"I Love That Queasy Feeling" - Kara Walker

The Daily Constitution 1878 (2011) © Kara Walker.

Kara Walker is having her first solo show in the UK. Read the reports/commentaries here and here and here at The Guardian. From the latter of the three I lifted the title to this post and we learn about the image above:

"Two years ago, Kara Walker came across a news story in an edition of the 19th-century Atlanta newspaper the Daily Constitution. The year was 1878; the piece described, in excruciating detail, the recent lynching of a black woman. The mob had tugged down the branch of a blackjack tree, tied the woman's neck to it, and then released the branch, flinging her body high into the air.

This terrible fragment of the past has made its way into a large graphite drawing ... Like much of her work, the drawing is both beautiful and disturbing: here, in grotesque, cartoonish monochrome, is the blackjack tree, the lynched woman spilling blood, her assailants laughing as she dies. As I stand and stare, Walker tells me why she was so drawn to the story. 'It's this completely absurd, extreme, violent situation that required so much perverse ingenuity.'"

Making Things Visible

On Thursday evening I attended a work-in-progress screening of a new film by a very talented local film-maker Carvin Eison entitled Shadows of the Lynching Tree. The title captures the subject. I anticipate that, when finished, this film will be provocative and extremely powerful. During the follow-up discussion, a set of themes occurred to me. The first was how long the shadows actually are. As I've noted here before, many of those commenting in print on the photographs that initially broke the ways U.S. military personnel were torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib regularly draw analogies to lynching photographs. The focus in each instance was on those perpetrating the crimes instead of on their victims.

This, in turn, brought to mind a second theme (on which I've posted here and here) revolving around the difficulty of depicting power and powerlessness. The difficulty, in particular, is how one might mitigate the risk of exploiting victims or sensationalizing violence and suffering while still capturing the evils of, say, torture or terror or genocide. This brought to mind the work of Ken Gonzales Day who - as I noted here - has used some photoshop-like-technique to erase the victims out of lynching photographs, leaving behind only the perpetrators. Here for example is a detail from one of these altered photographs; it was initially taken at the lynching of John Holmes at St. James Park in San Jose, CA in 1933.

Detail St. James Park (2006) © Ken Gonzales Day

We no longer witness Holmes's body dangling from the tree. As a result we are able to see more clearly the spectators and perpetrators. Arguably, we can discern even more. In a perceptive short review for The New York Times of a 2006 exhibition of Gonzales Day's work, Holland Cotter wrote:

"In each of these pictures, though, the artist has erased the body of the victim, leaving everything else intact. The tree or telegraph post used for the hanging is there; so is the crowd of witnesses and executioners, posing for the camera or staring up at what is now empty space.

As the artist Kerry James Marshall demonstrated in paintings using lynching photographs and a comparable mode of selective erasure, the effect is very different from looking at the horrific unaltered pictures, where the victims continue to be exposed and shamed as objects of casual spectatorship, exactly as their killers intended. Mr. Gonzales-Day's work throws the emphasis on the spectators themselves and makes hard lines between then and now, them and us, difficult to draw."

Cotter here drew my attention to Marshall, with whose work I am unfamiliar. The relevant work seems to be this triptych:

Heirlooms and Accessories (2002) © Kerry James Marshall

Although in this reproduction you cannot quite make out the suppressed background, Marshall leaves a spectral impression of the original photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion Indiana. Each of the women whose face is encapsulated in a locket witnessed the event.

The way that Marshal lays the necklaces clearly suggests that the spectators lives, and those too, of their descendants, are tethered to this violent scene. With that gesture, he enables us to ponder things that might otherwise be occluded by horror - things like complicity and, thereby, inheritance and continuity. Like Gonzales Day he is using photography to provoke us into seeing that the subject of the images might just as well be victimizers as victims.

