The Aestheticization of Politics: The Case of Lynching Photographs

[Content note: this article contains graphic images of lynching.]

The ur-image has long since decayed.

—Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” 1927[1]

For a work that is pivotal to scholarship on Jim Crow racial violence, the phrase “Jim Crow” is conspicuously absent in Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. Instead, she calls the epoch “nineteenth-century civilization,” a deceptively toothless choice of words until one begins to understand its full import.[2] Situating postbellum lynchings within the larger historical context of the transatlantic nineteenth century is a crucial heuristic of Wells’s work. While Jim Crow’s geographical locale was the American South, Wells contends that its apparatuses and underlying structures were more expansive and laying bare this expansiveness is the core contribution of her project. This is especially true of her theorization of the Black body in pain wherein examining the complex historicity and materiality of the site of lynching is key to understanding the social and economic deployment of the spectacle of Black suffering. Photography, one of the key instruments through which lynchings were both effected and memorialized, is not merely treated as a medium of representation in Wells’s work but also as one of the material cornerstones of “nineteenth-century civilization.” For Wells, the punitive pain inflicted on the lynched Black body is linked to the (lynching) photograph’s ability to mechanically stun its subject within a decontextualized moment frozen in time. Besides photographs, her works also chronicle the use of other seemingly innocuous artifacts of industrial modernity in the execution of lynchings: telegrams to track the whereabouts of victims; railway and telegraph poles, which became modern-day scaffolds; and financial institutions, which were often planning centers for lynchings. Unearthing the animacies of the material world is precisely the method that Wells chooses to unearth the relationship between the punished Black subject and the body politic. She reads both the lynched body and its photographic representation as embodiments of the process Walter Benjamin describes as “the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” that is, the ritualistic production of spectacular cultural artifacts which conjure notions of social cohesion and the illusion of expressive freedom for the masses.[3]

Wells’s works The Red Record and Southern Horrors align with larger nineteenth-century discourses on photography’s social life in numerous ways. From Karl Marx likening ideology to an “upside-down” image “as in a camera obscura” and reading photography as one of the five major industries of the era, to Cesare Lombroso’s employment of photography to produce proto-criminological theory, the photograph was the subject of both empirical and conceptual debates.[4] Lombroso’s foundational work The Criminal Man (1880) popularized the notion that inherent criminality can be assessed through the physical attributes of the subject such as the shape of the skull, body temperature, racial identity, and sexuality. He employed early photographic technology to map out “categories” of criminals, and this in turn played a crucial role in catalyzing the use of photography in law enforcement for the purposes of profiling and maintaining incriminating records of criminalized ethnic groups.[5] Wells’s own understanding of the photograph is mindful both of the role that lynchings played in sustaining labor regimes in the post-Reconstruction era and of the particular ways in which photographs of the lynched Black body served as the self-prophesying evidence of Black criminality. The Red Record is divided into subsections which specify the circumstances of various instances of mob violence while also commenting on the specific ways in which the Black body was rendered criminal and subsequently disposable within the postbellum racial economy. Among these, she lists self-defense, alleged impoliteness to white people in public spaces, pursuit of legal redressal, petty theft and minor altercations as punishable crimes under Southern Lynch Law, besides more serious (and usually trumped up) allegations of physical and sexual violence. The ubiquity of these “crimes” shows the existential and legal intertwining of racial Blackness and criminality within the postbellum carceral imaginary. The almost bureaucratic precision of Wells’s work stems from the fact that besides appealing to antiracist sentiments, she was also attempting to create records for acts of racial violence which would otherwise have been erased from official histories.

