Almost 50 years ago, the book Wisconsin Death Trip came out.
It was the work of non-fiction writer Michael Lesy, a graduate student at Rutgers University. He’d encountered what he viewed as haunting photos from Black River Falls, a small town in western Wisconsin. Taken between 1885-1940, the glass photo negatives were kept in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Lesy paired the photos with articles from the local paper about violent crimes, death and mental illness. The result was a disturbing collage of rural life.
Lesy had this idea that small town America was gripped by madness in those years.
In a recently published research article, art historian Yechen Zhao critiques Lesy’s approach.
When Zhao first flipped through Wisconsin Death Trip, he was somewhat stunned. “I bought myself a copy and was like, 'Wow, this book is so — it doesn’t say anything, but it implies a lot in a very accusatory way,'” Zhao says. He is ow the Marcia Brady Tucker fellow in photography at the Yale University Art Gallery.
There are black-and-white portraits of elegant couples. A grim, elderly woman dressed in black. A baby in a coffin.
Taken by commercial photographer Charles Van Schaick, they’re ordinary photos for the time. But the way Lesy presented them, they feel downright spooky.
“Just putting a circle around someone in a photograph — you can see that in all sorts of those true crime documentaries today — or just zooming in on someone in a still image, that just immediately applies suspicion,” Zhao says, describing some of Lesy's subtle manipulations, which mimic a forensic approach.
Lesy didn’t provide typical captions, instead pairing photos with clips from the local paper, the Badger State Banner, describing gruesome crimes, insanity and suicides. Aside from the fact that they were made at the same time, the photos and stories weren’t related.
Historians were critical of Lesy’s methods. But the book was popular, later inspiring a film and opera.
Zhao says the book offers a way to explore our relationship with photos when they’re used as evidence for crimes. “Because it’s so extreme, accusing an entire period and region of something,” he shares. “People are obviously upset at it, but also, you should feel similarly upset in a lot of ways to which photographic evidence is still used in courts of law.”
Lesy wrote that the photos were about “meanings, not appearances,” leaving readers to search for hints of darkness that would back his claims of small-town mania — like a game of “I spy.”
That’s similar to how a courtroom interacts with photos, Zhao says. There’s an expectation that photos can tell more than what they show.
“This is about how photographs and photographic evidence is used to prove or disprove certain things,” Zhao says. “The idea that a still image could do enough to convince a jury or convince the public that some crime was committed, and that you would be able to get that from a picture.”
Around the time that Lesy was working on the book, a general sense of conspiracy gripped the country. The public had just watched the scandals of the Charles Manson trials, Watergate and the Pentagon Papers play out.
“I think America was just generally cognizant of the fact that institutions were not always acting in their own interest,” Zhao shares. “And often, were doing kind of shady things.”
Around that time, forensic science had also reached a high point, with new technologies like fingerprint documentation and bloodstain analysis.
That might have shaped Lesy’s approach, Zhao says. The book feels like how a crime investigator might approach historical material.
Often, Lesy puts two photos side by side, suggesting relationships between two otherwise innocuous — and sometimes unrelated — images.
Consider, for example, a pair of photos of the same brick building, home to Van Schaick’s studio on the second floor. A vining plant grows across the building. Lesy mounted the left photo on a white background, the second photo on black. On the left, there’s a family with three little girls in front. On the right, they’re replaced with men in dark suits.
It suggests something creepy happened. Where did the children go?
Zhao says when he first encountered the book, it was this page that grabbed him, convincing him there was something interesting to explore. The two photos implied a before-and-after sequence — the kind of thing commonly implied in photos of weight loss.
“What I love about this is the fact that you’ve got the white background on the left side, the black background on the right side,” he says. “There’s this huge difference between the people in the photograph. Also, the time of year, obviously, this plant on the left-hand side is dead because it’s wintertime. This is just another example of how putting two photographs together and presenting them kind of straight creates all sorts of associations.”
Separately, the photos are innocent. Together, they create a feeling of suspicion.
The problem, Zhao says, is when Lesy went looking for a culprit, he left out parts of the story that didn’t fit in his narrative.
A significant part of the photographer Van Schaick’s archive were portraits of Ho-Chunk families. They were some of his most frequent customers.
“Truthfully, that is maybe the more interesting part of his work, is that he made 2,000 portraits of the Ho-Chunk people who were coming back from being forcibly removed from Wisconsin and Minnesota,” Zhao says. “They were making these photographs for commemorative purposes.”
According to the Wisconsin Historical Society, the family photos are uniquely valuable “because they were commissioned by the subjects in the images and so contain a familiarity and honesty not available with images made by some of Van Schaick’s contemporaries that were made for commercial or ethnographic studies.”
Although there are a couple photos of tribal members in his book, Lesy dwells little on the story of the Ho-Chunk in the archive. Zhao says this was surprising, considering the fact that in the '60s, the Wisconsin Historical Society’s efforts to work with tribal members to identify people in the portraits meant such information would have been available to Lesy when he was later digging through the archives.
Meanwhile, Lesy’s archival sleuthing coincided with a frenzy of Indigenous activism, Zhao notes, as the American Indian Movement called for Native American civil and political rights.
Zhao says this blind spot leads Lesy to identify the wrong criminal.
Between 1829-1874, the Ho-Chunk people were forced to sell more than 2 million acres of land, rich with minerals, across Wisconsin and Minnesota before relocating west to Iowa, the Dakotas and Nebraska.
“What I mean by the ‘blind spot’ is, if you set out to look at these photographs, looking for a crime and looking for a perpetrator, you do kind of miss out on what you might describe as a much more diffuse, or atmospheric, idea of what was going on then,” he says.
In one of the family portraits, a woman sits with her three daughters standing behind her. Their hair is crimped, their coats are stylish and they’re smiling softly.
Amy Lonetree, a Ho-Chunk historian, later wrote that when she saw Van Schaick’s photos of her great-great- and great-grandfathers, she saw “strength and resilience.”
They’d returned home after being forced to sell their land — a violent crime that Lesy missed.
