Eleventh International Conference on The Image

Abstract

I seek to expand the discussion of lynching photography through an analysis of three alternative lynching images: Marion Palfi’s 1949, Wife of a Lynched Victim; Kerry James Marshall’s 2002 print, Heirlooms and Accessories; and the Chicago Sun-Times/Associated Press’s 1955 photo of Mamie Till Mobley grieving by her son’s open casket. Traditional lynching frameworks, as Julie Buckner Armstrong asserts, are a triangulation between white men, black men, and white women, effectively silencing and erasing black women as victims of lynchings, witnesses, loved ones who carry memory, and anti-lynching activists. I argue an analysis of these alternative lynching images disrupt traditional frameworks of lynching, and offers a counter-narrative for reading issues of gender and representation through the image. They ask that we critique and analyze (1) who and what experiences are privileged in traditional lynching photography; (2) the correlation between the normalization of white womanhood and the impossibility of black womanhood; and (3) black women’s efforts at (re)claimation of space, status, and memory. Historian Kidada E. Williams (2014) and Michael Pfeifer (2014) insist that broaden the scope of the field must include “rendering visible” the after-effects of lynching violence, and its societal, sociological, psychological, and economic impact on all touched by lynching violence. Alternative lynching images create tools through which we can assess and analyze the generational legacy of lynching violence on society.