Photography and the practices of critical black memory

History and Theory

Volumn 48, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 112-129

  Raiford, Leigh ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

African Americans; Lynching; Memory; Photography

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950945217     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: 14682303     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00522.x     Document Type: Review

References (61)

1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph" (Atlantic Monthly, June 1859), http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/1859jun/holmes. htm (accessed September 16, 2009)
2. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O'Meally, "Introduction," History and Memory in African-American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 5
3. James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000). The exhibit opened at the Roth Horowitz Gallery in New York City on January 13, 2000 and was followed by shows at the New-York Historical Society, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Site in Atlanta, Georgia, and Jackson State University in Mississippi
4. See especially the work of Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)
5. Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line (Durham, NC: Durham University Press, 2004)
6. Dora Apel and Shawn Smith, Lynching Photographs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008)
7. Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women and the Mob (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004)
8. and Ashraf Rushdy, "The Exquisite Corpse," Transition 9, no. 3 (2000), 70-77
9. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 19
10. Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980)
11. and Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret
12. Text from the Without Sanctuary exhibition at the New York Historical Society, May 12, 2000
13. Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 196
14. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)
15. Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions (New York: Amistad, 2009)
16. Patricia A. Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)
17. and Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching
18. In addition to Goldsby, Apel, and Apel and Smith, see Margaret Rose Vendryes, "Hanging on Their Walls: An Art Commentary on Lynching, The Forgotten 1935 Art Exhibit" in Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century, ed. J. Jackson Fossett and J. A. Tucker (New York: New York University Press, 1997)
19. Witnessing Lynching: American Writers Respond, ed. Anne P. Rice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003)
20. Abdul JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright's Archeology of Death (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)
21. Phyllis Jackson, "Re-Living Memories: Picturing Death," IJELE: Art EJournal of the African World 5 (2002)
22. Leigh Raiford, "The Consumption of Lynching Images" in Only Skin Deep, ed. C. Fusco and B. Wallis (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 267-273
23. and David Margolick, Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001)
24. Ida B. Wells, "A Red Record" [1895], in Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997)
25. Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984)
26. Hal Foster, "Preface," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), ix
27. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 118
28. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire" in Fabre and O'Meally, eds., History and Memory in African-American Culture, 285
29. David Scott, "Introduction: On the Archaeologies of Black Memory" Small Axe 26 (June 2008), vi
30. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968)
31. Houston A. Baker, Jr., "Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere," in The Black Public Sphere, ed. The Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7
32. Shirley Teresa Wajda, "History Writing, With Light" Reviews in American History 26, no. 3 (1998), 567
33. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)
34. Photography's Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Peterson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)
35. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 10
36. John Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 58
37. Maurice Stevens, "Opening Remarks," "Imagining Bodies: Visions of the Nation Through Race, Gender and Space," symposium, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, March 16, 2006
38. Like other archives of "atrocity photographs," the uses of lynching photographs raise a host of ethical concerns. Work on the circulation of Holocaust photography offers striking and insightful parallels for this project. See, especially, Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
39. Andrea Liss, Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998)
40. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003)
41. and Susan A. Crane, "Choosing Not to Look: Representation, Repatriation, and Holocaust Atrocity Photography" History and Theory 47 (October 2008), 309-330
42. James Cameron, A Time of Terror: A Survivor's Story (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1982)
43. David Marriott, On Black Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 3
44. Harris, Exorcising Blackness, 187
45. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 7
46. For a discussion of SNCC's employment of lynching imagery, see Leigh Raiford, "'Come Let Us Build a New World Together': SNCC and Photography of the Civil Rights Movement," American Quarterly 59, no. 4 (December 2007), 1129-1157
47. Leigh Raiford, "Emory Douglas Meets CodeZ," CodeZ (Summer 2007), http://codezonline.com/featurearticle/2007/08/emory-douglas-meets-codez. html (accessed July 28, 2009)
48. Berger, About Looking, 61
49. Hilton Als, "GWTW," in Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 41
50. For more on "the icon," see Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991)
51. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 19
52. Timothy J. Clark, "Art and Violence," symposium, UC-Berkeley, January 31, 2007
53. Shawn Michelle Smith, "The Evidence of Lynching Photographs," in Apel and Smith, Lynching Photographs, 29
54. Kerry James Marshall, "An Artist's History," McNeil Lehrer News Hour, November 28, 2003. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july- dec03/marshall-11-28.html (accessed July 28, 2009)
55. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 37
56. Als, "GWTW," 38, 41
57. Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)
58. Consider for example, the photographs of torture emerging from the U.S. prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq. See Hazel Carby, "A Strange and Bitter Crop: the Spectacle of Torture," November 10, 2004 http://www.opendemocracy.net/ media-abu-ghraib/article-2149.jsp (accessed July 28, 2009)
59. and Susan Willis, Portents of the Real: A Primer for Post-9/11 America (New York: Verso, 2005)
60. Willis, Portents of the Real, 120
61. "Father and Three Sons Assassinated for Raising the First Cotton, News Never Reached World from Texas," Chicago Defender (October 30, 1915), 1