The images in Ken Gonzales-Day’s newest edition of Erased Lynchings, Set V (2023), are derived from appropriated lynching postcards and archival materials in which Gonzales-Day has digitally removed the victims and the ropes. This conceptual gesture is intended to direct the viewers’ attention away from the lifeless body of the victim and unto the mechanisms of the actual lynching: the crowd, the spectacle, the photographer, the site, and even the impact of flash photography upon this dismal past. In many cases, the perpetrators remain fully visible, jeering, laughing, or pulling at the air in a deadly pantomime.

The series strives to make the invisible visible and seeks to reveal that racially motivated lynching and vigilantism was a more widespread practice in the American West than was believed. In California, where the artist was born and lives, the majority of lynchings were perpetrated against Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans, and more Latinos were lynched in California than were persons of any other race or ethnicity.