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Maurice Berger on terrorizing force of images New York Times

A graphic photo stirs reflection, the Lens Blog

Maurice Berger is a Research Professor at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at UMBC and a well-known cultural historian, curator and author who writes the Race stories series for the Lens Blog at the New York Times. 


In this blog Berger writes: 

"Though startlingly similar to a lynching photograph from the Jim Crow South, this image is not a relic of a distant, shameful past. It was taken two months ago in a village in the Budaun district of Uttar Pradesh State in India. The murder is immortalized, like the lynching picture, as an image of a ghastly public spectacle — lifeless bodies dangling above, a crowd of onlookers below."

Posted: July 24, 2014, 11:32 AM