‘The Show That’s Alive with Death!’: Repair and Irreparability in the Goodrich Corporate Photo Archive

This paper’s primary object is a damaged black and white photograph found in the archives of the Goodrich Corporation, in Akron, Ohio. The action shot shows an automobile stunt performed by the ‘Jimmie Lynch Death Dodgers’ troupe sometime during or immediately after WWII. More notable than the car’s daredevil maneuver is that a chunk of the actual photograph has been torn out and lost, leaving a sizeable lacuna in the image’s bottom centre. This paper employs various materials, such as showbills, advertisements and promotional paraphernalia, to establish an epistemic correlation between the compromised physical condition of the photoprint and the dangerous public acts of vehicular destruction central to the Death Dodgers’ mass appeal — summed up by their slogan: “The Show That’s Alive with Death!”

Nonetheless, the damaged ‘Death Dodgers’ print poses a distinct methodological quandary, the problematic of which is best elucidated by balancing the “paranoid” and “reparative” modes of reading laid out in Eve Sedgwick’s 2003 essay. Paranoid hermeneutics are of limited use, since the visuality and rhetoric of the Death Dodgers already places the hidden violence of postwar America on full display (ironically under the guise of promoting auto safety). Conversely, no amount of reparative ‘accretion’ can ever fill the cognitive gap now rent into the partially destroyed artefact (unless, of course, the ‘missing piece’ were located). The paranoid/reparative duality is thus found too limited and too capacious, prompting an effective photo-historical methodology to seek a synthesis, lest it ignore its objects’ fundamental imperilment to disappearance.