I was particularly interested in the framing of perspective in The Show. After the lynching is completed, the camera pivots around the victim’s body, cross-cutting between a shot taken from behind the victim and perpetrators, facing the photographer, and a shot from the photographer’s perspective. The result emphasizes the ambiguous nature of the camera’s moral stance. Is the viewer meant to feel included in the lynch party, or to observe the scene as a kind of ethnographic snuff film? The body operates as a hinge within the film space—when the camera is placed behind the body, the shot evokes a crime scene in which the body as a deceased individual is literally placed in the foreground, his dangling feet visible. But when the camera faces the body, confronting the satisfied faces of the murderers, the body becomes a historical artifact, tertiary evidence of a ritual.

In contrast to Hale’s writings on the commercial display of lynch victim’s body parts and the personally evocative experience of 50,000 African Americans lined up to see Emmett Till’s corpse, the sheriff presiding over Emmett Till’s murder trial said, “I don’t understand how a civilized mother can put the body of a child on public display.” Is the racialized, lynched body evidence or spectacle? Is it representative of an individual or a population?

If, as Foucault writes, in the modern age of biopolitics death is the most private and shameful thing of all, then how are these discrepancies and ambiguities of visibility accounted for?