In the American Studies aisle of the University Press Bookstore I
have premonitions of unnatural fires. (My heart leapt into my throat.) A
thick, black monograph weighted with so much blood and history, the book
is propped up in an alcove on prominent display. Called Without
Sanctuary, it is a photographic record of lynching.
These professional and amateur photographs were often made into
postcards and sold as souvenirs to the crowds in attendance. I imagine
these postcards being sent to the friends and relatives of the white
people pictured here, some of them staring into the camera and smiling
as a mutilated black man or woman swings above their heads. There are
children too, brought to the lynching by a schoolteacher, let out of
class early to learn a lesson. What is it that allows them to watch a
man tortured and killed within (literal) stone's throw but with such
psychic distance that they might find this souvenir, what--?
Amusing?
I close my eyes and see these postcards being passed from hand to
hand, like trading cards, or threats.
The Tuskegee Institute records the reported lynching
of 4,742 blacks between 1882 and 1968, no doubt a small percentage of
the actual murders systematically committed. Lynching scholars testify
that these scenes were repeated thousands of times -- often before the
entire citizenry of a given town. These "lynching bees" or "Negro barbecues"
functioned as a space to produce a sense of community, like
church revivals or carnivals. They must have included elements from both --
fervent affirmations of a higher order, a shared scared feeling (of
being both saved and superior), and vendors pitching lemonade, maybe.
Residents of nearby hamlets would bring picnic baskets, gossip with
neighbors over harvests, weddings and births as black bodies swing
overhead.
In a mixed-media piece called Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock, black photographer
Pat Ward Williams frames a photograph of a lynched black man through a
window pane, locked to a tree with his arms pulled behind him, wrenched
out of sockets, tendon from bone. The photograph is broken up into
parts: the muscles stretched thin across ribcage, the chain cutting so
deep into flesh it disappears into shadow and blood, the wrists pulled
achingly toward a unseen point outside the film exposure.
Scrawled in a shaky hand around the
wooden frame (frantic white chalk skittering across the blackboard, as
anxious as graffiti): "Can you be BLACK and look at this? Life
magazine published this picture. Could Hitler show pictures of the
Holocaust to keep JEWS in line? Who took this picture? Couldn't he just
as easily let the man go? Did he take his camera home and then come back
with a blowtorch? ... How can this photograph exist? WHO took this
picture? Oh, god. Life answers -- page 141 -- no credit. Somebody do
something."
In a series of anguished questions, moving nervously from plea to
demand, Williams implicates not only the act of lynching but also the
act of photographing the violence. "No credit" -- why? Did the
photographer recognize his complicity? Was he ashamed? Did he leave the
man to the business of dying, still chained to a tree, furtive in his
cowardice? Did he self-consciously stage his anonymity to focus
attention on the horror? Or was he a participant who sought to inspire
terror in the pages of a national magazine? A former vendor of lynching
postcards, his business suffering with the postal service ban on his
type of goods, did he think he might be teaching a lesson?
What is the difference between watching and witnessing?
In an essay written for Without Sanctuary, Hilton Als is
openly bitter, skeptical of the humanitarian/historical "function"
expressed by editor and publisher in reprinting these photographs and
postcards. He identifies instead a kind of voyeurism: "In writing this,
I have become another cliché, another colored person writing about a
nigger's life. So doing, I'm feeding, somewhat, into what the essayist
George W.S. Trow called 'white euphoria,' which is defined by white
people exercising their largesse in my face as they say, Tell me about
yourself, meaning, Tell me how you've suffered. Isn't that what you
people do? Suffer nobly, poetically sometimes even? Doesn't suffering
define you?"
To ask, "Can you look at this?" is a much different question than
"Can you be BLACK and look at this?" What it means for me to be looking
at these is yet another question with another dynamic -- a refugee with
no past in this blood and fire and death, blood and fire
and death is instrumental to why I am here (in America) in the first
place. This other story is not the same but it is related to the question
of photography and accountability, power and powerlessness and
the ideological function of vision -- it is the pivotal difference between
"can you look" and how you look. That is, when it is not
photographs of lynched black men and women it is photographs of napalmed
Vietnamese girls that become the occasion for, "So, tell me how you've
suffered. Isn't that what you people do?"
::
A Korean American feminist contacts a friend of mine, an
administrative assistant in the Asian American studies program they both
work for in New York City. This woman, an adjunct professor, has been
looking at photographs of bombings. She notes in her e-mail message that
in viewing images of napalmed villages in Viet Nam, many of the victims
were not wearing pants. She is thinking in particular of the
black-and-white photograph of a naked young girl screaming in terror as
napalm flays muscle and meaning. She wants to know if this is some sort
of Vietnamese tradition, not wearing pants. Thuy, who is Vietnamese,
can't manage to word a polite reply.
