Deep South, Untitled (Bridge on Tallahatchie)

In 1955 Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American from Chicago, was visiting family in Mississippi when he was kidnapped and brutally murdered after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman. The perpetrators were acquitted. Haunted by the accounts of Till’s death since her own childhood, Sally Mann retraced his presumed route on the evening of his death, seeking to get the earth “to give up its ghosts.” Bridge on Tallahatchie depicts the Black Bayou Bridge in Glendora, Mississippi, where some believe Till’s naked, mutilated body was thrown into the river with a heavy fan from a cotton gin lashed around his waist.