This lecture is drawn from Shawn Michelle Smith’s book Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography (Duke 2020). It focuses on Carrie Mae Weems’ photograph series Constructing History, for which Weems and a group of students reenacted famous photographs from the U.S. Civil Rights era. It discusses the elegiac and ambivalent nature of Weems’s recreations, which are often focused on assassinations, and proposes that the photographs enact a form of melancholia that creates an affective openness to the past and calls attention to a political project that remains unfinished. Constructing History highlights the complex relationship between photography and memory.