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Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz's Slave Daguerreotypes Author(s): Brian Wallis Source: American Art, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 38-61 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art Museum Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3109184 Accessed: 08-02-2019 18:47 UTC

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Black Bodies, White Science

Louis Agassiz's Slave Daguerreotypes

Brian Wallis

"Renty, Congo. Plantation of B. F. Taylor, Esq." Daguerreotype taken by J. T. Zealy, Columbia, S.C., March 1850. Peabody Museum, Harvard University

Recent discussions of multiculturalism,

ethnicity, identity, and race have raised

many new questions about the nature of cultural difference. Some critics have

derided "political correctness" and challenges to Western canons of culture, while others have struggled to trace the

genealogies of cultural oppression and to challenge normative structures of identity formation. In its methodology, this

second group of critics has shifted the analysis away from essentialist or biologi-

cal versions of race by trying to determine how fluctuant ethnic roles are constructed

and articulated through a variety of

positions, languages, institutions, and apparatuses. When race has been sub- jected to the critical gaze of these prac- tices, it has inevitably been reinscribed as

a complex and discursive category that cannot be separated from other formative

components of identity. In other words, these debates have

made clear that "race" is a political issue, a

product of subjective choices made around issues of power, a function less of

physical repression than of constructions

of knowledge. Who determines what counts as knowledge? Who represents and who is represented? Whose voice will be heard? Whose stories will be remembered?

Such questions go to the heart of how history is written and validated by

society-through negotiations fraught with silent conflicts and profound

implications. For this reason, it is impor- tant to historicize not only the concept of

race but also the institutions and power-

knowledge conjunctions that have fostered it.

Museums are central to the ways our

culture is constructed. Despite the

attention they now pay to spectacle and

display, museums-like libraries, histori- cal societies, and archives-are principally concerned with sorting and classifying

knowledge. It is significant, then, that

over the past few decades a great sea-

change has swept over all these institu-

tions. In the wake of the photography boom of the 1970s, information once

stored in the form of photographs and

photographically illustrated books has

been wrenched from its previous organi- zational and institutional contexts and

reclassified according to its medium. As critic Rosalind Krauss has noted, the

effect of this change has been "to dis- mantle the photographic archive-the set of practices, institutions, and relationships

to which nineteenth-century photography belonged-and to reassemble it within the categories previously constituted by art and its history."'

Thus, in recent museum exhibitions of

daguerreotypes, images once intended for

39 American Art

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i

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personal, scientific, topographic, medical, or legal reasons have been reclassified,

reunited under the ruling category of the "daguerrean aesthetic." Once-anonymous camera operators have been given names and accorded the status of artists. And

works that formerly circulated in file

cabinets, desk drawers, family albums, and local archives have now been dis-

placed to the autonomous, unifying context of the art museum. If nothing else, this process proves that these puta-

tively objective records are anything but, and that the notion of an autonomous

image is a fiction. Moreover, this process

also suggests that the classificatory systems

of nineteenth-century objectivity may have a great deal to do with the formation

of modernist versions of knowledge. This

dual shift in seeing suggests that all knowledge is relative, historically situated,

subjectively formed and catalogued, and bound to interests that color its meanings. But what is signaled by this shift in

meaning? How has this reorientation of

photographic knowledge actually pro- duced new meanings and new insights?

What is the relationship between chang- ing attitudes toward race and simulta- neous transformations in museum

collection practices?

