Framed and Shamed

This chapter examines the recoding of images of lynchings that transformed the look from one of private pleasure to one of public disgust. It highlights an example of this counter-look, or look that endeavors to undo and even vilify the initial approving looks that lynching images invited: the look of shame that operates as a kind of social policing mechanism, one that diminishes the possibility for the consumption of lynching imagery as pleasurable and entertaining. The chapter compares a recent exhibition of lynching photography with a mid-century exhibition of antilynching artwork, suggesting that different evaluative criteria—aesthetic, ideological, realist, documentary—imply different political interpretations of lynching imagery. By analyzing the aesthetics of lynching, the chapter shows how a particular kind of looking is privileged and compels the recognition of certain bodies as human. Lynching, as an event, makes obvious the presence and potency of white humanity as it obliterated the possibility of black humanity.