Local Event: Work-In-Progress Screeing ~ Shadows of the Lynching Tree

EVENT: Filmmaker Carvin Eison will screen his work-in-progress, Shadows of the Lynching Tree.
TIME, DATE, LOCATION: University of Rochester, Morey Hall 321 on Thursday, October 16th, 5:00 pm
ADMISSION: Free and open to the public. A reception will follow the screening.

Carvin Eison, director of the Emmy-nominated film, July '64, which was broadcast nationally on PBS will be screening his current work in progress. Shadows of the Lynching Tree explores the history of lynching in the United States and reveals an underlying ideology still alive at some levels of American culture. This event is co-sponsored by the Film and Media Studies Program, the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies, the Department of History and the Department of English.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact Cricket Fegan, Film & Media Studies, tel: (585) 275-5757.

Photography and Drawing

Paul Cadmus, To The Lynching, 1935. (Graphite and
watercolor on paper, Whitney Museum of American Art)

Among the persistent themes in photography criticism is that photographs too often aestheticize suffering. Two things bother me about this theme.

First, photographs don't do anything. People - photographers, editors, curators, protesters, politicians, propagandists, advertisers, etc. - do things with photographs. In this instance it is important to re-frame the tacit question ~ What is objectionable or commendable about the way a given photographer (or anyone else) uses beauty in depicting this or that instance of pain or suffering? Why?

Second, why is the use of beauty problematic in photography when it seems less so (or at least is less frequently attacked) in other art forms? Imagine a photograph of a white mob tormenting and preparing to lynch a young black man that was as stylized as Cadmus's drawing.

Photographs as "Junk"

I never go to yard sales. But according to this story in The New York Times it sometimes pays to do so. Unfortunately, most times you don't find a cache of invaluable prints and letters. Instead you find yard sale junk. And, of course, it is simply karma that has this story run the way it does.

On the other hand, it is interesting to think about this episode as part of the circulation of photographic images, one possible stage of their natural history as it were. Remember that most of the lynching photographs that make up the Without Sanctuary exhibition also ended up in similar circumstances. James Allen simply began to buy them up. Good thing that he frequents various sorts of roadside sales, or knows lots of people who do.

Lynching Photographs

This slender volume - Dora Apel & Shawn Michelle Smith. Lynching Photographs. University of California Press, 2007. - is the second installment of a promising new series called "Defining Moments in American Photography." I have not seen the other volumes, which focus more narrowly on particular photographers (Alexander Gardner and Weegee). But Apel and Smith set an admirably high standard, even as they broaden focus onto the place of an especially gruesome "genre" of American photography - photographs of lynching, mostly of African-American men by mobs of Whites in the period from roughly 1880 through 1930. In part the authors (each of whom contributes an extended essay) take as their point of departure the kinds of images of collected in the exhibition Without Sanctuary. The volume itself focuses directly and narrowly on the subject announced in the title. That is as it should be. However, in their discussions of the uses and impact of lynching photographs in particular, the authors pose at least two crucially important, significantly broader, theoretical questions. First, how is photographic meaning grounded in and transformed by the divergent purposes for which different agents use images? I have raised this issue in several posts on lynching photographs here before [1] [2] [3]. Second, what sorts of response might or should photographs of such cruelly degrading and dehumanizing practices elicit? This is a topic that frequently evinces a rather despairing reponse from critics who note that photographs alone seem to have little political efficacy. But, as Dora Apel makes esepcially clear lynching photographs directly influenced political movements, first against lynching itself and subsequently in the more general struggle for Civil Rights. That is a refreshing and hopeful insight.

Uses of Photography - "Exile of the Imaginary"

Well, here is a question. I came acrosss an advert for a current exhibition called "Exile of the Imaginary: Politics Aesthetics, Love" among the adverts in the most recent issue of ArtForum
(March 2007). I knew I'd seen the image in the poster someplace before. Sure enough it is a detail from a photograph taken at the lynching of John Holmes at St. James Park in San Jose, CA in 1933. I had seen related images (plates 80-84) in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America about which I've posted before. In that post and another I raised the issue of "meaning" and "use" in photography.

