Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

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The almost one hundred images reproduced here are a testament to the camera's ability to make us remember what we often choose to forget. These lynching photographs were often made into postcards and sold as souvenirs to the crowds in attendance. Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe don't want to believe that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago.

Just a terrible, tragic history that needs to be exposed so we can be reminded of what we do when our community approves of our monstrous behaviors. I found the introductory essay of this book, by Leon Litwack, to be really informative; it was very well footnoted with historical references, and describes the culture of lynching in the South, and its basis in white fear of blacks. I was surprised to see that the first photos are of white men, several of which are in the west - California, Kansas and Minnesota. In several images there were thousands of attendees, some of whom traveled from great distances to watch and/or participate in the torture. What I really appreciate about the memorial, from what I’ve seen is the way it forces us to participate and feel implicated as spectators, and the way it takes the spectacle of the body out of it,” she said.One person interviewed in the book comments that in the late 19th and early 20th Century, it was always "open season" on Negroes, who were viewed as less than human - and they were tortured with methods not even used on animals. This book should be required reading for all because it touches upon the long history of racism in this country and it gives context to what is happening in this day and age. While I still adhere to the need to face the past fully and honestly if the US is to move forward, I don't have a ready answer for the question "At what point does documentation of horror become pornographic/exploitative?

These pictures are shocking visual testimony to the unspeakable ferocity of violence against blacks in this country in the not-too-distant past. And on a large scale, where lynching became normalised to the point where a postcard of a public hanging became something you might send your aunt to let her know you were thinking about her. It is as though we have cracked open a previously untested door and, adjusting for the new light, find our eyes bringing to focus what we now know must be hell. Hinshaw noted that there were always white spectators to lynching, even the photographs without crowds depicted.Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). But “Without Sanctuary” also started a debate about how we remember lynching, and how we approach and present the artifacts of atrocities.

The show was initiated by Andrew Roth when he learned that Twin Palms Publishers was planning a book about the Allen-Littlefield collection. I sometimes say I can't understand the depravity and wickedness of humanity in that we do these things AND also claim to be a great nation--but it is who we are, and nothing will change about our present until we both look at the past and repent, and change our behaviors today. So said a nine-year-old child to his mother, on his way back from witnessing a public lynching in the late 1800s, once upon a time in America.

Editor James Allen, an American antique collector, includes nearly 100 images of lynchings in America from his own collection, including battleground cases such as the 1911 murders of Laura and Lawrence Nelson in Okemah, Oklahoma the lynching of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1935, and the infamous 1915 execution of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia. To be mesmerized by these photos of mob violence is to in some small but undeniably important way put hands on the beast, to learn its contours and edges. Als, in a searing and legitimate critique of the entire project itself – objectifying as it is of the bodies of lynched African-Americans – finds himself ultimately “unable to determine the usefulness of the project”. There were lynchings in the Midwestern and Western states, mostly of Asians, Mexicans, Native Americans and even whites.