Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography

Tanya Sheehan

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Photographic and Visual Arts Visual Culture and Art Theory Photography and Visual Culture

Abstract

Comical associations between the science of photography and ideas about race were common on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades after the medium's invention. Some humorists observed that no bourgeois sitter would welcome the sight of his “negative” or blackened self; others illustrated the cosmetic character of race by depicting the effects of photographic chemicals on human skin. This essay takes these racial jokes seriously by reading them as historically specific social commentary. Beginning with an analysis of the first book of photographic humor, Cuthbert Bede's Photographic Pleasures (1855), it shows how this genre both reinforced and challenged popular conceptions of whiteness, blackness, and the photographic medium.

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References

1997Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest 1996Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.1936The National Geographic Magazine 2001Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 1852Uncle Tom's cabin, or, Life among the lowly 2017All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 1969White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 1999Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire

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