“These exist only in my mind’s eye,” narrates Lila, framing a free floating hand that grasps a flashbulb in Darkroom (Quintero Weaver 24).  Margins around three images on the page reproduce her memories as the photos that never existed, that hand holding the flashbulb that was never there.  Layered atop the Earth in space, these photos cannot be contained within this planet’s geography or within real time.  They are products or tools of remembrance that invoke an absent photographer (her father) and are simultaneously unattainable because that photographer is absent.  One close-up shoe resoundingly sets foot in the U.S., but the ground where that it touches is indistinguishable from the photo’s invisible background, although that nonexistent ground offers a surface for the foot’s shadow.  In other words, this photograph is already impossible or at least difficult to render using her father’s camera; the photo has to be rendered outside of the time or at least the medium that it invokes (photography in the 1960s).

Granted, hidden/invisible ground in a photo is an attainable visual effect, but landlessness as it is depicted as an active moment in this photo departs markedly from her father’s journalistic style of photography.  His photography at times could violent contact, but this violence requires surfaces and light.  Her imagined photography benefits from the dark as much as from fuller illumination; his is confounded when white people obscure light in an attempt to erase their brutalization of peaceful protestors (Quintero Weaver 160-167).  She recreates the photos that were blocked from being created or destroyed; once again, the photographer must be outside the real-time event to bear witness to it: her father as hand-on-flashbulb in the sequence of Lila’s arrival and her father’s camera taken by Lila the writer in order to retrieve the photos that he never took or was unable to develop (Quintero Weaver 24, 160-167).  In this sequence, the ink backdrop of the page submerges the photos in space-out-of time, similar to the star-filled illustration of “space” around the earth that provides an out-of-time canvas for the photos of Lila’s arrival to the U.S. (Quintero Weaver 24).

In the moment, Lila imagines her father rhetorically asking, “Hey!  How can we take photos without light?” as a man next to him replies, “Oh, boy, Mister!  That’s the least of our problems!”  Invoking the binary structure of racism that Lila elaborates throughout the memoir, this exchange graphically juxtaposes her father’s righteous indignation with another man’s immediate fear of physical violence to his body.  Violence to a camera and violence to a person come into sharp contrast in a panel (or imagined photo) that has minimal illumination but enough contrast to bring two pairs of eyes into focus (Lila’s father’s eyes angry and the other man’s eyes terrified).  The dialogue is charged with dynamics that render Lila’s father relatively safer from violence than the other man, who addresses him as “Mister,” while Lila’s father does not directly address him by name or title, invoking the (hierarchized/racist) “distinct interpretation of respect” that Lila depicts earlier: “Good morning, Mister Green” to which the reply is, “Morning, Big Jim” (Quintero Weaver 69).  Lila’s father can bear witness because he may be able to escape the violence or “pass” as a (perceived-as-non-afrodescendiente) bystander, although he could suffer the fate of Richard Valeriani or Viola Liuzzo for his desire to document what happens, and more easily so because of xenophobia and its psychotic perceptions of latinidad (Quintero Weaver 186, 194).

Cameras are characters in the panel, and hands appear on a camera as/before it is “smash[ed],” as do a streetlight and a fractured candle (Quintero Weaver 66, 61, 62).  Although more overtly disembodied than the hands on a camera being seized (or immediately prior to seizure) and Lila’s foot touching invisible U.S. ground earlier, these parts evoke the people that hold them prior to the beating/killing.  These objects are ways of connecting readers to hands and to songs that accompanied those candles; Lila’s imagined photos of these objects are ways of complicating detachment from violence as an ideal position for one who bears witness.  Those cameras have to have someone behind them; someone has the strength to hold those candles, and someone chooses to take up those clubs.  Throughout this panel sequence, someone is behind the camera: Lila’s father, Lila, readers, witnesses, participants.  A woman makes direct eye contact with readers or the camera-wielder and shouts, “Help!  They’re gonna kill him!” (Quintero Weaver 163).  A police officer thrusts a club in the photographer and readers’ faces as he threatens, “Get off this sidewalk right now!”  Complicity in the scene is unavoidable yet mediated by the frames that distance readers temporally from the moment in which the photos are taken, reminding readers that identification with the images for those who aren’t present at that moment is complicated.  By imagining these photos out-of-time or reproducing real-time photos out-of-time (those that her father took) and turning up the volume to hear those moments facilitates contact between reader and image, between surfaces during acts of violence, and between now and then, closing down any escape from a continuum of violence and racism.  Everything is in-time because it is out-of-time; there is no dismissal of violence “then” and instead there is an engagement with violence that is specific to a moment but is by no means resolved in the moment of reading.

Newspaper headlines fly irrespective of oxygen “around” the world, visualized as “in space,” a return of the starry sky around earth (Quintero Weaver 177).  Cameras are trained on the “first attempt to march to Montgomery” on March 7, 1965 in the previous panel, but the dissemination of the news is visualized out-of-time, in space, in hindsight that recognizes that moment of news as it feels now-then (Quintero Weaver 176).  Temporal grounding is unavoidable, but there is no single ground “on” earth in which to contain this particular moment; its impact defies what can be photographed, although it is invoked by cameras, the reader-as-photographer in the first panel, and the moment-as-dated-headlines in the next “space” panel.  This moment bears witness, but it has to invoke distance to bring readers into a specific moment, to reaffirm the continuum while reminding readers that they are out of this moment as they try to process it.

What do you think of the sketched versions of people?  It seems like Quintero Weaver uses the pen/drawing implements to reduce a face to its barest components, a satire on “phenotype” racism and caricature, a critique of Anglo/Eurocentric art education or at least the drawing manuals she mentions (Quintero Weaver 56-57).  She uses the power of racist, de-individualizing gaze (which she owns up to having), turning it on her white neighbors and classmates at moments when they try to de-individualize her or other people (Quintero Weaver 53, 74, 86).

Three words: Parallels haunt me.