Transforming Trauma: Absence as Presence in Ken Gonzales-Day’s “East First Street (St. James Park)”

Abstract

Included in Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching series, “East First Street (St. James Park)” (2006) depicts a crowd of people gathered around a tree at night. If it were not for the series title, the event imaged would be obscure. In Erased Lynching, Gonzales-Day digitally removed the hanged bodies of lynch victims from a number of press photographs and postcards produced in the American West and disseminated around the turn of the twentieth century. This act of archival intervention functions to recast the macabre spectacle as the spectators themselves. Rather than the abused and assassinated bodies of the victims, contemporary viewers are confronted with those whom Peter Maass would refer to as the “perpetrators and participants” of the grotesque and sinister event. The presence of the photographer is made particularly apparent by the captured image of people turning to face the camera, their expressions extinguished by its blinding flash. Erased Lynching raises several questions regarding the ethics and aesthetics of photojournalism and the imaging of atrocity, signaling the practice’s fundamental transformation in the digital age.

Keywords:

• photography
• lynching
• Ken Gonzales-Day
• digitization
• photojournalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Whereas most political and popular cultural attention to the history of lynching in America has concentrated on the excessive assault against African Americans in the nation’s southern states, Gonzales-Day’s series confronts the lesser-acknowledged and equally atrocious Californian history of vigilante “justice” and mob murder that claimed the lives of hundreds of Native American, Mexican, and Chinese people in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

2. In fact, the comments scrawled across the backs of postcards, such as those used as source material for Gonzales-Day’s project, arguably represent an early and less immediate form of the comment threads following the contemporary publication of amateur images online. Certainly the audience is expanded today and rendered significantly more anonymous, but the incentive to augment images with personal opinions and engage in debate is evident in both cases.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Reilley Bishop-Stall

Reilley Bishop-Stall is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her doctoral research concerns the representation of catastrophe and trauma in contemporary art with a specific focus on photographic media. Reilley holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC CGS) and has had her work published in local and international peer-reviewed journals.