crowded living spaces, worn clothing, crying chil-
dren, sad and exhausted faces—may lead outside
viewers to think of those living in poverty as passive
and indifferent, and therefore as somehow ‘‘deserv-
ing’’ their situation. In light of such potential impact,
photography’s mechanical reproducibility, the fact
that photographic images can be endlessly replicated
and widely circulated, only serves to increase the
stakes in social representation.
Of course, photographs never establish and
uphold commonly held beliefs alone; they always
constitute only one factor in a large and complex
network of meaning. (Some critics, such as Susan
Sontag, even hold that photographs in and of
themselves have no power to persuade and always
depend on outside elements to make sense.) And of
course, no photograph ever invites a singular,
inevitable interpretation; context and a viewer’s
particularities may alter a reading considerably.
Yet this does not suggest that people can make
any image signify what they want it to signify,
that its meaning is completely free-floating. Social
codes restrict everyone’s access to possible ways of
reading and seeing, as well as to what there is to see
and read: power relations in society have generally
privileged the able-bodied, economically comforta-
ble, heterosexual, male, white perspective.
Since the nineteenth century, the histories of
photography and the social sciences have often run
parallel or intersected. While critics still argue over
whether newly established human sciences such as
anthropology, criminology, or sociology began ap-
plying photography as a useful instrument of docu-
mentation after the medium’s inception, or whether
photography was invented because contemporary
society, with the emergence of industrialized capital-
ism, required a tool that ‘‘authentically’’ recorded
social hierarchies in order to keep them in place, all
can agree that photographic images began playing
an important role in fixing groups in their ‘‘appro-
priate’’ social positions almost as soon as the me-
dium was formally introduced in 1839. Repeatedly,
public institutions and the state made use of photo-
graphy to ‘‘prove’’ what pseudosciences like physiog-
nomy and anthropometry had established: that the
white male constituted the apex of evolution, while
women, the poor and laboring classes, and ethnic
Others (which included Africans, Amerindians,
Asians, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims) lagged behind
and required firm social control.
Photography so employed not only suspended
movement into an arrested image but also sought to
fix the multiple, fluid interpretations any subject
offers into a single one, rigidly delineating the bound-
aries of norm and difference. The Other, neatly
framed (often in full-body pose) in a limited, defined
space, could now be gazed at and scrutinized at will,
the photograph’s borders seeming to contain an
unknown simultaneously fascinating and threaten-
ing. Denied their subjectivity, those represented,
often under some form of coercion, became canvases
for endless projections. ‘‘This is what the Other looks
like,’’ J. T. Zealy’s photographs of African slaves or
Jean-Martin Charcot’s photographs of hysterics seem
to say. ‘‘This is the essence of difference [read: nega-
tive deviation].’’ Many images served to debase or
vilify, but even photographs that supposedly cele-
brated their subjects, such as Edward S. Curtis’s
early-twentieth-century portfolios of Amerindians,
engaged in questionably reductive maneuvers. In his
desire to capture ‘‘a vanishing race,’’ Curtis fixed his
subjects in an idealized past—in clothing, occupation,
and outlook—disallowing any signs of moderniza-
tion or change in the communities he photographed.
Photographs taken to effect social reform—in the
West, particularly until the 1950s—often perni-
ciously straddled the dual objective of attempting
to garner (financial) support for their subjects and
portraying them in a manner that made them look
‘‘worthy’’ of such assistance. These so-called social
documentary photographs relied heavily on the
depiction of men, women, and children in their
living or work spaces to expose the degrading envi-
ronments they had to endure, a genre pioneered by
Lewis Hine at the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury. Intimately tied to government or public agen-
cies, such images often pursued specific, and rather
narrow, goals—a fact that led to an emphasis on
essences and the creation of types in this form of
social representation.In the United States, the work
of the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security
Administration (RA/FSA) employees during the
Great Depression of the 1930s has become para-
digmatic of social documentary. Purporting to
authentically document the everyday lives of the
American people, the photographs most widely cir-
culated focused on ‘‘the wronged and strong,’’ people
persevering with dignity in the face of dire economic
circumstances, in effect offering densely coded
glimpses of mostly rural hardship and deprivation.
How much the camera, popularly viewed as a
recorder of the real, was expected to produce ve-
racious images can be concluded from a scandal
surrounding FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein.
Fleeing a Dust Storm, a picture he shot in 1936 to
underline the adverse effects of drought in Okla-
homa, showed a man and two young boys, one of
them trailing behind, fighting the elements to reach
a dilapidated hut. When it was revealed that the
photograph had not been taken during an actualSOCIAL REPRESENTATION