This poster raises, I think, some unsettling issues about the uses of photography. One of the artists included in the exhibition is Ken Gonzales-Day who last fall had an exhibition entitled "Lynching in the American West, 1850-1935" at CUE Art Foundation in NYC. (The exhibition was curated by Bruce Yonemoto and was accompanied by an essay composed by Juli Carson. Yonemoto is among the artists included in the "Exile" exhbition which is curated by Carson. Small world.) In any case, Gonzales-Day has undertaken to "erase" lynching as in this image:

According to the Artist: "More than simply retracing the forgotten lines of history, the Erased Lynching series directs our gaze to invisibility itself. Gleaned from the archive, regional museums, and eBay; these photographic images of Western lynchings were altered. The bodies of the condemned and the ropes are removed but the lynch mob, if present, remains fully visible, jeering, laughing, or pulling at the air in a deadly pantomime. As such, this series strives to make the invisible -visible." In this altered image the body of John Holmes no long swings from the tree above the assembled crowd (even though in the publicity still for the exhibition one can still make out the rope wrapped around the tree trunk).

Now, this strikes me as an astoundingly creative enterprise. I do not mean to criticize Gonzales-Day; in fact, I want to track down more of his work.* My worry, rather, is about the poster and the other publicity for the "Exile" show. As you can see, the poster reproduces a detail from the left side of this image (which, as the following image shows, Gonzales-Day reproduces as a large - 120 X 280 inch - mural). I am extremely uneasy about using this brightly colored slice of a retouched photograph of a lynching as a publicity poster that in no way acknowledges the original provenance of the image. ArtForum reproduces the larger black and white image I've lifted here in the same fuscia color as the bottom part of a full page advert that is itself embedded in a 100+ page expanse of other advertisements. (See page 227.) I cannot quite put my finger on it, but something seems amiss here.

As I wrote in my earlier posts, I think James Allen has done an immense service by pushing us to confront the evidence of systematic racial violence in the U.S.. Likewise, Gonzales-Day, by highlighting both the quite large number of lynchings in the Western states and the fact that Latinos constituted a disproportionate number of the victims of those acts of violence, has undertaken a much needed task. But images do not speak for themselves. And the publicity advertisements for the "Exile" show seem to me to suffer precisely because they re-embed a horrific event in speechless silence.
__________

*Gonzales-Day has published a book Lynching in the American West, 1850-1935 with Duke University Press (2006) in which he recounts his inquiry into the subject.

Meaning and Use in Photography, II

As a follow-up to the last post here is a comment from John Dewey:

"The heart of language is not "expression" of something antecedent, much less expression of antecedent thought. It is communication; the establishment of cooperation in an actiivity in which there are partners, and in which the activity of each is modified and regulated by partnership. To fail to understand is to fail to come to an agreement in action; to misunderstand is to set up action at cross purposes. ... Meaning is not indeed a psychic existence; it is primarily a property of behavior,and secondarily a property of objects. ... Primarily meaning is intent and intent is not personal in a private and exclusive sense."- Experience & Nature (179-80)

So this would be a reminder to those who might want to follow Sontag and take a too narrow view of intention or to imagine that "use" is somehow governed entirely by convention. Dewey warns against the first tendency. And everything we know about the pragmatics of language suggests that conventions hardly determine use; any convention can be exploited in unforeseen ways. The late philosopher Donald Davidson went so far as to suggest that the ubiquitous opportunities for generating neologisms (unanticipated, unconventional usages) calls into question the very idea that language is conventional. And while sometimes such exploitation is accidental, sometimes it must be intentional and creative - hence the possibility of art.

So, a topic for discussion: what is the "meaning" of the lynching photographs collected in Without Sanctuary? Those who initially took them - or who posed for them or who purchased them from those who initially took them - had some set of uses in mind. But what of James Allen, the man who has collected these images and created the exhibition? What sort of communication is involved in those very different instances?

