What Does Death Really Look Like?

Four photographs of the lynching of an unidentified 

African American male in a coastal Georgia swamp, 1902

The collection of lynching photographs compiled by James Allen on the “Without Sanctuary” website is not only disturbing as a set of images, but a stark and brutal reminder of an incontrovertible moral corruption in our nation’s recent history. Some images show a single body, dangling at the end of a noose, with no living bodies in sight while others are filled with onlookers eager to get a glimpse at the hanging victims. It is unclear which scene is more unsettling: the corpse left to rot silhouetted against a scenic pastoral landscape or a crowd of white men gathered around a tree to witness death much in the same way they are captivated by fly balls and home runs. Was this just a game to them? Both scenarios are graphic and horrific but it is the utter fascination that the spectators of this terrible crime seem to share is the most unnerving. Crowded around a tree where the victims have been killed, the people in the mob are not excused from their participation in this event; their presence serves to support the lynching and even in such high profile cases as some that have been documented through these postcards, no bystander is innocent. Perhaps even more upsetting, many of these images were taken by professional photographers, their names and studios etched into the negatives with dates and locations and sometimes even with personal notes about the event or the selected audience. Clearly, there was a market for these types of photographs or else they would not have been taken; the contemporaneous trend of labeling photography as a documentary medium discounts the fact that photographers were looking to make a living and sell what they could capture, even stooping so low as profiting from these lynching photographs as postcard images.

Confederate dead gathered for burial after battle,
photograph by Alexander Gardner 

            Comparing these post-war lynching photographs to the thousands that were taken by the now famous photographers of the Civil War, the fascination with death and corpses is consistent, but the surrounding context can not be avoided. The bodies laying horizontal on the battlefield are stoic in what may become their final resting place and as such, they become depersonalized; one can not discern how they were killed, what side they fought for, or even who they are. The photographers sent to capture scenes from the war were doing so in order to place the war on every front page newspaper and shock the American public by appealing to their moral hierarchy. Photography was a way to preserve memories, however skewed, for a nation that was falling apart at the seems and which have lasted through the past century. In the way the Civil War photographs are passive representations of a massive death toll, the lynching photographs are personal and intrusive attacks against the victims they portray and exploitative of their “shock value” as sellable items. Some of the identities of the hanging bodies are know as are their crimes or reason for death and they become activated in the scene both by the presence and absence of bystanders; the fact that such a photograph was even taken of the event attests to the fact that lynchings were grossly popular in the post-war period. When considering these postcards, the persecutor of the lynching may not be directly pictured but is nonetheless universally known: white men in search of an unattainable vengeance against non-white outsiders. While the photographs from the Civil War aim to portray the horrific aftermath of war for the wider public, the lynching photographs represent a perversion of the human consciousness and an unnatural fascination with images of the dead. And even more vital to this distorted narrative, both sets of photographs were taken by professionals, which ultimately poses the question: which were more important to remember, the Dead at Antietam or the “Unidentified corpse of an African American male?”