Familiarizing Lynching: Intimacy, Kinship, and Anti-Blackness in American Photography

Sammendrag

This article examines the relationship between two sets of images from the nineteenth century: family portraits and lynching photographs. The latter have often been studied through the lens of spectacle with limited attention given to the less spectacular images that also comprise the visual culture of anti-Black violence in the United States. Drawing from other nineteenth-century photographs, such as portraits of enslavers’ families and white families associated with lynchings, the following study locates lynching photography’s origins in the intimate and the familial. This article strays from a focus on the spectacle of Black death and suffering in photographic representations of anti-Black violence and instead considers how the more banal, mundane representations of kinship shaped communal belonging and exclusion in the decades preceding and following emancipation. Placing lynching photographs within the broader milieu of nineteenth-century vernacular photography reveals how the hypervisibility of Black death and suffering came to be central to American understandings of familiality and kinship.