mapping the hang trees http://criticalspatialpractice.blogspot.com/2007/01/hang-trees.html
The images on this page are part of a series entitled, Searching for California's Hang Trees, or just Hang Trees, for short. They were taken over a five-year period. The series extended across other distances as well, and in photographing these sites, I traveled to nearly every county in the state of California. All of the images were taken with an old wooden Deardorff 8 x 10 camera that I bought on eBay. As straightforward as this series may be photographically, it is also part of a larger project that has come to be know as Lynching in the West.
Searching for California's Hang Trees derived from my own research into the history of lynching in California. When I started this project, few people even believed that California had a history of lynching and Western terms like, frontier justice, vigilance committee, necktie party, and kangaroo court, colored those cases that were known.
I began this project by trying to assemble the most complete record of lynching in California that I could, and I was particularly interested in discovering how nineteenth century conceptions of difference (race, creed, color, national origin, and even gender) might have obscured the fact that, when taken collectively, Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Latinos, fell victim to the mob's anger more often than persons of Anglo or European descent.