We're speaking in urgent whispers because we are at a professional
academic conference, there to discuss the production of knowledge or its
lack, among other things. We lean in toward each other, heads close.
Thuy wrings her hands and rolls her eyes. "How could she begin to think
that an entire country doesn't wear pants? Why does she even think
that's a legitimate question?"
At the same conference, I argue in my paper on a Viet Nam panel with
white academics that photographs of suffering are never "innocent." That
is, I don't think a photo of a burning girl can "cure" historical
amnesia, that the meanings attached to an imagined fluttering of thin
arms, a face contorted are necessarily coherent or obvious. My
moderator, a mild-manner traditional historian, insists in his following
commentary that such images are still necessary for rousing the masses.
These images, he says, can be used for humanitarian purposes.
But the fact that someone can look at a photograph of a burning girl
and ask questions, not about the war but about her nakedness, would seem
to contradict him. Isn't this evidence enough that there is no inherent
"truth" to be apprehended in a photograph? A "humanitarian" message is
hardly transparent. Does the image necessarily call upon us (as viewers)
to recognize the instrumentality of the (conditions of) haunting? Having
become the sign by which we realized the truism war is a terrible
event, does the still image of a naked young girl screaming in
terror as napalm flays muscle and meaning always invite a
reckoning with the phantoms of modernity's violence?
Browsing the zine rack at the record store I picked up a poorly-made
zine, called something about "no power" and "little people." The cover
is a xerox reproduction of that photograph of the napalmed girl. Inside
are more images of Vietnamese people in various states of distress to
death, coupled with short paragraphs vaguely expressing the author's own
dissatisfactions, his internal doubt. I can't find anything that might
explain why these photographs, why that war.
I hate it, it's disturbing and gut-wrenching -- what is the process by
which four million deaths become the occasion for his speech?
Even the well-meaning (for what little it is often worth)
aestheticize violence for their own purposes. In The Rhetoric of
Empire, David Sparr asks, "What really is the role of journalistic
representation in making people aware of the suffering of others? There
is clearly a sense in which the media can declare an emergency, can make
an appeal on behalf of refugees or victims of famine, and elicit a
practical response. Yet the very artfulness of this appeal, the images
and techniques on which it relies, allows for a certain
nonidentification on the part of the audience, and perhaps even allows
that audience to take some satisfaction in the image of suffering as
it belongs to the other."
Photojournalists, armed with cameras and good intentions, assume
that well-framed photographs of suffering will trigger a moral response,
an outrage among "folks back home." But what we get are only
affirmations of what we (think we) already know -- that the Third World is
mysteriously gripped by violence, trauma, and wars that make no sense
(to us in the "civilized" First World). It's likely that it never
occurred to Nick Ut, the Pulitzer-Prize winning war photographer, that
anyone looking at a photograph of a young Vietnamese girl -- her flesh
burning away-- would ever think to ask such a question, but they have
and will again.
What is it that allows for that kind of distance?
Linda Le is a contemporary French Vietnamese author, and in her first
translated novel called Slander, I remember what it means to be
iconic by way of biting prose. "Remember when your people began to leave
the Country. The fugitives piled by the hundreds into little boats as
fragile as giant matchboxes. They crossed the ocean on those boats. Back
here, the people rubbed their hands together. They had found the ideal
victims, and they called them freedom fighters. Why, the frivolous
people were just about ready to run to their yachts and go rescue the
victims. They piled into boats in their turn, overloaded with cameras
and photographic equipment, fighting to get the first shots of these
victims with such sweet, sad eyes. Then styles changed. Other
frivolous people had tracked down new victims...."
Once again, I have to ask the question. Does the image necessarily
call upon us as viewers to recognize the instrumentality of the
(conditions of) haunting? Having become the sign by which we realized
the truism racism is a tragic thing, does the still image of a
naked black man screaming as fire flays muscle and meaning always
invite a reckoning with the phantoms of modernity's violence?
Dwayne and I have been corresponding between my bouts of exam
preparation and teaching and his own series of workshops and research.
Punk rocker and the Literacy Through Photography project coordinator at
the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, he responds at
length to a vague inquiry:
"Without Sanctuary, to my mind, traverses two uneven terrains. One
is the blood-soaked earth, the invisible land bridge from Africa to the
New World, mapped by two hands, one black, one white. The other is
cratered and shell-shocked, a mud smear across the globe of countless
historical atrocities. The publisher of this book is the same house that
published The Killing Fields, portrait photographs of victims
from S-21 (Tuol Sleng), taken by the Khmer Rouge as self-documentation
at their notorious torture and execution center. The same slick design,
the refined and understated (tasteful) packaging of death. When I first
encountered The Killing Fields I was shocked into silent weeping, there in the consummately
unemotional aisles of Harvard's bookstore.