In contemporary scholarship, Amy Louis Wood, Koritha Mitchell, Jacqueline Goldsby, and Trudier Harris, among others, have built on Wells’s work to show that lynching photography was used not nearly as often for anti-lynching journalism as it was for strengthening the civic bonds of the white citizenry. I extend this scholarly conversation by examining not only the material history of the lynching photograph but also the epistemological disciplinary power that inheres in photography itself. The punitive undertone in the camera’s ability to capture its subjects is by no means a linguistic happenstance but instead indicative of the literal and figurative ways in which photography was deployed for both carceral and extrajudicial violence.[6] Given the history of the circulation of print material on lynchings, Wells’s journalistic work was fraught with multiple complexities. Not only did she have to perform the task of bearing witness to and reporting on a phenomenon which potentially endangered her, but she also needed to create a tradition of journalistic work on lynching that would radically depart from and repudiate the existing use of lynching photographs which reified rather than condemning racial violence. In other words, Wells needed to “politicize art” to counter the “aestheticization of politics” (Benjamin, The Work of Art, 66). Supplementing photographs with rigorous political commentary and describing in detail the incidents which led up to them in her journalism became a crucial way of achieving just this. Furthermore, in circulating these images outside of the narrow, provincial milieu of the Jim Crow South, she attempted to divest them of their jingoistic contexts as terroristic memorabilia.

A particularly fitting instance of Wells’s materialist reading of the lynching photograph lies in a section of The Red Record documenting the lynching of C.J. Miller at Bardwell, Kentucky on July 7, 1893. Miller was accused of murdering two young girls in Bardwell, despite the physical description of the accused provided by the sole eyewitness being entirely different from Miller’s appearance. To prove himself innocent Miller delivered a brief speech to the crowd gathered outside the precinct to lynch him. The content of this speech is crucial for mapping the structural underpinnings of the ensuing violence. He says:

My name is C.J. Miller. I am from Springfield, Ill.; my wife lives at 716 N. 2d Street. I am here among you today, looked upon as one of the most brutal men before the people. I stand here surrounded by men who are excited, men who are not willing to let the law take its course, and as far as the crime is concerned, I have committed no crime, and certainly no crime gross enough to deprive me of my life and liberty to walk upon the green earth. (Wells, The Red Record)

What is noteworthy here is that immediately after stating his name, Miller mentioned his marital status and his address. It is only after this that he made a plea for mercy and claimed his innocence. The legitimacy granted to the punished by normative markers of marriage and private property are here more important than appeals to law or morality. A telegram was sent to the chief of police in Springfield, Illinois to ascertain the veracity of Miller’s claims, and the chief first denied and then later confirmed the information, but the confirmation came too late to protect him from the wrath of the lynch mob. The scene of violence that followed is overdetermined by technologies of industrial modernity: the damning telegram, numerous photographs of Miller’s lynched body, and a telegraph pole from which he was hung. In the final moments, the prisoner’s request for a routine hanging was denied as “[s]omeone declared the rope was a ‘white man’s death,’ and a log-chain, nearly a hundred feet in length, weighing over one hundred pounds, was placed round Miller’s neck and body, and he was led and dragged through the streets of the village in that condition followed by thousands of people” (The Red Record). Pain inflicted on the lynching victim was assuredly far from functional; it was deeply ceremonial and intimately connected to questions of political economy. Used for hauling automobiles and industrial equipment, the log chain when wrapped around the newly emancipated Black body is a richly layered symbolic instrument of torture. It conjures the image of enslavement and the Black body in chains, while simultaneously becoming a metaphor for the enslaved worker becoming a wage laborer. If emancipation’s critical flaw was to think of labor as a metric of freedom, the torture inflicted on Miller comprehensively debunks the notion that the postbellum laboring Black body was even nominally free.

Painstakingly documenting the details of various acts of violence rather than confining her commentary to pathos, Wells urges her readers not to read these scenes as gratuitous but rather to see the punished Black body within the contours of political economy. Importantly, she theorizes the pain inflicted on the Black body not as a simple continuation of the disciplinary regime of chattel slavery, but rather as constitutive of the formerly enslaved person’s initiation into wage labor. Wells begins The Red Record by drawing attention to this crucial distinction, adding

While slaves were scourged mercilessly, and in countless cases inhumanly treated in other respects, still the white owner rarely permitted his anger to go so far as to take a life, which would entail upon him a loss of several hundred dollars. The slave was rarely killed, he was too valuable; it was easier and quite as effective, for discipline or revenge, to sell him ‘Down South.’ (The Red Record)