Louis Agassiz and Racial Typologies

A particularly revelatory case is that of the

so-called slave daguerreotypes of Louis

Agassiz, discovered at Harvard's Peabody Museum in 1975 and justifiably celebrated in the exhibition "Nineteenth-

Century Photography" organized by the Amon Carter Museum in 1992. This

extraordinary series consists of fifteen

highly detailed images on silver daguerreotype plates, which show front and side views of seven southern slaves,

men and women, largely naked.2 The individuals sit or stand facing the camera with a directness and forthrightness that is

at once familiar and utterly strange. If it is

a shock to see full frontal nudity in early

American photography, it is even more

surprising to see it without the trappings of shame or sexual fantasy. Here, the

seated women calmly reveal their breasts,

and the standing men are stark naked. But their attitudes are detached, unemotional, and workmanlike. In what

seems to be a deliberate refusal to engage with the camera or its operator, they stare

into the lens, their faces like masks, eyes

glazed, jaws clenched. Fascinating and disturbing, these pictures raise compelling questions about the construction of-and the social investments in-the categories of "race," "science," "photography," and "the museum."

The daguerreotypes, which were taken for Agassiz in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1850, had two purposes, one nomi- nally scientific, the other frankly political.

They were designed to analyze the

physical differences between European whites and African blacks, but at the same

time they were meant to prove the

superiority of the white race. Agassiz hoped to use the photographs as evidence to prove his theory of "separate creation," the idea that the various races of mankind

were in fact separate species. Though strictly scientific in purpose, the da-

guerreotypes took on a very particular

meaning in the context of prevailing political, economic, and aesthetic theories about race. Thus, they help to discredit

the very notion of objectivity and call into

question the supposed transparency of the photographic record.

The classificatory project that led to

the production of the slave daguerreotypes

was something of a departure for Agassiz, who, in 1850, was the most famous

scientist in America (fig. 1).3 Before coming to the United States, he had shown no interest in the growing Ameri- can debates over slavery or the division of mankind into separate species. Born in Switzerland, Agassiz (1807-1873) had

40 Summer 1995

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California Historical Society, San Francisco

achieved his first success in Paris as the

star student of the legendary Baron

Georges Cuvier, the leading zoologist of his day and the founder of the modern

science of comparative anatomy. Cuvier was so impressed with Agassiz that he turned over to him his own research on

fossil fish. In 1829, when he was just

twenty-two, Agassiz published his first

scientific treatise, a mammoth, ground-

breaking study of the fish of Brazil. This volume consisted of the meticulous

drawing, classification, and ordering of more than five hundred species of fish

found principally along the Amazon River.

Continuing his studies of fish, in 1830

Agassiz published the comprehensive catalogue Fresh Water Fishes of Central

Europe and, from 1833 to 1844, the

Such questions go to the heart

of how history is written and

validated by society-through

negotiations fraught with

silent conflicts andprofound

implications.

multipart publication Research on Fossil

Fish. Previous to this project, only eight generic types of fossil fish had been

identified; Agassiz's five-volume work

catalogued more than 340 new genera. The methodology Agassiz used was comparative and relational: individual images or specimens held far less meaning for him than the cumulative consequence of a series properly ordered. Sorting and classifying were the bases of Agassiz's method. As a result, he was one of the

principal collectors and archivists of

natural history specimens in the nine-

teenth century. In the United States, he

founded prominent natural history museums in Charleston, South Carolina,

and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and established the fundamental rules for

cataloguing and classifying. Indeed, the modern museum combines two

41 American Art

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2 Detail of Louis Agassiz's "Tableau" to accompany his introduction to Josiah Nott and George Gliddon, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854)

nineteenth-century traditions-the organization schemes of Agassiz and the showmanship of P. T. Barnum.

When he emigrated to the United States in December 1846 to take a post at Harvard University, Agassiz's first stop was in Philadelphia to see "the American Golgotha," the famous skull collection of Dr. Samuel Morton. An eminent physi- cian and anatomist, Morton had recently published two skull compendia, Crania Americana (1839) and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844), works that had profound influ-

Works that formerly circulated in

file cabinets, desk drawers, fam-

ily albums, and local archives

have now been displaced to the

autonomous, unifying context of the art museum.

ence on the understanding of race in America. Morton's first book collected

data on the shape and capacity of the skulls of various North American types, classified as white, Indian, Eskimo, and

