ABSTRACT
In January of 2000, James Allen opened the exhibition Witness: Photographs of Lynchings from the Collection of James Allen at the Roth Horowitz Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. In partnership with John Littlefield, Allen spent years collecting and preserving lynching photographs and postcards before presenting a portion of them with an accompanying publication. The popularity of Witness prompted a re-tooling of the exhibition with the aid of the New York Historical Society (NYHS), where it opened in March of 2000 as Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, and was attended by a record 50,000 people in the first four months.1 The exhibition then went on a tour that included the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, the Chicago Historical Society (CHS, now the Chicago History Museum), and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. In each location, curators sought to create a particular viewing atmosphere to meet the demands of the throngs of visitors. Though installation and programming choices varied, in all of the exhibition iterations the photographs were shown with supporting materialssuch as books, posters, videos, and music-meant to contextualize both the images and their history.