Revisiting "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America"

This evening I attended a lecture on campus here by James Allen, the man behind the recent, controversial exhibition of photographs of the lynching of blacks in the United States. You can find the web page for the exhibition here: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Also speaking at the event was Natasha Barnes, Professor of English and of African -American Studies at the University of Illinois -Chicago. In their talks they raised several points that bear repeating.

First, photography was integral to these lynchings (which occurred from the 1870's through the 1960s). It was directly implicated in the violence, a component of the events rather than incidental to them. It was not generally part of a journalistic enterprise. People made images of the torture and killing for profit. And people bought the images, often as postcards to send to relatives and friends. So photography did not just capture the ritualized violence involved, it was part of that ritualized violence.

Second, during the questions one student asked if there was any connection between the events portrayed in the pictures and events here in Rochester. He seemed blissfully unaware that the technology that allowed the images to be made was intimately linked to Rochester. As James Allen made clear in his remarks, car headlights were used to illuminate the scenes for photographers and, eventually, many particpants could capture the memory of lynching with Kodak brownies. An interesting question - if the Kodak slogan "You press the button, We do the rest!" is accurate, how many Kodak employees spent time developing amatuer photographs of lynching? Or how many of the professional photographers who attended the lynchings used Kodak products in their portable dark rooms?

Finally, Allen tried very hard to resist the urge to draw direct links beween the lynching photographs he has discovered and contemporary politics. But, in part, the photographs in his collection are powerful because they help us think not only about the violence they immediately partake in, but to think beyond that to more recent forms of systematic officially sanctioned violence.

Here, for instance, is Susan Sontag:

"So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the photographs reveal to have happened to ''suspects'' in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken -- with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. . . . If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree.
The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib. The lynching pictures were in the nature of photographs as trophies -- taken by a photographer in order to be collected, stored in albums, displayed. The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shift in the use made of pictures -- less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated." ("Regarding the Torture of Others," NY Times Magazine, 23 May 2004, pages 26-7).

And here is Luc Sante:

"The pictures from Abu Ghraib are trophy shots. The American soldiers included in them look exactly as if they were standing next to a gutted buck or a 10-foot marlin. That incongruity is not the least striking aspect of the pictures. The first shot I saw, of Specialist Charles A. Graner and Pfc. Lynndie R. England flashing thumbs up behind a pile of their naked victims, was so jarring that for a few seconds I took it for a montage. When I registered what I was seeing, I was reminded of something. There was something familiar about that jaunty insouciance, that unabashed triumph at having inflicted misery upon other humans. And then I remembered: the last time I had seen that conjunction of elements was in photographs of lynchings. In photographs that were taken and often printed as postcards in the American heartland in the first four decades of the 20th century, black men are shown hanging from trees or light fixtures or maybe being burned alive, while below them white people are laughing and pointing for the benefit of the camera. There are some pictures of whites being lynched, too, but these tend not to feature the holiday crowd. Often the spectators at lynchings of African-Americans are so effusive in their mugging that they all seem to be vying for credit. Before seeing such pictures you might expect the faces in them to express some kind of collective rage; instead the mood is giddy, often verging on hysterical, with a distinct sexual undercurrent. Like the lynching crowds, the Americans at Abu Ghraib felt free to parade their triumph and glee not because they were psychopaths but because the thought of censure probably never crossed their minds. In both cases a contagious collective frenzy perhaps overruled the scruples of some people otherwise known for their gentleness and sympathy -- but isn't the abandonment of such scruples possible only if the victims are considered less than human? After all, it is one thing for a boxer to lift his hands over his head in triumph beside the fallen body of his rival, quite another to strike a comparable pose next to the bodies of strangers you have arranged in quasi-pornographic tableaus. The Americans in the photographs are not enacting hatred; hatred can coexist with respect, however strained. What they display, instead, is contempt: their victims are merely objects." (Tourists and Torturers," NY Times, 11 May 2004, page A23)

Allen is using the images he has collected to encourage us to think more systematially about cruelty and torture and hatred and dehumanization. For putting these images together and challenging us to face them and the violence they embody we are deeply his debt.