Negro. Judging that the ancient skulls he had collected from Indian burials and

other sites did not differ markedly from modern skulls of the same race, Morton

concluded that the races always had the

same physical and mental characteristics. In other words, he believed that racial factors were static rather than evolution-

ary. Moreover, from a comparison among skulls, Morton deduced that the races of

mankind had been separately created as

distinct and unequal species (fig. 2).4 Prior scientific theory about evolution

was almost universally creationist; that is, it conformed to the Bible in its belief in

the unity of all peoples as descendants of

Adam and Eve. This theory, called monogenism, asserted origin from a single source. Racial discrepancies were ex- plained by subscribing to one of two views: one, the environmentalist, which

said that separate races evolved into

different body types and skin pigmenta- tion because of climate, locale, and other

physical effects; and two, miscegenist, which held that separate races were the

result of intermarriage. But it was poly- genesis, the theory of multiple, separate

creations for each race as distinct species, that became the hallmark of the American

School of Ethnology. For a brief time around 1850, the American theory of polygenesis, with Morton as its leader,

enjoyed wide credence in international scientific circles.

Whether or not Morton and Agassiz discussed racial theory at their first

meeting is unclear. Until that point,

Agassiz had shown little interest in racial

typologies and had not yet embraced the theory of separate creation. He was

impressed by the skulls, though. For a

collector like Agassiz, the effect was dramatic, and he wrote to his mother at

once: "Imagine a series of 600 skulls, most of Indians from all tribes who inhabit or

once inhabited North America. Nothing like it exists anywhere else. This collec-

tion, by itself, is worth a trip to America." However, in the same letter to his mother,

Agassiz recorded another event that may have either reflected his conversations

with Morton or simply jolted him into a confrontation with the issue of race. He

wrote of his encounter, for the first time

in his life, with a black man:

All the domestics in my hotel were men of

color. Ican scarcely express to you the

painful impression that I received, especially

since the feeling that they inspired in me is

contrary to all our ideas about the confrater-

nity of the human type and the unique

origin of our species. .. . Nonetheless, it is

impossible for me to repress the feeling that

42 Summer 1995

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~~~~~~~~ iii! i ! i . i tI.E R P A .J ?AM -I A ,V NEGRO.! Vt- HO TENTOT

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they are not of the same blood as us. In see-

ing their blackfaces with their thick lips

and grimacing teeth, the wool on their head,

their bent knees, their elongated hands, their

large curved nails, and especially the livid

color of their palms, I could not take my eyes

off their face in order to tell them to stayfar

away.5

43 American Art

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Despite his personal repugnance for the

blacks he encountered, Agassiz later

claimed that his beliefs on racial typologies

were without political motivation, and he

remained a staunch abolitionist, a position that seems contradictory given the later

proslavery embrace of his views. Morton, a

Quaker, also argued for disinterested

science, although his assertion, in Crania

Aegyptiaca, that ancient Egyptians were not black and in fact had employed blacks as

their slaves seemed to support American

slavery. But clearly, highly subjective

political and aesthetic decisions governed the development of polygenesis, particu-

larly among southern scientists determined

to prove the inferiority of African-Ameri- can slaves in the decades before the Civil

War.

This "scientific" issue came to a head at

the third meeting of the American Associa- tion for the Advancement of Science held

in Charleston in March 1850. The central

theme of the conference was the question

of the unity or diversity of species, and the

featured speaker was Agassiz. His com- ments to the Charleston audience, his first

public statement regarding separate creation, were circumspect. But he made it clear that he sided with the southern view

of polygenesis and accepted the inferior status of blacks. The various races of

mankind, he stated, were "well marked and

distinct" and did not originate "from a common center ... nor a common pair."'

