that simply documented ‘‘reality.’’ From such a
perspective, one might consider photography to
have served as merely a recording device that docu-
mented the social existence and realities of race.
However, the role of photography in actively con-
structing knowledge about identity and the human
body, including racialized identities and bodies, has
been significant to more recent critical approaches
to photography. Such critical approaches explore
the power of the photographic image as construc-
tion, and further engage the relations of power that
are at work in the very acts of photographing. This
essay will provide a brief overview of some concep-
tual approaches and photographs through which
the intersection of race and photography might
be understood.
It is now largely understood that race is a social
construction. This contrasts with mid-nineteenth
century conceptions of race as a given biological
fact, a concept that persisted well into the mid-
twentieth century, and some argue, still exists today.
This biological notion of race posits difference
between individuals based primarily on physical
markers, specifically, skin color. A hierarchy of
social characteristics was then attributed to indivi-
duals based on these presumed differences, and
posited some races as superior and others as infer-
ior. There was a confluence of the concept of race
across a wide range of disciplines, predominantly as
a category for scientific inquiry, but also in philo-
sophy, literature, and art. This logic of race culmi-
nated in eugenics, whose practice in Nazi Germany
resulted in the genocidal atrocities of the Holo-
caust, and led to the later rejection of biological
racial hierarchies by scientists worldwide. Many
scholars now study the relation between race and
social practices, including how visual culture con-
tributed to the production of race. They also exam-
ine the extensive ways in which concepts of race and
their practice justified racism, and legitimated
forms of abuses that were sanctioned by legal, poli-
tical, and social structures. Early photography and
racial imagery contributed in a central manner to
both the construction and reinforcement of social
race relations.
Racial difference was at the heart of colonialism
and imperialism, whereby European colonial po-
wers considered themselves superior to the nations
and peoples they would dominate in Asia, Africa,
and the Americas from the fifteenth through twen-
tieth centuries. Travel and expeditionary pho-
tography not only documented landscapes for
militaristic and governmental purposes, but also
popularized forms of visual tourism for general
publics and familiarized them with imperial ima-
gery. Anthropology as an academic discipline
undertaking the study of ‘‘man,’’ developed along-
side the nineteenth century rise of colonialism and
imperialism that reached its peak between 1890 and- Some argue that anthropology is colonial-
ism’s by-product, a discipline that documents the
traditions of other cultures as they are being des-
troyed by colonialism. Photography was exten-
sively used as a documentary research tool in
anthropology, and its sub-fields of biological an-
thropology, archeology, and ethnography. One
starkly sees in biological anthropological photogra-
phy the subjugation of colonial human subjects in
the drive to create racial classifications and taxo-
nomies of human beings; subjects were objectified,
frequently unclothed, and photographed from sev-
eral angles. It is here that contemporary questions
about the very act of photographing can be easily
understood: Who is photographing whom? How
are they represented in the photograph, and
towards what ends? If early anthropological photo-
graphy was driven by a desire to capture the scien-
tific ‘‘reality’’ of their subjects and visualize their
racial difference, the revisiting of photographic
archives by contemporary artists and curators now
makes apparent the original photographers’ social
contexts of creation, their preconceptions and
desires. Alloula discusses how French photogra-
phers frequently manipulated their Algerian female
subjects against a backdrop of the harem in order to
conform to already existing colonial imagery and
fantasies. Curators Melissa Banta and Curtis M.
Hinsley closely outline the transition from travel
photography and histories of exploration to the
exact categories and uses of anthropological photo-
graphy. These photographic archives have also
been the subject of re-examination by contempor-
ary artists. Carrie Mae Weems’s reworking of his-
torical images of slaves and freedmen from the
1840s to 1860s (notably with the incorporation of
text), inFrom Here I Saw What Happened And I
Cried(1995–1996) attempts to provoke dialogue
between the photographic subject and spectator;
The Hampton Project(2000), similarly converses
with historical photographs by Francis Benjamin
Johnson fromThe Hampton Album(1900).
The major 2003 exhibition Only Skin Deep:
Changing Visions of the American Self, brought
together over 350 photographs and explored the
complexity of race through its broad range of
images from 1845 to 2003. The exhibition upholds
that racial categories and the maintenance of popu-
lations into these categories is a constituent element
of American identity. Photography served to pro-
duce and maintain these racial categories. Some of
REPRESENTATION AND RACE