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Dialogues@RU is published annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume One
Spring 2002
Without
Sanctuary:
Lynching Photographs And Museums As Their Sanctuary -
Page 1
by Soo Hee Kwon
Images contain a sense of omniscience, having the power to humanize and dehumanize at the same time. Recently, there has been much controversy over the public exhibition of lynching photographs. James Allen, an Atlanta antique collector who buys and resells rare objects, compiled his collection of violent lynching photographs into a coffee table book, Without Sanctuary, in an attempt to change the meaning of them. They are now shown to make the public aware of this inhumanity and in doing so; the images give a humanizing effect. The publication of these images, however, and their growing number of exhibitions in venues including the Roth Horowitz Gallery, the New York Historical Society, and the Andy Warhol Museum, led to many criticisms about the images being voyeuristic, objectifying, exploitive, and even victimizing. Martha Rosler discusses in "In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography)" how documentary photographs play an inappropriate role when exhibited in contemporary art galleries, and museums. Rosler believes that these images produce a sense of new victimhood because those who are depicted in the images have no voice. Lynching photographs, however, revolutionized the use of documentary photography and need not be recognized as negative and demeaning. These ideas bring into question lynching photographs as documentary in museums, and their affect on how the images are viewed. An important concept here is the meaning of institutionalizing lynching photographs in museums and how the institutions play a role in shaping views, knowledge, and history. What is determined by these museums is how important these historical documents are. Although museums may exploit these images as Rosler might see it, this ultimately, much like new victimization, does not matter in their overall humanistic intentions. The use of lynching photographs shows the effects of their evolved objective to change the issues of race, victimhood, and their significance. The museums, by using the images as documentary, make a distinction between the new audience/victim relationship; it is no longer the murderers and murdered but the past conscience and today's conscience looking back at history. This distinction is necessary to overcome the horrors of the past.
Lynching photographs, although they were once passed around as postcards and kept in safekeeping as one cherishes a snapshot of friends and family, are now displayed to the public to show how frequent this disturbing activity once was. This change in function of lynching photographs has major implications. The photographers' original intent was to dehumanize those lynched in the images, glorify the act of lynching, and warn other potential victims of their fate, while saving the morbid images as a memento of the event. Through time, the photographs went from the homes of those that attended the lynching to the home of James Allen. His exhibiting them in public museums has changed the photographs meaning from one of a private collection that might have served only as voyeuristic images with no purpose but to decorate the home of a "picker", to photographs of historical importance displayed to educate and make the public aware of the extent to which lynching took place. The exhibition of the photographs allow them to become Rosler's definition of a "real documentary", which is the "financially unloved but growing body of documentary works committed to the exposure of specific abuses caused by people's jobs… by racism, sexism, and class oppression," rather than objects with "the aestheticization of meaning and the denial of content, the denial of the existence of the political dimension" (Rosler, 325; 320). Rosler states that this aestheticization is a consequence of their isolation in museums as the photographs obtain a high value and status. On the contrary, the latter definition resulted from the original intentions and functions of the photographs, not from their isolation in museums, which only give the photographs all that Rosler claims is denied in them. The lynching photographs were once "financially unloved", being passed around so frequently and in abundance as postcards. Recently, however, perhaps because of their antiquity, their prices have been rising, some as high as $750 (Moehringer, 18). There are two possible outcomes in this instance of extremity. Either the photograph is displayed to expose the abuses of history, or to be glorified with pride for the actions of the past. For such a high price, who would buy the photo-postcard other than to use it as a revolutionary tool or in reverence? Allen states, "In America everything is for sale, even a national shame" (Allen, 2). Allen has purchased and displayed this "national shame" in order to bring it to the surface.
The photographs' meaning as documentary is also defined by being placed in a museum atmosphere. If they were placed in a home, such as a lynching attendee's for example, there would be a greater denial of meaning, content, and political dimension, and reduce the photographs to souvenirs as they were once considered. The value of these photographs increase as they are pushed to be exhibited in other museums to expose a history and educate the public. This contradicts Rosler's description of documentary, showing that lynching photographs have attained a high value and status yet remains full of documentary meaning and content. It is a great change of meaning, a more meaningful one at that, compared to the photographs' original intent. Their meaning is to expose the horror of lynching, an abuse caused by all that Rosler has mentioned: a lower classes success through jobs, a dogmatic outlook on a different race and sex, and one group of people dominating another. Rosler's notion of art museums denying meaning, however, does not apply to the lynching photographs, but rather, museums define the meaning of the now documentary photography, and allow more meaning to be exposed. Neither the financial status of a photograph nor the photographer's original intention make a difference in what is considered documentary, but it is the purpose of the photograph at the time of its use that determines this.