Postcards to Charles Lynch

Last year, Garapa Collective won a grant offered by ZUM Magazine, a publication dedicated to photography, edited by Instituto Moreira Salles. Our proposal, "Postcards to Charles Lynch", consisted of a visual essay on the subject of contemporary lynchings, specifically those which took place in Brazil in 2014 (in the past 60 years, around 1 million people participated in such events throughout the country, says José de Souza Martins, an expert on the matter). The theme is urgent and approaching it within a documentary perspective seemed necessary. The result of our research is now presented as an artist-book that reflects upon the subject. Each of the 36 images taken from still frames of YouTube films depict the barbarity of lynchings, referring also to the way we deal with images of violence nowadays: every shot in the book comes from amateur footage, created by people who where either watching or participating in such atrocities. At some level, “Postcards to Charles Lynch” responds to what Susan Sontag claims in “Regarding the Pain of Others”: let the atrocious images haunt us, she said. In order to amplify access to this body of work, we’ve published on Issuu a fac-simile of the book: http://issuu.com/fehlauer/docs/postais_para_charles_lynch and on Vimeo a video that summarizes the process: https://vimeo.com/140832075