Wish you were here’s purpose is to comprehend the aim / reasoning behind the photographs that immortalised the barbaric torture and execution of a person(s). And to illuminate the utterly contemptable need for these photographs to then be printed as postcards. Were they a macabre memento? A deterrent? Or simply the cruelty of spectacle, as if to mock the widespread use of postcards as correspondence? We must question the psychology of such an act of unashamed inhumanity, and the the utter disrespect of an individual’s dignity, an atrocity that served as entertainment. Crowds thronging to witness the blood-curdling scenes with ambivalent blood lust that justice was being served to the miscreants who had committed a crime, was an unfortunate comment on the metaphoric ‘crowd mentality’.

 

We are accustomed to the sending and receiving of postcards as a communiqué between friends and family, customarily during a holiday, or before email and social media, as a way to action / activate a memory or a moment in time. A written form of relaying enjoyment / leisure / thoughts. Their usage has existed since the late Victorian era which came with the advent of more affordable photographic equipment. It was suddenly possible to reach newly built seaside resorts by the ever-expanding railway network, and local photographers and printers were reeling off postcards in their thousands. Their quaintness and innocence could not be further removed from the knowing depictions of death and gore, which at times were also used as seemingly innocent messages.

 

The depiction of execution / torture in postcard form was particularly prevalent in the early 1900s especially in China and the United States. Although they were also used in France and Germany, predominantly during the First World War, and indeed throughout the world. It was specifically used in the face of continued oppression by European Imperialists in Africa and Asia, as it was suddenly possible to view an unimaginable act in photographic form. Exposed and engrained onto film, a persistent replaying of human degradation. An ironic immortality.

​

"The pathological joy among the people and bystanders in anticipation of an imminent execution is a key to the continuation of the death rap in a collectively uncivilised world,” said French existentialist Albert Camus, in ‘Reflections on the Guillotine’

 

In the US, the imagery used was mostly that of ‘lynching’ during an horrific period of American history, where Black people were reduced to an, “other”, subhuman, segregated and degraded by eugenicists and by the use of far-right religious propagandists [often by the infamous Klu Klux Klan], stoking up fear / alienation and base bigotry, which was directly aimed at the predominant white working-class all-American, “average joe”. It has been quoted as being “Bigot Pornography”, extremely graphic and highly emotive imagery that haunts, which defies empathy and destroys the concept of human dignity.

 

“We are all, including our judicial system, law and government, like Romans. We feel contended when a gladiator is gored or impaled on an iron rod or a convict’s limbs are ritualistically dismembered. There is a beast hidden even in the best of us.” – Milan Kundera

 

But how can we begin to comprehend these images? Although judicial executions still exist in many countries, in the west the act is typically ‘unseen’ and carried out in prisons away from the prying eyes of spectators. Perhaps the almost primal part of the human mind is at play, so-called “rubbernecking” at the aftermath of car crashes / accidents in general [distinct imagery that became infamous through Andy Warhol’s car crash ‘multiples’], consuming horror and gore in fictional films, and craving further depravity as entertainment. Nevertheless, as human beings we have the choice and autonomy to ‘look the other way’, or remove ourselves from these scenes, as a form of protest, or simply disgust at the lingering “brutality of spectacle”.