Execution photographs have served various purposes. Photographers and picture editors have speculated on ghoulish curiosity. Governments and occupying authorities have invoked the camera's ‘unimpeachable truthfulness’ to show that criminals have been punished or dissidents eliminated. Onlookers have created macabre souvenirs.
Execution images were common in the 19th century, as both paintings and popular prints. Of the former, Goya's Third of May 1808 (1814) and Manet's Execution of the Emperor Maximilian (1868-9) are among the most celebrated. As soon as technology permitted, however, the camera became a natural competitor. In 1858, Felice Beato photographed the hanging of insurgents after the suppression of the Indian Rebellion. Alexander Gardner recorded the execution of the Lincoln conspirators in the Washington Arsenal on 7 July 1865. Two years later, the Mexico-based Frenchman François Aubert (1829-1906) took photographs relating to the execution of the French-installed, defeated Emperor Maximilian: not the shooting itself, but the site, the firing squad, and Maximilian's bullet-riddled clothing and embalmed corpse. They were marketed in France, despite efforts at censorship, by Disdéri as cartes de visite, and possibly influenced Manet's painting. In the aftermath of the Paris Commune, victims of government reprisals were photographed before burial, and faked pictures of Communard atrocities by photographers like Eugène Appert (1830-91) were circulated as right-wing propaganda. Over the next four decades, execution photographs were taken in colonial situations from the Belgian Congo to the fringes of British India; after the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China; and during the Balkan conflicts that preceded the First World War.
Twentieth-century technology expanded the genre. The lynchings perpetrated in the American South until the 1960s were often photographed, by both commercial operators and amateurs. An eyewitness of the killing of Thomas Brooks in Fayette County, Tennessee, in 1915 noted: ‘Hundreds of kodaks clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching … Picture card photographers installed a portable printing press at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling postcards showing a photograph of the lynched Negro.’ Paradoxically, the abandonment of public execution elsewhere in North America, and in Europe, coincided with the rise of an illustrated tabloid press avid for gruesome images. Their circulation value was demonstrated in January 1928 when the New York Daily News sold c. 1 million extra copies with an illicit photograph of the murderer Ruth Snyder in the electric chair. To obtain it, photographer Tom Howard, posing as a reporter, had strapped a specially designed single-shot plate camera to his ankle.
During the Second World War and its prelude in Korea and China, Japanese, Russian, and German forces carried out executions on a vast scale. They were often filmed or photographed for historical or propaganda purposes. But official German photographs sometimes reveal soldiers snapping hangings and shootings with their own cameras; and letters mention shouts of ‘slower, slower’ so that better pictures could be obtained. Although private photography of such ‘unaesthetic’ subjects was officially banned, many execution pictures survived. Some were captured and archived by the Russians, and re-emerged to shock visitors to the Wehrmacht atrocities exhibition in the 1990s. The fact that they were taken at all, and often showed servicemen in relaxed mood while hostages or other non-combatants were being put to death, is a measure of the brutalizing effect both of the war and, undoubtedly, of the Nazi regime's vicious anti-Bolshevik and racist propaganda.
The wars and revolutions of the later 20th century were accompanied by countless cold-blooded killings of prisoners or civilians. Some photojournalists recorded them, others refused. Among the most celebrated images were John Sadovy's photos of Hungarian secret policemen being shot in October 1956; Eddie Adams's of a captured Vietcong being executed in Saigon on 21 February 1968; and US army photographer Ron Haeberle's colour photographs of the My Lai massacre a few weeks later. In Dacca in December 1971, during the Bangladesh War of Independence, prisoners were shot and bayoneted to death in front of photographers. Meanwhile, peacetime executions continued to be photographed: in China, for example, the open-air shootings of criminals and dissidents recorded by Li Zhensheng. In the USA, although execution pictures became harder to make (though not impossible: vide the execution of Allan Lee Davis in Florida in 1999), interest in capital punishment remained strong, demonstrated by Lucinda Devlin's Omega Suite studies (1991-7) of prison death chambers; and by the reactions to Oliviero Toscani's images of Missouri death row inmates, intended for Benetton's 2000 advertising campaign.
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (1996).
- Allen, J., Als, H., Lewis, J., and Litwack, F., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000).
- Breidenbach, S. (ed.), Lucinda Devlin: The Omega Suites (2000/1)
