Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

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That enables us to dismiss what we see as an aberration, as the work of crazed fiends and psychopaths"(33-34). Ritual murders turned into social events for white supremacist mobs with glee in their eyes--gazing at tortured Black bodies. The photographs that go on view tomorrow at Roth Horowitz, a gallery on the Upper East Side, may never fit comfortably in the history of art, or for that matter, of photography.

In terms of being thought provoking, this books is a "5", but I can't "like" this chronicle of abomination. This blood-thirsty chapter in American history is underexposed and perhaps in this new century we can talk more about it in a diplomatic way. One person interviewed in the book comments that in the late 19th and early 20th Century, it was always "open season" on Negroes, who were viewed as less than human - and they were tortured with methods not even used on animals.If anyone could possibly become numb to the almost-unspeakably violent images, it’s Allen, who compiled his work into “Without Sanctuary,” a traveling exhibit and later a book that brought lynching and lynching photography into the public consciousness in a way it never been had before. However, C-SPAN only receives this revenue if your book purchase is made using the links on this page. Perhaps a person can be so shaken and taken only once, for the unsettling chill that 'Without Sanctuary' produces in me has dampened my eyes not at all.

The memory of lynching brings America face to face with "our problematic history with due process and the rule of law," said William Kornblum, sociologist at the City University of New York's graduate school, "Even today we can't face part of it. This book should be required reading for all because it touches upon the long history of racism in this country and it gives context to what is happening in this day and age. In fact, Klan members, masked and working under cover of night, are somehow less troubling than the “ordinary” white citizens of Dixie seen in these pages—men, women, and children who were photographed while participating, actively or complicitly, in the torture, mutilation, burning alive, and/or hanging of black citizens in broad daylight and in public.People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope. Without Sanctuary is 98 four-color plates from the Without Sanctuary Collection of lynchings photographs in America.