Through this reflection Wells undertakes a project aligned with Silvia Federici’s definition of primitive accumulation. Federici defines primitive accumulation as not only the expropriation of resources but also the “the construction of a new patriarchal order”; Wells’s reading of lynchings similarly reads them as the construction of a new racial order necessary for turning the enslaved worker into a wage worker in the postbellum South.[7] By doing this, she adds nuance to a racial binarism that has characterized scholarship on lynching photography. For instance, Amy Louise Wood, in her article “Lynching Photography and the Visual Reproduction of White Supremacy,” remarks:

Reports of lynchings in southern newspapers at the turn of the last century often showed a remarkable consistency. . . . These images of a powerful, yet controlled white citizenry were not uncommonly recorded over and against corresponding images of unruly and savage black men.[8]

Wells reminds us that in textual and visual representations of lynchings, the binary between the “controlled white citizenry” and “savage black men” mediated other unseen social relations. The lynch mob was typically represented as comprising lawless, working-class whites who had gone rogue, therefore using the ideology of race to conceal the underlying structures of class. Thus, the key to understanding the photograph as an ideological apparatus lies not just in analyzing what it shows, but the context it hides. Reflecting on photography’s sleights of hand, Bertolt Brecht remarks, “Photography is the possibility of a reproduction that masks the context . . . from the (carefully taken) photograph of a Ford factory no opinion about this factory can be deduced”[9] In Southern Horrors, Wells echoes this by chronicling the imminent threat of lynching that she faced for her anti-lynching journalism in the Memphis Free Speech:

[T]he leading citizens met in the Cotton Exchange Building the same evening, and threats of lynching were freely indulged, not by the lawless element upon which the deviltry of the South is usually saddled—but by the leading businessmen, in their leading business center.[10]

Countering the violence of the lynching photograph for Wells was not confined to its content alone but extended to its form and attendant empirical truth claims. It was therefore important to question both the criminality of the accused and also an undifferentiated conception of the perpetrators. By distinguishing between the “lawless element” and “leading businessmen” she theorizes the position of the white working-class not as agents but as buffers in the racial terror of Jim Crow and underscores the role of print journalism in propagating this distorted perception. Relatedly, the locale is an important interpretive inroad here. Cotton Exchange Buildings were set up in the nineteenth century in response to the boom in the global cotton industry and were sites of both spot and futures trading. The Memphis Cotton Exchange was founded in 1874, functioned predominantly as a spot trading center, and actively sought to promote Memphis Cotton in markets in New York, Liverpool, and New Orleans. That Reconstruction-era lynchings were planned in a building which enshrined an industry historically premised on Black enslaved labor points to the critical role that lynchings played in the management of ostensibly free Black laboring bodies. Furthermore, through this exposé, Wells refutes the commonsensical notion of lynchings as “mob violence,” and shows her readers the methodical planning that they entailed and the well-thought-out economic and political interests they served. Lynching and its visual representation performed the multipronged function of giving the Southern white working-class “an expression while preserving property,” punished the Black laboring class for not readily participating in the industrial workforce, kept the working-classes fragmented along racial lines, and ultimately maintained both the social and economic status quo of the postbellum South (Benjamin, The Work of Art, 66–67).

Wells unpacks the economic embeddedness of lynchings further in her narration of the lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas. She mentions among other details, a specific form of torture that warrants unpacking. Smith, accused of the rape and murder of a four-year-old white girl, is described as “>a harmless, weak-minded fellow, not capable of doing any important work, but sufficiently able to do chores and odd jobs around the houses of the white people who cared to employ him” (Wells, The Red Record). The lynching is decided on in a “meeting of citizens” at the local courthouse, and before the commencement of the torture upon the scaffold, Smith “was placed upon a carnival float in mockery of a king upon his throne, and followed by an immense crowd, was escorted through the city so that all might see the most inhuman monster known in current history” (The Red Record).[11] This pageantry is not merely a pointless prequel to Smith’s killing, but rather a demonstration of the predicament of a nonproductive proletarian body. Furthermore, the caricaturized sovereignty evident in the captive being put on a throne encapsulates the violent contradiction inherent in the project of emancipation itself: the granting of voting rights without meaningful economic redistribution. Wells reflects on this in her work, observing:

