Transgressive frames

Abstract

This article revisits the lynching photograph to consider the rhetorical and cultural practices that instructed the unseeing of white mobs for what it reveals about dematerializing representations of the state in social media imagery documenting anti-Black police brutality. To do this, the author draws on creative, curatorial, and architectural examples that bring the eye into confrontation with the state’s hidden hand – the rig that naturalizes the public’s first-person (shooter) perspective, the body-worn or (para)surveillance camera footage, obscuring contemporary lynching’s stately face from public view. The author reflects on the staging and circulation of lynching photography as well as the exhibition of representative artistic renderings; an example of transgressive spatial engagement at the recently opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama; and then turning to Canada, the author offers a case study that considers the outer-national visual implications, concluding with example works by visual artists, Anique Jordan and Jalani Morgan, whose transgressive creative practices demonstrate disinvestments in repair.