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Re: I would like information about pictures I have in myposession.



Photographs of the punishment of criminals were circulated in many countries, from an early point in the national availablity of photography, as a logical extension of the practice of public punishment as an example to others.  It is a truism of the development of the modern state that it asserts a monopoly on coercion.  Such photographs demonstrated to the widest possible audience the ability of the state to substantiate that assertion.   

One well-known example is the photograph of the captured assassin of Nasir-i-Din Shah weighed down with chains which circulated in Iran for decades after the event in 1896.  There were photographs of his execution, too. 

Photography could also be used as a tool in support of non-state forms of social control, as in the many photographs of lynchings which circulated in the US.

Photographs of state and non-state violence were regularly reproduced for sale.  They were particularly common as 'souvenirs' of the 'exotic' east. 

In common with exoticised pornography (there was an entire industry in North Africa provisioning European soldiers), it would not be unusual to find such photographs among the momentoes brought back by a soldier after a tour of duty.

> I have in my posession original pictures dating from 1914-1925 of numerous
> exections, beheadings, and tortures taken place in precommunist China.
> These pictures were obtained by my great-grandfather when he was a soldier
> for the U.S. army and was stationed in China. I also have pictures of his

>The U.S. Marine Corps Museum had a scrap book in their manuscript
>collection with similar photographs. I was operating under the assumption
>that the person who assembled the book had taken them himself, but now I
>am wondering about this, and am having an unpleasant feeling that some
>enterprising person was duplicating and selling those pictures.  The same
>subject matter you refer to, beheadings of school girls, "death of a
>thousand cuts," and so forth.



R. Jackson Armstrong-Ingram, C.A. 
Archives and Records Administrator
City Archives and Records Division 
City Clerk, 240 Water St
Henderson, NV 89015 

702-568-8334

jai@gty.ci.henderson.nv.us

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