently in this region. After the end of the civil war, most of the formerly enslaved Black men became tenant farmers. In 1919, as cotton prices surged, Black sharecroppers, trapped in a vortex of credit and debt and underpaid for their crops, began to organise to receive fair payment. On September 30, a meeting of farmers was disrupted by several white men, one of whom was killed in a shootout. In a matter of hours, a white mob — including members of the National Guard — descended on the area. Two days later, more than 500 Black people were killed in what is considered to be the deadliest racial conflict in the history of the United States.
Misinformation ran through the newspapers afterwards, fuelling panic and justifying the violence. Many white-owned papers falsely reported that a “Black insurrection” was under way, claiming Black sharecroppers were plotting to overthrow white landowners. In reality, there was no insurrection. The idea of Black people asserting their rights to fair pay and to negotiate their labour contract, especially in the Jim Crow south, was enough to provoke a deadly backlash.
Elaine recovered after the massacre. Black families left and returned. Throughout the mid-1900s, it had a population of more than double what it is today. When I first came to Elaine I recognised this erasure early and wanted to make work that countered this removal of Black life, while being honest about the realities of this small town. I searched online archives expecting to find photographs, records and visual evidence that might help me understand what this community was like after the massacre. The lack of images and the scarcity of records felt less like neglect and more like a deliberate narrowing of historical vision.
We often imagine archives as neutral repositories of history and culture, yet they are built through decisions. Someone determines what is worth preserving, what deserves cataloguing and what receives institutional care. The archive tells us as much about power as it does about the past. Every document that survives exists in place of countless others that were never made or never considered important enough to keep.
Perhaps this is one of America’s many enduring contradictions. We often describe ourselves as a nation built upon ideals of liberty and democracy, yet our collective memory has always been uneven. Some histories become foundational myths that every American is raised to know, while others survive only through family stories, local memory and the determination of communities unwilling to let themselves disappear.
There are people in this town who do not want to talk about Elaine’s history, rightfully so. And there are people in this town who have to talk about it. Yet there are also people in this town who believe the massacre was — is — fake news. The legacies of sharecropping, disenfranchisement and racial violence have not faded into history; they have transformed into modern-day policies of neglect, ensuring the area remains in a kind of poverty that was never self-imposed but systematically enforced.
Phillips County, where Elaine sits, is home to the highest percentage of Black Arkansans, but it’s a place where history’s wounds remain open. With the lowest life expectancy and the highest poverty rate in the state, the weight of racial and economic injustice is not abstract — it is felt deeply in the bodies, minds and futures of the people who call this place home. The only employment opportunities in Elaine are a few local businesses and temporary work on soyabean farms, and the farming jobs tend to be offered to white people. To make money or find opportunities, Black residents have to leave.
For as long as I have been working in Elaine, the local children have been making photographs alongside me. While I primarily work with film, my digital camera is often passed from hand to hand. Over the years, what began as a casual exchange evolved into something more meaningful when I hosted a summer photography camp at the Elaine Legacy Center, the town’s former elementary school (the school district closed in 2005). Using equipment I borrowed from my university, the camp became a space where children could photograph, edit and print images that reflected their lives. Those photographs reminded me that authorship is never as singular as we often imagine. Every project is shaped by acts of generosity: introductions made by neighbours, stories shared across kitchen tables, family albums opened to strangers, children willing to trust someone carrying a camera.
I had envisioned our work contributing to an evolving archive within a civil rights museum under development along the racial dividing line of Main Street, in a building that had stood since the time of the massacre. The museum was set to open in 2023, but, due to mismanagement and poor construction, has been cancelled. The Arkansas state government was slow to officially acknowledge the Elaine massacre, and the actual events in Elaine are excluded from the public school curriculum.
Residents of Elaine have never been offered a chance for reconciliation or to publicly grieve the trauma. The only memorial that speaks to what happened there is 35 minutes away in the county seat of Helena. It is the only memorial that I have seen without any names of the people who were killed. When I learnt about the cancellation of the museum, I was disappointed, but that faded quickly. If you want to move to Elaine, there is nowhere for you to live. The water remains undrinkable. And if you desire fresh food or washed clothes, you must make an hour round-trip to Helena. What would it mean for a town to create a civil rights museum when it lacks the resources to meet its residents’ basic needs?
The history of photography is filled with remarkable images that were made in communities marked by inequality. Many of those photographs changed how audiences understood poverty, labour, migration and racial injustice. They have entered museums, defined careers and, in some cases, the history of photography itself. Yet the communities that made them possible are rarely invited to share in the cultural or economic value they helped create. That legacy of extraction and abandonment has become impossible for me to ignore.
As this long-term project, which I call “Out The E”, has grown, I have found myself asking a different set of questions. What responsibility does an artist have once the photographs have been made? What does collaboration mean if its benefits end when the exhibition closes or the book is published? If a community’s trust, time and generosity become the foundation of a body of work, should that work not also contribute to the community’s future?
The work itself is inseparable from the relationships that made it possible. It exists because people invited me into their homes, entrusted me with family histories, introduced me to their children, and allowed me to return again and again. Those acts of trust carry obligations that extend beyond mere representation. For that reason, I have developed a long-term endowment that is associated with “Out The E”, so the project can generate resources that remain in Elaine long after I am gone. This endowment is not intended to repair generations of racial violence or compensate for decades of disinvestment. No single project could do that. Rather, it is an attempt to imagine a different relationship between documentary practice and the communities that make it possible. If photographs can accumulate cultural and economic value over time, then perhaps some of that value should return to the place from which it came.
As the US marks its 250th anniversary this July 4, we will once again revisit the ideals that have shaped the country. But anniversaries should ask more of us than remembrance. They should ask what kind of inheritance we intend to leave behind. The archive is one kind of inheritance. So are the institutions we build, the communities we sustain and the futures we make possible for those who come after us.
Harlan Bozeman is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow
“Out The E” is published by TBW Books in the autumn
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