On Looking: Lynching Photographs and Legacies of Lynching after 9/11

Section II Lynching, Visucility, and Empire Fall 2006 N k a «4 5 On Looking: Without Sanctuary, Exhibition, Installation shot, Martin Luther King Center, Atlanta, GA, 2000 Journal of Contempora ry African Art Lynching Photographs and Legacies of Lynching after 9/M Dora Apel Today when we look at lynching photographs , we try not to see them. Looking and seeing become seeming forms of aggression that implicate the viewer, however distressed and sympathetic, in the acts that turned human beings into horribly shamed objects. Most of us would prefer not to look. Even when looking, the pictures are hard to see, and made all the more so by the presence of death, already difficult to look at, but here having occurred so excruciatingly in an atmosphere of selfrighteous cruelty and gloating. Discussing another form of horrible death, a type of Chinese execution known as "the death by division into a thousand parts," James Elkins writes, "According to original Chinese law, the nose, ears, toes, and fingers are to be cut first, and the pain is to be prolonged as much as possible." This also describes the process of many ritualized spectacle lynchings. Elkins observes: "There is also a nearly unbearable immorality to these images. The crowd of complacent executioners moves aside each time the photographer wants another shot, and the photographer did not protest or run away or intervene."1 The immorality resides not only in the execution itself and in the attitude of the participants, but also in the role of the photographer , whose ostensibly neutral position is not neutral , but appears to sanction the acts he records by declining to oppose them in any way. We, as viewers, are invited to occupy the photographer's viewing position. In a series of four photographs of such a Chinese execution, Elkins suggests that death itself is trapped in the sequence, between the frames, that begin with a living woman (accused of adultery) and end with a butchered corpse. Most lynching photographs (with some exceptions) are not produced in sequence from life to lifelessness, but taken after death, with the executioners and spectators still present, or of the corpse by itself, or with later groups of spectators who were not present at the lynching. The horror of death resides in the relationship between the selfconfident white killers or voyeuristic spectators who turn to face the camera and the hanging, burned, and/or bullet-riddled black bodies. The contradiction represented here embodies the relationship of power to helplessness, citizen to outsider, privilege to oppression, jubilation to degradation, subjecthood to objecthood, community to outcast, pride to humiliation. The photographer who records the gruesome spectacle is implicated as rendering a service to the lynching community through the taking, reproduction, and sale of lynching postcards as commemorative souvenirs that record the race-colorcaste solidarity and lethal "superiority" of the white community. But the passing of time, the changing contexts for the presentation of the photographs, and our own subject positions change how we perceive the photographs. Most of us reject the complicity implied in assuming the position of the photographer and recognize a much different issue at stake Fall 2006 N k a «4 7 today in this legacy of representation, namely, the responsibility of historical witnessing. The photographer now renders a service to history. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America After being hidden away in drawers and albums and dusty corners for decades, a large body of lynching photographs was presented to a broad public for the first time at the beginning of the twenty-first century to electrifying effect. Seventy-eight mostly smallsize lynching photographs on postcard stock were first shown in the exhibition Witness at the Roth Horowitz Gallery in Manhattan in January 2000. They were taken from the collection of James Allen and John Littlefield, representing lynchings that took place between 1880 and 1960, and were displayed with books, posters, and other historical artifacts dealing with the racist oppression of African Americans in the post-Civil War period. People stood in long lines in the freezing winter weather to visit the tiny one-room gallery, sometimes waiting up to three hours to get inside, then spending hours more looking once there...