Family Portraits (2016) addresses the roles technology and the media play in normalizing violence against Black bodies. By recontextualizing contemporary and historical images of racial violence within frames made for housing family keepsakes and treasured memories and displaying them on a 1960s era Andre Bus coffee table against monochromatic backgrounds, Locke makes clear the double-standards at play in the United States’s cultural responses to and consumption of racial violence, both publicly and within the domestic sphere. Locke explains, “the prohibition of showing the deaths of victims is waved when the victim is black.”