"I wanted to strip every book from the tidy shelf, to make a tearful
spectacle of our ready consumption. Instead I choked on my own unspoken
grief and made way for a thick white man in a heavy worsted trenchcoat
as he groped in the obscure darkness of the lower shelves.
"Recently a young, up-and-coming documentary photographer stayed at my
house as a guest of my roommate. They had collaborated in Malawi and
Rwanda, doing an extensive written and visual piece on families headed
by children after the genocidal killings in 1994 had claimed their
parents and adult relatives. This clean-cut, energetic white man, a
recent graduate of Duke University, was well-favored by his professors
and now too by the photography elite in New York City where he lives. He
had come to North Carolina to present at a retreat for other recent
graduates from various universities who were about to begin documentary
work with NGOs around the world. In recounting to me his discussion on
ethics he said, 'It's documentary photography. You have to take risks
and get in people's faces. If you don't like it, don't do it.'
"Within his language was his underlying subscription to the Nation;
the white, dominant culture, which he believes should be altered, not
resisted, overthrown, set alight and burned down. In the long history of
reformers there is a clear reductive aestheticization in liberals' use
of images of war and suffering, of documenting the silenced and their
silencing. This photographer and his colleagues, in denying this
critique, would likely claim that this work by motive shifts it to a
different plane. Further, the need to influence policy asserts an
ironclad imperative. Not only the policy of our own government, but also
of international organizations like the U.N. to help secure funding from
corporate philanthropies for Third World nations undergoing devastation.
They are guilty of a pragmatic reduction. Of collecting horror and loss
and then condensing these into choice images to nudge the
White national narrative in a different direction, rather than
require the gaze be broken and the pencil and the camera be handed over
to the subject. They staunchly defend their right to the
mechanisms of recording, of telling. There is a deep unwillingness to
forfeit. Or blink.
"This book asks many questions of us and many in turn need to be
leveled at it. About how the pictures extend understanding and
complicity, how they challenge or illuminate present seepage of age-old
prejudice and bigoted violence. We are forced to ask who will own these
images and who will benefit (culturally and fiscally) from the sale of
the book? Publishing is fundamentally a business and as such hinges on
profit. And in America, the most profit seems to be made on the
spectacle of others' misery. For myself, and this is the most essential
and most tenuous possibility of the book, I want to be always be moved
to carry myself to the position of one who witnesses rather than simply
watches."
::
Here something becomes
terribly, terrifyingly clear-- that vision is not a transparent or a
passive operation, that something intervenes between retina and image,
something like ideology. The meanings of photographs aren't fixed or
stable -- such images (and the events depicted) as the lynching
postcards had been naturalized within the logic of Jim Crow resentment,
vengeance, racial terror and oppression. The use value of such
photographs for humanitarian purposes needs to evaluated, then, for the
structures of power (inherent in the act of looking) that it reproduces
-- these are images that still carry information about a group of
powerless people to another group addressed as socially powerful. The
gap between intent and function can't always be breached, and the
incommensurability of such photographs seems to always exceed a
statement of purpose or historical introduction or caption.
Against the positivism of the human rights discourse that often
accompanies these photographs of lynching, racial terror, poverty or
third world suffering, feminist artist Martha Rosler suggests that
documentary photography "is [actually more] like horror movies, putting
a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. One
can handle imagery by leaving it behind. It is them, not
us."
This book -- weighted by expense (it is beautifully produced)
and history (it is horrifyingly produced) -- hardly offers an adequate
accounting of the violence.
Jacques Derrida once suggested that haunting belongs to the structure
of every hegemony. These photographs and postcards are not just material
evidence of historical and social effects (like bodies or their bones),
but a conjuring trick in and of themselves. They invoke the ghosts of
lynched men and women, lynching men and women, and the still-breathing
specter of racism at the heart of American ontology.
That is, what is simply more violence when you are already living with
too much? It does not end the way we might have thought it had --
there is still James Byrd, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, Patrick
Dorismond, never mind those who are unnamed in the popular historical
record. There are some pasts that are not left behind, or as Als
repeats, "I resent these pictures for making me feel anything at
all."
::
Thank you to both Dwayne Dixon and Rosey Truong. I had to trim Dwayne's
response to keep this column at an acceptable length. Dwayne is an
amazing and dedicated ally and if you. re interested in speaking to
him, you can always reach him at: dedixon@acpubs.duke.edu or at The
Center for Documentary Studies, 1317 W. Pettigrew St., Durham, NC 27705.
Toni Morrison's Beloved is a fictionalized
tale of the haunting effects of slavery; that both history and haunting
are material and embodied is made heartrendingly clear.
Write to me if you want, and give me a break from studying for my
oral exams. Mimi Nguyen, POB 11906, Berkeley, CA 94712-2906,
slander13@mindspring.com.