This statement elicited a firestorm of

controversy with the conservative clergy in

his hometown of Boston, and Agassiz was obliged to make his positions on Christian- ity and abolitionism clear in three long

articles published in the Christian Exam-

iner. In these, Agassiz stressed that his views regarding separate creation did not contradict the biblical notion of a unified

human origin. Rather, he argued, the Bible referred only to the Caucasian inhabitants of one portion of the globe; Negroes, Indians, Hindus, and the other "species" he identified inhabited different and

discrete geographical regions, having

originated and evolved in unique ways. Regarding slavery, Agassiz tried specifi- cally to divorce himself from any political

implications (or intentions) of his project:

We disclaim, however, all connection with

any question involvingpolitical matters. It is

simply with reference to the possibility of

appreciating the differences existing between

different men, and of eventually determin-

ing whether they have originated all over the world and under what circumstances, that

we have tried to trace some facts representing the human races.7

Yet, following his visit to Charleston in

March 1850, Agassiz was motivated to gather specific evidence for his theory in

relation to Africans. That Agassiz would

employ science in a project that implicitly

supported the southern view of slavery is

significant because it demonstrates how

the pose of disinterested empiricism

actually fortified preexisting, though

unstated, political views. Even the mode of statistical analysis had an ideological

basis characteristic of increasing modern- ization. The mania for the collection and

quantification of natural specimens coincided with other statistical projects,

such as the beginning of the annual census, statistics for crime and health, and

the mapping and surveying of new lands,

exemplifying a new way of seeing the world.8 Certainly, such scientific enu- merations reduced individuals to statistics

and involved depersonalization, but, its proponents argued, modern quantifica- tion would improve social organization by helping to catalogue the needs of citizens.

In attempting to organize his data

regarding Africans, Agassiz sought firsthand evidence. Since the importation of Africans had been outlawed in 1808,

Agassiz was doubtful about finding "pure" examples of the race in America. But Dr. Robert W. Gibbes, who had given two papers in Charleston, encouraged Agassiz to visit the plantations around Columbia. Gibbes, the son of a prominent South

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Carolina family, was a close friend of

many of the leading plantation owners,

including such families as the Hamptons, the Hammonds, and the Taylors. He was also Columbia's foremost authority on science and culture. He was a nationally recognized expert on American paleontol- ogy and, like Agassiz, an obsessive collec- tor of scientific specimens.'

Whatever Agassiz may have thought about the racial status of Africans as he

wrote out his lectures in Boston, his

attitude was radically transformed once he witnessed the real-life situation of African-

American slaves in Columbia, South

Carolina. There, he encountered a tiny caste of aristocratic white slaveowners

who commanded vast plantations (Wade Hampton's alone was more than eighteen thousand acres) and owned as many as three thousand slaves. In 1850, the white

population of Columbia was just over six thousand, whereas the slave population was in excess of a hundred thousand.

Given this huge disparity, upcountry

plantation owners were justifiably fearful

of slave uprisings and used a variety of

fear-inducing tactics to insure docility. Thus, if attitudes toward slaves were more

tolerant, even paternalistic, in Massachu-

setts or even Virginia, in South Carolina discipline was deemed necessary, and the need for discipline seemed to encourage an attitude of contempt toward slaves.10

How Agassiz hit upon the idea of photographing the slaves is not fully known. The idea may have come from Morton, who had given Agassiz a da- guerreotype of a young African boy he had exhibited before the Academy of

Natural Sciences in Philadelphia."11 Or

Agassiz may have been familiar with various calls in contemporary European scientific journals for the creation of a

photographic archive of human speci- mens, or types. For instance, Agassiz's

colleague ltienne-Reynaud-Augustin Serres, a professor of comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes and the

president of the Academy of Sciences in

Paris, had proposed the establishment of a

museum of photographs of the races of mankind. And, in 1845, a French

daguerreotypist named E. Thiesson had taken studies of Brazilians and Portuguese Africans in Lisbon.12 But there was no

precedent in America for the type of

photographic collection that Agassiz sought to build.

In a letter to Morton, Gibbes explained that during a tour of plantations around

[The daguerreotypes] help to

discredit the very notion of objec-

tivity and call into question the

supposed transparency of the

photographic record.

