Lynching postcards / Civil War photographs : a different story telling

     Gardner's and Brady's photographs of the Civil War are mostly about keeping memories, having something left of those soldiers. Most of the photographs staged union soldiers in front of their tent or cabin, playing cards, waiting. Some of them would be of abandoned houses, camps, drills, work on the field (building bridges, telegraphs...); and a few would be of death. However, as it was pointed out, even those photographs of dead bodies were staged: corpse were moved, and there would not have any photograph of the actual violence of the war: battles, soldiers firing...

Plate 27: What do I do, John Henry?

Plate 36: Harvest of death

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plate 27, tends to give a romanticized idea of what the life  in camp was. The soldiers are well dress and seem to have a "good life" as well as "enjoying" themselves and there brotherhood. Whereas plate 36, gives a feeling of helplessness. 

     Lynching postcards are quite different. They are only depicting violence and are even more difficult to look at because nothing tempers their wrongness. There is no feeling of brotherhood or of doing what need to be done for a greater good. In addition, photography became easier with the time, people did not need to stand still for minutes in order to take their picture. These postcards were 'live' not 'stage' as were the Civil War's photographs. Photographs were not only a mean to keep dear and good memories but started to become common. 

 

George and Ed SILSBEE HANGED by a MOB of CITIZENS IN FRONT OF JAIL. Jan. 20, 1900. Fort Scott Kan. Flash Light by Dabbs

 

      In the case of the lynching postcards, death seems represented as an entertainment, a spectacle citizens enjoyed and participated to create. It is not war casualties or self-defense. It is citizens killing other citizens because of their skin color. Even when their is no spectators in the frame, the viewer can understand that it is a warning, a message intended to be seen by onlookers. It is staged in a different way Civil War photographs were. Whereas the latter were supposed to give the image of the "good death", to reassure families back home that their father, brother or son were well taken care of; the postcards have a darker purpose: frighten free African American, celebrating White supremacy.

     The same media is used, photography, but it serves opposite purposes and ends. Civil war photographs can be perceived as intimate photographs. Even though they were display in exhibits, they somewhat private and treated with care, deference even. Lynching postcards were a mercantile object as were slaves. One can send postcards to family and friends, collect them, sell them, buy them, display them. It is as if nothing changed, as if the Civil War main purpose was not reached: freeing slaves and making African American the equal of White American.

 

     Today, seeing these postcards is disturbing, revolting, sickening, but it might not have been the case in the early 1900. Now we see them as the illustration of what should have never happened, of shame to  have let it happened, of a reminder of what should never happen again. However, then it was something normal, something to be proud of (you do not make postcards of shameful moment).

These photographs tell a different story, then and now. We can ask ourselves how today's pictures of conflicts, war, terrorisms attacks can be perceived in the next century. Are the photographs we see today in mass media any different than the ones of the Civil War and Lynching? And how so?

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?”    

Our presenters last week reflected on the general absence of violence from photographs of the Civil War, with the important exception of Brady and O'Sullivan's photographs of corpses of soldiers killed in battle at Antietam and Gettysburg.  These debuted to the horror of American gallery-goers and were neglected in the aftermath of war.  [See links in sidebar.]

In spite of these silences, we know violence is a central theme in US history: in the expulsion of indigenous people from their lands, the institution of slavery, the conquest of Mexican lands, the experience of civil war.  Sven Beckert, writing a history of capitalism, has gone so far as to rebrand "mercantile capitalism" as "war capitalism," intent on emphasizing the indispensability of violence to the development of economies based on commodity production for world markets.

In this week of the course alone, we're obliged to acknowledge violence as one of the primary reasons for the failure of Reconstruction: the Ku Klux Klan's campaign of terror against black Americans subdued the nation's first attempts at interracial democracy in the South. (For descriptions of the KKK's tactics, see Lisa Cardyn's "Sexualized Racism/Gendered Violence: Outraging the Body Politic in the Reconstruction South")  Lynchings remained common in the Southern states through the 1930s.  (See (1) Brundage, Lynching in the New South, (2) the postcards of lynchings collected by James Allen [note accompanying essays by historians and civil rights activists], and (3) the NYT feature on the recent report of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama.)  [All of the aforementioned resources are linked in the sidebar.]

So we have incontrovertible evidence of a history of widespread violence and terrorism in the United States: yet perhaps not one with which many people are familiar. This simultaneous documentation and eschewal raises the question: how do we make sense of the presence or absence of records of violence in American histories?  To what extent does the United States have a usable history of violence? Of terrorism?

Option 1 is to reflect on these questions, making reference to the aforementioned sources and to American history more broadly, including contemporary conflicts and exercises of force/violence.
Option 2 is to compare the lynching postcards collected by James Allen to the photographs of the Civil War discussed in class or to accounts of death provided in Faust's Republic of Suffering.
Option 3 is to analyze one of the postcard images [please include the image in your post], taking into account the setting, role of the photographer, spectators, killers, and victim.  Be aware that these are very upsetting images, and that the exercise of describing them will also be disturbing.

Please label your posts with any relevant keywords or important motifs to make the cloud navigation in the sidebar meaningful.