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When we look at lynching photographs today, we try not to see them. Looking and seeing seem to implicate the viewer, however distanced and sympathetic, in the acts that turned human beings into horribly shamed objects, as if viewing itself were a form of aggression. Most of us would prefer not to look. Death has occurred here so painfully, in an atmosphere of such self-righteous cruelty and gloating, that even when we look, the pictures are difficult to see. The pain inflicted upon lynching victims was often prolonged as much as possible in a ritualized and spectacularized process, beginning with the severing of toes, fingers, ears, or genitals. Photographers would take pictures for souvenir postcards that sold by the thousands, usually featuring the tortured and maimed corpse of the victim, with the executioners and spectators still present. For the viewer today, the horror of death resides in the relationship between the self-confident 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, subjecthood to objecthood, and community to outcast.
The photographer is implicated by rendering a service to the lynching community, supplying the images for commemorative postcards that record the race-color-caste solidarity and lethal “superiority” of the white community. The photographer’s ostensible neutrality at the lynching is thus compromised by his apparent inaction in the face of a gruesome spectacle and implicit sanctioning of the act he records. We, as viewers, occupy the photographer’s viewing position, but most of us reject the complicity thereby implied. There is a much different issue at stake today in this legacy of representation, namely, the responsibility of historical witnessing. The passing of time, the changing contexts for the presentation of the photographs, and our own subject positions change how we perceive the photographs. The photographer now renders a service to history.1
Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America
After being hidden away in drawers and albums and dusty corners for decades, about sixty lynching photographs from 1880 to 1960 were presented to the public in the exhibition “Witness: Photographs of Lynchings from the Collection of James Allen,” at the Roth Horowitz Gallery in Manhattan in January 2000, to electrifying effect. The photographs 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 freezing weather to visit the tiny one-room gallery, sometimes waiting up to three hours to get inside, then spending hours more viewing once there, leading Roth Horowitz to issue no more than 200 free tickets a day in order to manage the crowd. Some 5,000 people saw the show before it closed.2
James Allen, a white antiques dealer from Atlanta and a native of central Florida, collected the photographs over the course of fifteen years, during which he and his partner, John Littlefield, purchased more than 130 lynching photographs, paying as much as $30,000 for a panel of three photos. The photographs came from various sources, not only dealers but “Ku Klux Klan members, the trunk of a prominent Savannah family, from people where the photographs were kept in albums alongside vacation pictures.”3 For a time these materials were deposited in the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta. In 2000, Twins Palms Press in Santa Fe, a publisher of art and specialty books, published ninety-eight of the photographs in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Containing essays by Georgia congressman John Lewis, University of California historian Leon Litwack, black author and New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als, and an essay by Allen, who also annotated each image, the book has sold over 30,000 copies.4
Among the visitors to the exhibition at Roth Horowitz was Stevie Wonder, the blind musician who wanted to “see” the photographs and was given a private tour and description of the works by James Allen. Asked by Wonder why he collected these photographs, Allen answered that, among other reasons, “I’m a gay man, and the discrimination I’ve known in my life has been from white males. I’m just angry, and this is a way to express my anger.”5
The exhibition at the Roth Horowitz gallery was so popular that it was later organized as an exhibition by the New-York Historical Society and co-sponsored by the Community Service Society, curated by James Allen and Julia Hotton. This exhibition was augmented with material from the Historical Society’s collections to provide a fuller picture of the antilynching movement’s activities in New York. From March 14 to October 1, 2000, the exhibition drew 50,000 people in its first four months at the museum and was held over for another four months.6 Here, too, visitors stayed for a long time.
Viewers and reviewers alike were struck by the disturbing visual presence of the lynch mobs and the consternation evoked by looking at the photographs. “It’s a difficult task, this re-viewing of violence, this striving for reflection rather than spectacle, for vision rather than voyeurism, for study rather than exposure,” wrote Patricia Williams for The Nation, alluding to the sadistic voyeurism that is always an inherent danger in viewing such photographs.7 “One kind of viewing—very different from the kind that these photos originally elicited—is being sanctioned here,” noted another analyst in a New York Times editorial. “After all, at this exhibition we are a crowd looking at a crowd looking at a lynching. And we are looking at the lynching too. Again and again, a white mob looks back at us.”8 This exchange of looks is potent. For the viewer, it is easier to look at the mob, which evokes outrage, than to look at the lynching victim, which elicits shame and horror. The language used to describe the mob implies a degree of equivalence of agency: “We are a crowd looking at a crowd” and “A white mob looks back at us.” A visitor to the exhibition observed, “Considering the fact that human beings have been executed, for people to smile, to be actually jostling to be in the picture, that’s more stunning than anything else.”9 James Allen agreed: “After you get through the shock, what lingers are the images of the perpetrators, and not of the corpses, and that’s where the focus needs to be.”10 Why should the focus be here? Is it to stare down the look of the mob with a counter-look? To confront the fact that these ordinary people who committed such extraordinary atrocities in the name of community values are part of our history too? To produce another outcome—if not in the past, in the future?
The exhibition, with approximately 100 photographs and postcards, traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2001; museum staff members there, like those at the New-York Historical Society earlier, were required to attend sessions that addressed their own emotions about the exhibition. One reviewer, Mary Thomas, yielded to a universalist impulse in suggesting “the commonality of the experience”; she warned that lynching should not be regarded as a manifestation of racial politics but viewed in contemporary global and pluralistic terms: “While the grievous suffering inflicted upon generations of African Americans by these sanctioned odious social rituals should not be denied and should be addressed, mentally categorizing such events as a black problem or even specifically a racial issue is to not only miss the point, but also the opportunity to isolate attitudes that continue to support such behavior globally.”11 Certainly one can argue that issues of race hatred and fear manifest themselves in crucially deadly ways around the world today, but to suggest that this larger context overrides the historically specific racial politics of lynching, despite initial caveats calling for the examination of these “odious social rituals,” is precisely to miss the point and to vitiate the lessons that can be learned by studying the historic specificity of lynching practice in the United States, a practice that is indeed not a black problem but an American problem.
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