Colonialist Photography

Imag(in)ing Race and Place

Eleanor M. Hight, Gary D. Sampson, Eleanor M. Hight, Gary D. Sampson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136473944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Colonialist Photography is an absorbing collection of essays and photographs exploring the relationship between photography and European and American colonialism. The book is packed with well over a hundred captivating images, ranging from the first experiments with photography as a documentary medium up to the decolonization of many regions after World War II.

Reinforcing a broad range of Western assumptions and prejudices, Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson argue that such images often assisted in the construction of a colonial culture.

1

INTRODUCTION

Photography, “Race”, and Post-Colonial Theory

Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson

The theme of the Annual College Art Association Conference held in Toronto in February 1998 was “The History of Art in a Post-colonial Environment.” In response to the call for sessions, we proposed a topic we thought essential to the conference theme: the relationship between photography and Western colonialism. Our hope was to gather a core of papers that would demonstrate, through a variety of subjects and critical methods, how photography functioned as a cultural and political medium intricately tied to the establishment and support of colonialist power. We were particularly concerned with the period from the 1840s to the 1940s, from photography’s first experimental “documentary” uses to World War II, after which time many regions under the colonial authority of European nations and the United States struggled for independence. This collection of essays grew out of our CAA session, “Imag(in)ing ‘Race’ and Place in Colonialist Photography.” It includes the expanded session papers of Ayshe Erdogdu, Andrew Evans, Patricia Johnston, and Kim Sichel, as well as additional contributions by Julia Ballerini, Brenda L. Croft, Rebecca DeRoo, John Falconer, Michael Hayes, Oscar E. Vázquez, and the editors. These writers examine a diverse range of photographs produced by Europeans and Americans of peoples and places in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, Hawai’i, Oceania, and Australia. Building upon current ideas about the relationship between colonialism and visual representation, the chapters analyze the ways in which photographs operate as complex discursive objects of colonial power and culture.

Through a variety of case studies and interdisciplinary methods, the chapters underscore the problematic intersection of cultural, political, and economic institutions that constitute the project of Western imperialism. Yet, by no means do we wish to suggest that the authors present a unified argument that all colonial photographs act in a precise way to establish specific racial stereotypes and markers of inferiority in the depictions by Europeans and Americans of colonized peoples and their homelands. Nonetheless, the overwhelming evidence of the photographs seen within the contexts of specific episodes of colonial history indicates that the images produced a dynamic rhetoric of racial and ethnographic difference between white Europeans and Americans and non-European “races” and “places.” The photographers expressed distinctions between colonized peoples and themselves ambivalently; as agents of colonial culture, they most often envisioned their subjects as objects of both racial inferiority and fascination. The photographers’ perceptions of their subjects were influenced and reinforced by a diverse array of familiar administrative practices, commercial enterprises, artistic and literary traditions, as well as the ongoing scientific investigation and classification of racial types. That the photographers shared attitudes with other colonial structures made these images readily accessible to the imaginative conceits of a broad range of Western viewers.

The colonial constructions of racial, cultural, and geographic difference found in the photographs under discussion are examined in the present volume through the channels of photographic production and consumption. These vary widely from the “scientific” recording methods of physical anthropology, especially the hierarchical categorizing of human specimens, to the popular commercial formats of collection and display: cartes-de-visite, tourist postcards, photograph albums, photographically illustrated books, and magazine advertisements. By using a combination of historical method and recent forms of interpretative analysis, the authors offer new insights into what we believe is still a little-understood aspect of modern cultural and social history – the pervasiveness of the symbolic and scientific uses of photography for the verification and justification of colonial rule. Not only do the chapters study photography’s contribution to the creation of colonial authority and the writing of colonial history. They also address the complex ways in which photographs assist in the construction of a colonial culture, in the sense elaborated in Nicholas Thomas’s critical analysis of anti-colonialist theories.¹

In their respective approaches to the interpretation of colonial photographs, the authors of this volume have looked to the various disciplines contributing to the field of postcolonial studies today, especially anthropology, literary criticism, geography, imperial history, art history, and photohistory. Such a complex theoretical base makes the task of setting the foundation for the case studies all the more challenging. However, it also immediately imposes a positive form of resistance to settling into a fixed line of argumentation that colonialism’s objects must be construed solely as essentializing texts of racial oppression and imperial governance, an approach we wished to avoid from the start. To do so would be simply to rehearse the same tendencies that one finds in the stereotyping and hierarchical ordering of humanity found, for instance, in early ethnographies. Yet, to examine the conceptions of race in photographs of colonized peoples is to recognize that the images played a certain role in the development of racial theories and prejudices by Americans and Europeans. Hence the photographs could be used in the dehumanizing practices of isolating allegedly degenerate groups, while they could also serve to identify others for their suitability for service or for their receptiveness to reculturation in accord with colonial authority.

