Beyond the photograph: a graphic history of lynching

Abstract

This paper studies the 2008 graphic novel Incognegro in conjunction with the surviving lynching photographs. It argues that Johnson and Pleece’s work gives us a behind-the-scenes documentation of lynching – an ‘inside view’ that the photographs, despite their claimed reliance on a facticist projection of ‘objective reality’, often fail to do. To the extent that the period’s white-sponsored lynching photographs follow a carefully coded if unwritten convention and aesthetics of representation, they tend in fact to elide and gloss over the ‘whole truth’, or distract from immediate and direct enregisterment of the full and utter horror of the violence being perpetrated; this, despite the presence of the ‘strange fruit’ that grotesquely and ominously hangs from the itinerant scaffolds dotting the lynchtime landscape. In this backdrop of history and representation, Incognegro may be understood as an interventionist text in the long and innovative narrative of America’s visual culture; a first-order intervention that reconfigures a racist visual archive from within, so as to unravel and deconstruct the undergirding matrix of ideological, socio-cultural and aesthetic values upon which the lynching photographic archive stands.