Wanted: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture

Abstract

The communications scholar Rachel Hall samples images of outlaws over three centuries in an effort to track the development of what she calls the “vigilante viewer,” for whom spectatorship shaped attitudes about authority, class, gender roles, and social danger. Hall contends that portrayals of antebellum murderers, fugitive slaves, Pinkerton-sought robbers, Great War draft dodgers, those “most wanted” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and modern-day terrorists have instructed viewers to share the vigilante's sense of moral superiority, righteous outrage, and community endangerment. Historians will find this book most useful for its perceptive readings of a wide assortment of visual texts. The transition from colonial execution woodcuts—“hanging corpses seen from a great distance”—to individualized and close-up engravings of antebellum prisoners, she writes, reflects the translation of the condemned into the criminal… . If the condemned was a synecdoche for the evil that circulated throughout the community, the criminal was a discrete figure who could be separated out from the rest of society. (p. 37)