Death and Photography

Death and Photography Shirley Sam uels P hotography has made visible the obscenity of death for more than 150 years. In the early years, when dead babies were portrayed as if asleep in their mother's arms, the object was to protect memory. In later years, by recording massacres and executions, photographs insisted on a scrutiny at once judicial and memorializing. Because the history of images, especially images of death, enables us to approach their acquired emotional resonance, I want to open my discussion historically. But I dressed this morning as though I were going to a funeral; today's events appear as both elegy and exhortation. The Irretrievable Body Before I turn to photographs of death, I want to evoke a different form of imaging or imagining resurrection , that of poetry. By bringing the concept of Christ's crucifixion together with the grim spectacle of lynching contemporary with her post-reconstruction experience, Angelina Weld Grimke (named for her aunt, the abolitionist agitator Angelina Grimke Weld) sought to relocate the capacity for joy that seemed eradicated by deaths among the "wistful sounds of leaves."1 Trees God made them very beautiful, the trees: He spoke and gnarled of bole or silken sleek They grew; majestic bowed or very meek; Huge-bodied, slim; sedate and full of glees. And He had pleasure deep in all of these. And to them soft and little tongues to speak Of Him to us, He gave wherefore they seek From dawn to dawn to bring unto our knees. Yet here amid the wistful sounds of leaves, A black-hued grewsome something swings and swings; Laughter it knew and joy in little things Till man's hate ended all. -A nd so man weaves. And God, how slow, how very slow weaves H e— Was Christ Himself not nailed to a tree? In presenting the crime of lynching within the formal constraints of the sonnet, Angelina Weld Grimke at once mediates and denies the presence of race as an element in such a death. Rather she blames "man's hate" and calls on God to explain the events, and to explain the silence, among the trees that He "gave." What it is to be on "our knees" in worship of these trees comes to mimic the supplication of begging for life in the face of murderers. Further, as Grimke locates a "black-hued grewsome something" that "swings and swings" in the trees, she turns to ask "Was Christ Himself not nailed to a tree." The natural speech of trees with their "little tongues to speak" gives way to the silence of the "something" among them. But this silence further gives way to a different question of worship. Is it instead a holy matter to find a dead body in a tree? Grimke's poem displays no perpetrators. They are absent, as they are in many of the photographs of lynched bodies in the Without Sanctuary exhibit. And yet, many of those photographs also show spectators . Their steady gaze at the photographer implicates the viewer, who looks into the scene of the crime as though looking back at the criminals. These white spectators do not look for approval of their watching or of their presence at the scene of a crime. They assume such approval and the surefootedness of their bodies in juxtaposition to dangling corpses enacts that certainty. The documentation provided by the camera endorses and encodes the event as a ritual. The possible resistance I would propose to such an endorsement, quiet as it might appear, is to re-imagine the viewer's presence at such a ritual as religious, and to replace, through analogy, 122«IMka Journal of Cont em porary African Art Mother with her Dead Daughter Posed in Painterly Convention of the "Sick Child." Al b er t J. Beal s, N e w Yor k City. 2 ? X 3 ?", Dag u er r eo t yp e, circa 1 8 5 2 . St an l ey B. Bu r n s, M D an d Th e Bu r n s Ar ch i ve. Fall 2006 N k a «123 A Harvest of Death. Get t ysb u r g...