A new exhibition at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Photography, "If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground," imagines the life the 14-year-old might have led had he not been lynched in Mississippi in 1955. Co-curated by Harvard professor Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr, Till's cousin and the last surviving witness to his kidnapping, the show uses an imagined photo library to prompt reflection on who America chooses to remember and how it confronts its history of racism, at a time when memorials to Till continue to face vandalism and misuse.

Till was murdered after whistling at a white shopkeeper while visiting relatives in Mississippi; his killers were acquitted but later confessed to the crime. The exhibition, running until December, arrives alongside other commemorative milestones: Illinois has designated 25 July as Emmett Till Day, the barn where he was killed has been bought for preservation by the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, and the Chicago church that held his funeral has unveiled a recreated neon sign in his honour. Curators say the project responds directly to continued resistance to honouring Till, seventy-one years after his mother Mamie Till-Mobley held an open-casket funeral attended by nearly 100,000 people.