Paul Turounet photographed this historical marker at the River Site, where the mutilated body of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, had been dumped into the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi in 1955. Till had been abducted, tortured and murdered for allegedly violating a Jim Crow-era unwritten code of behavior regarding the interactions of blacks and whites. The murder and trial became an iconic moment in the Civil Rights Movement after the two white men were acquitted by an all-white, all male jury. Months later, they would confess to the murder without consequence.

The historical marker has been replaced four times due to vandalism, primarily by people using the sign for target shooting. In 2019, the marker gained national attention after it was shot by three University of Mississippi fraternity members who posted an image of themselves holding shotguns beside the sign on Instagram.

Turounet’s photograph of the flower adorning the pink border of an old marker marred by bullet spray with storm clouds looming in broken-blue sky belongs to the artist’s longform project Somewhere Out There, Something Is Happening. The locus of Turounet’s work is contemplation; his work asks whether what is past is prologue of our collective history. The substance of this recent work has been the contemporary social cultural landscape of the United States of America. This is one of many subject-sites.