The Extreme Witness of Photographed Lynchings

In Making Whiteness, Hale examines the cultural power of lynching. Lynching in the South was characterized on the one hand a spectacle of torture and on the other, the sensationalized mass circulation of lynching photographs . Concerned with the politics of the image from the lynching publics in the South, Hale argues that the key to understanding the spectacle of lynching, “lay not in the assignment of cause and blame, the rallying of rights and wrongs, but in the looking” ( 221). Although “looking” was central because of the public spectacle that it produced, it was the distributed photographs of lynched bodies that created a complex system of representation. Importantly, such images were used by lynch group and anti-lynch groups alike.

The deployment of gruesome images by anti-lynching groups reframed the narrative from woman as victim to the greater victimization of the black man. The means of effective mobilization were argued, “one violated body demanded another more violated one” (224).  The aestheticization of horror that the image of the lynched body represented became a mode of bearing a greater truth. As Hale describes, the practice of distributing images was one where the two figures of victimhood became “competing bodies as metaphors for competing truths” (224). What are the ethical and representational limits that emerge from the mobilization of such sensationalized and extreme images? What can we make of the space between the two “victims,” woman and black, as well as the space between the image and action, narrative and truth? This is particularly relevant in relation to the use of the beaten body of Emmett Till as a mode of activism.

Monica