John McKenzie sent me this article today (Jim, you're familiar with the author, David Cheshier):

Are there images we ought not see?

If memory serves, I’ve attended at least five academic presentations spread out over the last six years or so where brutal photographs of racial lynchings were splayed onto a big PowerPoint screen as the objects of critical analysis. These are terrifying images that reveal acts of horror: bodies twisting at rope’s end, defaced and sometimes castrated, victims often killed for crimes they did not commit by vigilantes milling around in the picture apparently oblivious to the atrocity and acting more like attendees at a company picnic. And of course it is this very casualness of the crowds that compounds the shock value of these photographs.

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