'Evidence! Evidence! Give us Evidence':the photograph in The Octoroon and An Octoroon

This critical response considers the interrelationship of sensation, evidence and spectacle by examining the changing affective and evidential power of the photograph. First its role as a form of new documentary evidence (alongside the will, Zoe’s free papers, the mortgage, the missing payment) in The Octoroon, (1859) then, in An Octoroon, (2014) as an evidentiary spectacle that confronts the audience with the fact of lynching and its afterlife in artefacts. The singular act of fictional, furtive white on black violence from Boucicault’s play is substituted for evidence of collective, widespread, public and state-sanctioned white on black violence. This photograph is not an accidental result of God’s justice but a souvenir taken for the express purpose of recirculation to affirm white supremacy, celebrate and legitimise violence against black people. I will discuss in detail the photograph chosen for the Orange Tree/National Theatre production and draw on Barthes’ Camera Lucida and his discussion within it of Richard Avedon’s ‘William Casby, born in slavery’ to consider the lynching photograph as ‘a new, somehow experiential order of proof’ (Barthes 2000, 79/80).