Bøker av Dora Apel

Why do we look at lynching photographs? What is the basis for our curiosity, rage, indignation, or revulsion? This book examines lynching photographs as a way of analyzing photography's historical role in promoting and resisting racial violence. It charts the history of lynching photographs - their meanings, uses, and controversial display.

In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel explores how memory can be mobilized for social justice and how inherited traumas can be channeled in productive ways. Examining memorials, photographs, artworks, and her own experiences as a cancer survivor and the child of holocaust survivors, she discovers strategies for “unforgetting” the past.

Analysing over one hundred representations of lynching, Dora Apel shows how the visual documentation of such crimes can be a central vehicle for the construction and reinforcement of racial hierarchies. Lynching was often orchestrated explicitly for the camera, and photographs were used to construct ideologies of """"whiteness"""" and """"blackness.