The most straightforward use of photography to define racial types can be found in the field of physical anthropology. Before photography was available, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), a German physiologist who is often considered the father of physical anthropology, used comparative anatomy, including measurements and drawings of crania, to study prehistoric human development and to compare racial types.² This, and later cranial studies such as those by the Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton, helped establish the anti-Darwinian theory that there were separate races, each of which was a separate species.³ According to this theory, some of these species were more evolved than others; people with darker skin were deemed less evolved, more primitive, and white Nordic types were at the top. Such theories fed into the justification for slavery in the South in the United States and for more widespread colonial rule in the nineteenth century. Even in the twentieth century, anthropologists and scientists continued to produce “documentary” evidence to prove that there was a correspondence between physical type and intelligence and even a propensity toward criminal behavior. The Harvard anthropologist Earnest A. Hooten built upon Morton’s views in publications with such blatantly prejudiced titles as Apes, Men, and Morons (1937).⁴

Once available in the mid-nineteenth century, photography was used extensively to create “type” or specimen photographs in the newly developing science of biological or physical anthropology.⁵ In these photographs, a non-European person under colonial scrutiny was posed partially or even totally unclothed against a plain or calibrated backdrop to create a profile, frontal, or posterior view. Or scientists measured and photographed the skeletons and skulls of people from far-flung colonized areas of the world. From these photographs physical traits were gleaned and ordered so that different ethnic groups could be classified according to common characteristics. Under the influence of Morton, Louis Agassiz, the Swiss natural historian at Harvard University, had daguerreotypes made of African slaves in South Carolina, and later albumen prints of slaves in Brazil, to document further the theory of polygenesis.⁶ In Europe, anthropologists and ethnographers made similar studies under the auspices of government-sponsored institutes of anthropology and ethnology, such as the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris.

Based on the published studies in physical anthropology, in which races were defined and placed in a social hierarchy, racist or racialized theories developed. The French ethnologist Joseph-Arthur comte de Gobineau published his fourvolume Essai sur I’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the inequality of the human races, 1853–55).⁷ His work, which was extremely influential, declared the superiority of the white “Aryan,” that is, Germanic race. Only by keeping a population pure, by avoiding hybridity or miscegenation, could an Aryan society survive and prosper. His Essay influenced the British Germanophile Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who expounded upon the Frenchman’s theme in his history of the nineteenth century.⁸ Chamberlain was a great fan of Wagner who wrote on the composer’s work and married his only daughter, and his promotion of Aryan superiority would influence Hitler and the National Socialist movement. Echoes of such ideas can be found also in the British notion of “the white man’s burden,” that imperialism could save or civilize non-whites who were perceived to be more primitive and in need of education.⁹

While today physical anthropologists and other scientists have discredited the notion that racial distinction is biological, ironically it is physical evidence that has been used to disprove such suspect theories through scientific advances in genetics and DNA analysis.¹⁰ Recent criticism of literature and other forms of writing has also brought new light to the study of “race” as a cultural, social, and political fabrication.¹¹ The authors here focus on the ways in which photographers contributed to such fabrications by creating visible markers of racial distinction in their photographs, which then assisted in establishing a consensus of both professional and popular belief about the various people who fell under Western control. The racial stereotypes established in ethnographic photographs, and their presentation as titillating spectacle, eventually spilled over into ethnographic films and into the broader realm of popular films, as rigorously analyzed in Fatimah Tobing Rony’s book The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (1996).¹²

As will be seen in the analyses of specific photographic practices, the complexity of the colonial encounters between Europeans, Americans of European descent, and indigenous peoples would be slighted if these images were read only as embodiments of racial prejudices that could be used to suppress colonized people through surveillance and discipline. A subtle argument in discussions of race and colonialist culture is to what extent such prejudices can actually be attributed specifically to racial repugnance, on the one hand, and to colonialist righteous indignation over the customs and beliefs of people of other cultures, on the other. In other words, if the historical evidence is any measure, the latter does not necessary imply the former. Christian colonialists, for instance, made distinctions between their religious beliefs and social mores and those of the colonized, which were clearly viewed as inferior, but not always assuming an inferiority of race.¹³ Furthermore, the Western visualization of native people and their environments as primitive or exotic was more often an attempt to make the unfamiliar or strange seem desirable in a traditionally legible way, than it was a deliberate racial or ethnographic denigration.

As objects of fascination, colonized people were often assigned positions formerly occupied by a colorful cast of conventional characters – shepherds, pagans, banditti, gypsies, loose-living women, and other roughcast types – who, when not appearing as subjects themselves, became little more than stock figures in a colonized landscape.¹⁴Their placement in these preconceived roles helped Westerners negotiate the personally threatening experience of the unknown by selectively transforming uneasy or awkward, even hostile, cultural confrontations into a more palatable form. As Thomas has pointed out, this is a less obvious form of “legislating” the colonized that differs from their more specific identification as racial inferiors by Orientalists.¹⁵ Other writers have recently examined the transformation of North Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and Latin America into a kind of exhibition space of natives, species, and habitats for the consumption of a Euro/American public that perceives them as radically different, or exotic. These writers have focused on literature, travel narratives, art, and anthropological method, but only rarely on photographic production and consumption.¹⁶

Aboriginal peoples were frequently depicted in their native environments, which served to differentiate them further from those of Americans and Europeans. While none of the chapters here focuses on photographs of sites completely devoid of human p...