“Can these bones live?” (2008) by Theodore A. Harris is a three-part collage piece that overlaps the elements of historical photographs, symbols, text and ink, each in very detailed and powerful arrangements. While the individual composition of all three parts provides its own message, Harris uses repeated motifs to create a unified conversation about political corruption and social issues within the United States.
When comparing the three parts of Harris’s work, the center image stands out as one of the more powerful statements and unique compositions. Bullet holes scattered across the piece each contain a word of the Miranda rights, cut off at the word “Attorney”. The purpose of this is unified with the image of Malcom X framed in the wrist hole of a pair of handcuff and the text of an article on the bottom about Amadou Diallo, a black man shot and killed by the police, creates a statement on the injustice of police
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Each image is paralleled to the other on the bottom of the first and third panel. In the first panel, the presents the image of Richard Nixon dancing with his daughter in a ballroom on her wedding day. Nixon, a president with reputation for scandal and corruption, and displays his image in parallel to the third panel, containing a photo of a red war ship named after Condoleezza Rice, the former Secretary of State in the Bush administration who would’ve been ending her time in office at the time of this piece’s creation. By shrouding Nixon and Rice’s ship both in the black ink, Harris is associating both figures with the same amount of corruptness, perhaps for Rice not with the ship itself but with the War created during her term as Secretary of State with the inclusion of a sniper rifle with the repeated images of the inverted dove and Uncle