“Stranger Fruit”: Black Mothers and the Fear of Police Brutality | The Marshall Project
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/03/22/stranger-fruit-black-mothers-and-the-fear-of-police-brutality
Police brutality cases that capture public attention follow a familiar pattern: first relentless media coverage, then local or national outrage, and then — if charges are ever brought against the officers involved — the drawn-out legal process. But what happens when this public cycle ends? In his ongoing series “Stranger Fruit,” photographer Jon Henry focuses on the private relationship between Black mothers and their sons, looking at how fear of violence permeates the daily lives of Black families across the United States.
“Stranger Fruit,” a project seven years in the making, features intimate portraits of Black mothers with their sons across the United States. Inspired by Renaissance paintings such as those by Titian, Henry poses the mothers cradling their sons in a manner that evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà, as if in mourning. Though these families have not experienced fatal police violence, Henry said they live with the possibility of such loss daily.