Jon Henry’s ongoing series, Stranger Fruit, uses the classical pietà – Michelangelo’s sculpture of Mary cradling Jesus – to illustrate the enduring pain of Black mothers who have lost their sons to police brutality.

New York City-based photographer Jon Henry stages portraits with various women around the United States cradling their sons on street corners, in parking lots, in front of government buildings; everyday spaces that symbolize the horrific commonplace-ness of racist, systemic murder. While Michelangelo’s Pieta casts Mary looking down at Jesus, many of the women in Henry’s portraits lock eyes with the lens, and us as viewers, returning our gaze with sadness, strength, and, depending on who’s looking, condemnation.

Henry paces these portraits with images of the women in bedrooms and other quiet, empty spaces, a signal of contemplating loss and endurance. “Lost in the furor of media coverage, lawsuits, and protests,” Henry writes, “is the plight of the mother. Who, regardless of the legal outcome, must carry on without her child.”

While the women in Henry’s photos have not actually lost their sons, these slow, reflective portrait sessions, made with a 4x5 camera represent living with a constant fear of police violence.

Henry occasionally intersperses text from a few of the mothers he photographs, often organized into poetic stanzas. For Henry, these passages speak to the experience of mothers across the country:

I feel sad,

sad that mothers actually
have to go through this…

My son was able to get up
and put back on his clothes
Others not so much.

They are still mentally frozen
in that position, that sadness,
that brokenness. I feel guilty

to be relieved that it’s just a
picture because for others
it’s a reality.

I feel scared, I feel next. I feel like Tyler could be the
next hashtag.”

Henry started the series in 2014 in response to the police murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, and continues as they never seem to end. He recently won the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture for this series which will be on display at The Griffin Museum through October 23rd and has several images in Photographic Center Northwest’s latest exhibition Examining The American Dream in Seattle, Washington, up through December 10, 2020.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Jon Henry