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Dialogues@RU is published annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume One
Spring 2002
Without
Sanctuary:
Lynching Photographs And Museums As Their Sanctuary -
Page 2
by Soo Hee Kwon
The museum is used, in this case, to carry out the goal of educating, acknowledging, and making the public aware of the events in the past. Documentary photography, which is used for this very purpose has taken a new form in Rosler's mind. Rolser views new documentaries as an attempt to protect the sensibility of the minority depicted in the photograph. This, Rosler claims, "manages to institute a new genre of vicimhood-the victimization by someone else's camera of a helpless persons" (319). The lynching photographs hold onto the moment in which the person was victimized. To see this, as a new victimization by the camera, is to demote an important function of history, which Berger states, in Ways of Seeing, is "not for living in" but a "well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act" (11). History is to be looked at so that past mistakes do not happen again. To perceive another sense of victimhood in the image, alone, is to regress back to using the past for living in. Allen has used these photographs to change dialogue in issues of race and politics. This is not possible without overcoming a new victimization because this preserves a separation of the people, in a social and political aspect. Critic, Mary Thomas, argues that the political dimension should be denied or at least not the main focus when visualizing the images. Thomas believes that "mentally categorizing such events as a black problem or even specifically a racial issue is to not only miss the point," but also "risks splitting the audience experience into one of us vs. them, casting the African American as victim and the contemporary white as hapless inheritor of his own racial stigma" (6). Those fixated on the problem of race will carry over the separation of victim and perpetrator into their feelings about the event. Thomas's idea of splitting audience experience is an extension of Rosler's fear that a new victimization may arise from such acknowledgements. The mental categorizing of a racial and political issue may bring this experience about but, the photographs blatantly show these issues and they must not be denied, simply acknowledged-the victimization did exist at one time but a sense of new victimization only furthers the audience split. The museums play a major role in how the past is perceived. The experience of "us vs. them" is an instinctive view from visualizing the history of lynching and the races depicted (a majority of which were hangings of African Americans by a crowd of Caucasians), but what the exhibition has done is change the us vs. them racially to us of the present vs. them of the past.
The reactions evoked through the exhibition are closely tied with the causes. Rosler's view of a new victimization as a representation "that the poor are ashamed of having been exposed as poor, that the photos have been the source of festering shame," is an accurate portrayal of museum critic, Carol Duncan's, theory on what museums do; "Western representations of western culture hold implications for the way non-western cultures are seen." (Rosler, 319; Duncan, 4). The way that white, suburban society is represented in the images of lynching, one can easily assume that victims were ashamed to have been in such a position. The exposé of the lynching photographs may have shifted an instinctive shame from the minority to the majority as many white viewers feel the need to be ashamed for what their ancestors have done. "Festering shame", however, is not the museums' intent; neither is the museums' intent to fester a pity. The meaning of the exhibition is to bring to the realization that many different non-westerners, as well as a number of westerners, were victims of lynching. Museums expose the shame imbedded into the event in its entirety. Rosler's new victimization cannot be seen through the lynching exhibition; but the change from memoir to documentary gives those in the images recognition by exposing their part in history.
For the purposes of impact, museums remove all aestheticism from the exhibition to reduce the voyeurism of the photographs. There are two types of museums, according to Duncan; "the educational museum is considered by its advocates to me more democratic and popular, while the aesthetic museum is seen as more elitist" (3). Duncan treats museums as places of ritual where social identity is distinguished and ideology is produced. The museums that the lynching photographs were exhibited in, however, whether educational or aesthetic in nature, were used in the educational aspect. The results are not based solely on the visualization of the photographs but are also an effect of their presentation in public museums. Keeping the lynching photographs away from being viewed as artistic images by avoiding customary exhibiting such as framing, projections, slides, blown up images and caption, as well as the museums' presentation as an educational show, create an expected reaction from the audience (Hulser). This supports Duncan's idea that art museums, "whatever their stated aims and potentials, must function within existing political and ideological limits" (2). By exceeding this boundary, the museum cannot succeed in educating and offering its values and beliefs. For example, if the museums saw "people as fundamentally unequal and regarding elites as natural occurrences…" as Rosler states leads to authorship and isolation and "differentiation of elite understanding and its objects from common understanding", then the relation between image and ideology is disconnected (320). This can occur by aestheticizing the lynching photographs; a political and ideological boundary would then be crossed and the images would go against the current ideology. The category of the museums does not change this relationship, although values and beliefs are not necessarily offered but rather simply reinforced and made stronger through the exposé of images and the voicing of the people. Documentary, Rosler states, "carries (old) information about a group of powerless people to another group addressed as socially powerful" (306). The message sent when the picture was taken was that the powerless group was not human enough to have the right to live and that this was a thought common to many. In today's case, the socially powerful can be society as a whole, blacks and whites of equality (at least more so than during the lynching days) that gets the message that lynching is wrong and unjustifiable. History itself has changed this view of oppression; the photographs only enhance it. The people, who see the immorality of lynching and view the oppressors as evildoers, already believe so. It is the current societal and political emphasis on equality that the museums build on to refrain from what Rosler sees as a disconnection of image and ideology.