What the Police are Not Trained to See: Wisconsin Death Trip and the Blind Spots of Photographic Evidence

Wisconsin Death Trip, the 1973 book by Michael Lesy, juxtaposes Charles van Schaick’s nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographs of townspeople in Black River Falls, Wisconsin with local newspaper clippings of grisly murders and crimes. Drawing from police laboratory protocols, forensics manuals and case law, I show how Lesy’s book imitates contemporaneously developed law enforcement techniques for presenting, justifying and interpreting photographs as evidence, which it uses to make a historical claim about death and madness in rural America. Ironically, the book’s mimicry of these techniques creates its blind spot: Lesy is unable to see how Van Schaick’s photographs actually relate to the indigenous Ho-Chunk people of the region and their struggle against forced removal by the US government. Studying Wisconsin Death Trip demonstrates how the interpretive momentum generated by a forensic approach to archival photographs too easily identifies the wrong crimes and perpetrators.