But it was a bootless strife for colored people. The government which had made the Negro a citizen found itself unable to protect him. It gave him the right to vote but denied him the protection which should have maintained that right. Scourged from his home; hunted through the swamps; hung by midnight raiders, and openly murdered in the light of day, the Negro clung to his right of franchise with a heroism which would have wrung admiration from the hearts of savages. He believed that in that small white ballot there was a subtle something which stood for manhood as well as citizenship, and thousands of brave Black men went to their graves, exemplifying the one by dying for the other. (The Red Record)

Lynchings and the material paraphernalia produced for and through them thus symptomize the violence of political independence without economic redistribution. The implications of this are damning, for Wells sees the lynched Black body embodying not the failure of emancipation but rather its inherent contradictions.

Central to a lynching’s protracted violence is the work of people Wells terms “relic hunters,” who “almost fought for a chance to cut off a piece of rope” and “remained until the ashes cooled to obtain such ghastly relics as the teeth, nails, and bits of charred skin of the immolated victim” (The Red Record). The memorabilia gathered at lynching sites were not limited to photographs taken of the event but extended to corporeal bits of the victim’s corpse. This necessitates expanding our conception of aesthetics when it comes to the lynched body where it is not merely the representation of the body in pain but the body itself which is a grotesque work of art. Thinking of the Black body in pain as an aesthetic category helps us assess not merely the entrenched morbidity within photography but also theorize the reciprocal relationship between desire and production that the lynched victim embodies. The desire to punish the noncompliant, raced body produces the visual technologies of the photograph and the photograph in turn intensifies this collective desire. Observing that for the photograph, “the ur-image has long since decayed,” Siegfried Kracauer conceptualizes photography’s death drive as follows:

A shudder runs through the beholder/viewer of old photographs. For they do not make visible the knowledge of the original but rather the spatial configuration of a moment; it is not the person who appears in his or her photograph, but the sum of what can be deducted from him or her. It annihilates the person by portraying him or her, and were person and portrayal to converge, the person would cease to exist. (“Photography,” 423, 431)

The physical sensation evoked in the word “shudder” warrants scrutiny, for the effect it describes is reminiscent of the military doctrine of blitzkrieg which incapacitates the opponent both physically and psychologically through unexpected and shocking tactics. Here again, we must attend to the ways in which the photograph does far more than simply portray pain; Kracauer’s sensory language underscores the photograph’s ability to also produce and instigate pain.

The lynched Black body as the decaying ur-text in the context of the lynching photograph complicates Kracauer’s formulation. The death of the subject is what invigorates the lynching photograph and in turn, the lynching photograph catalyzes more sites of racial violence. This complex relationship between the body, the photograph, and public memory is evidenced in Wells’s commentary on the lynching of Lee Walker in Clanton, Alabama. She reproduces not only the photograph taken during the event but also the following handwritten note scribbled at the back of the extant copy, which reads: “This S.O.B. was hung at Clanton Ala. Friday Aug 21st/91 for murdering a little boy in cold blood for 35¢ in cash. He is a good specimen of your ‘Black Christian hung by White Heathens’ [illegible] of the Committee” (The Red Record). Wells informs us that this photograph was reproduced in court in Walker’s stead before Judge A. W. Tourgee, of Mayville, New York, in a legal deliberation that happened after the event. The photograph then comes not only to portray the lynched body but also to become its proxy, possessing the legal personhood denied to its subject in order to substantiate a predetermined judgement regarding the subject’s purported criminality.  

Lynchings for Wells are thus neither an ahistorical continuation of the racial brutalities of slavery nor the tragic consequence of the waning Reconstruction era but rather a form of dialectical mediation between stages of racial capitalism. To this end, the lynching photograph is both the chronicle and tool of punishment against wayward proletarian subjects.