Caption: “Negro hung alive by the Ribs to a Gallows’
[Capt. Stedman did not witness this torture but heard about it from 'a decent looking man'. The victim was apparently kept alive for three days and never complained.]“
“Captain John Gabriel Stedman, a member of the Scots Brigade in the Netherlands, went to Surinam to help repress a revolt of former slaves. His book, translated into six languages, describes, among other things, the cruel treatment of slaves in that colony. His book was originally illustrated by William Blake, Francesco Bartolozzi, and others; those illustrations have been copied and slightly reinterpreted by the illustrator of this [Italian] edition. The text of this edition is based on the 1798 French edition. The artist could be Cristoforo dall’Acqua, Austrian printmaker and draftsman.”
Stedman claims that his publication “must have hurt both the eye and the heart of the reader.”
Now, let us locate this image within a history of looking at lynching photography. Hilton Als essay, GWTW, plows through a dark and depressing compendium of lynching photographs. Als does not shy away from the fact that the publisher of this book, Twin Palms, also does a brisk business in gay erotica (Duane Michels, JackPierson, Herbert List, Stephen Barker…) and moreover, that the bodies and positioning of the lynched men does not always significantly differ from the images in the ’sanctified’ modern male erotica. Als lets the readerin on the fact that someone somewhere is masturbating to a lynching photograph. Its violence does not exclude it from sexual fantasy and may in fact be just what includes it.
Lastly, although Als does dot go this far, that above and beyond lynching (is that possible?), we equate hanging with autoeroticaffixiation. We hear about and visualize the suburban teenage boys found in their bedroom with a rope around their neck and semen on their legs. Its uncommon but not uncommon enough to surface and resurface. There is an attempt to block out the vision of the semen that may be forced even in the direst and most grotesque circumstances. The arched backs and titlting heads of the victims also point us towards this unmentionable associative slip. And when the men are lynched together? There is a fucked up and pulsing dance created by the sway of the rope – a sudden intimacy- where the bodies seem to dance against one another and that too becomes unmentionable and marginal. We sexualize inspite of ourselves; outside of a conception of ethical thought.