Columbia, Agassiz had selected various slaves to be photographed: "Agassiz was delighted with his examination of Ebo, Foulah, Gullah, Guinea, Coromantee,

Mandrigo and Congo Negroes. He found enough to satisfy him that they have differences from the other races." After

Agassiz departed, Gibbes had the slaves brought to the local daguerreotypist,

Joseph T. Zealy, and photographed. Gibbes carefully recorded the names,

African origins, and current ownership of the slaves. In June 1850, Gibbes wrote to

Morton, saying, "I have just finished the

daguerreotypes for Agassiz of native

Africans of various tribes. I wish you could see them."13

The fifteen daguerreotypes are divided into two series. The first consists of

standing, fully nude images showing front, side, and rear views. This practice reflected a physiognomic approach, an attempt to record body shape, propor- tions, and posture. Two slaves were photographed in this manner-Alfred

45 American Art

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3, 4 "Alfred, Foulah, belonging to I. Lomas, Columbia, S.C." Daguerreotype taken by J. T.

Zealy, Columbia, S.C., March 1850. Peabody Museum, Harvard University

(side and back views; figs. 3, 4), from the Foulah tribe before his enslavement to I.

Lomas; and Jem (front, side, and back

views; figs. 5-7), from the Gullah and now the property of F. W. Green. The second series was more tightly focused,

showing the heads and naked torsos of three men and two women. This series

adhered to a phrenological approach, emphasizing the character and shape of the head. The daguerreotypes include front and side views of five slaves: Jack

(figs. 8, 9), from the Guinea tribe, a slave driver on Edgehill, the plantation of Benjamin F. Taylor; Drana (figs. 10, 11),

Jack's American-born daughter who lived on the Taylor estate; Renty (figs. 12, 13), from the Congo tribe, who also worked at Taylor's estate; Delia (figs. 14, 15), Renty's American-born daughter, who also lived on the Taylor estate; and Fassena (figs. 16, 17), from the Mandingo tribe, a carpenter at the plantation of Wade Hampton II.

Typological Systems

The efforts by Gibbes and Agassiz to

systematize the slave daguerreotypes represent an early attempt not only to

apply photography to anthropology, but also to form a coherent photographic archive. As critic Allan Sekula has pointed

out in his landmark article "The Body and the Archive," almost from its incep-

tion the photograph was perceived as a form of currency within a closed system.

As currency, the photograph ascribed value by both quantifying things and placing them in a circulating system that emphasized their similarity to or differ-

ence from other things. This system,

generally perceived as an archive, attempts

46 Summer 1995

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5-7 "Jem, Gullah, belonging to F. N. Green." Daguerreotype taken by J. T. Zealy, Columbia,

S.C., March 1850. Peabody Museum, Harvard University

to give coherence and meaning to seem- ingly random components. Every photo- graph, Sekula says, takes its place in a "shadow archive," that ultimate, imagi-

nary ranking and organizing of informa- tion implied by the very selective and

classificatory nature of photography.14

In fact, primitive archival systems were immediately characteristic of the

daguerrean era. The "shadow archive" of early photographs can be divided along two general organizational principles- the laterally organized catalogue or the

vertically organized genealogy. The catalogue attempted to establish similarity or difference across a spatial dimension.

This concept thus included group por- traits, panoramic views, and collections of

portraits of famous people. The geneal- ogy, on the other hand, assembled likeness or diversity across time. This

category embraced family photographs (often assembled in frames or, later, in

albums), postmortem or memorial photographs, records of changing scenes,

or changes in an individual over time. Within the "shadow archive," both of

these systems for organizing photographs -and they often overlapped-implied a

hierarchical ordering."5 Individual images were linked comparatively and organized dichotomously, thus creating and enforc- ing divisions between self and other,

healthy and diseased, normal and patho- logical. Strengthened by the seeming transparency of photographic realism, these categories and the divisions between them soon took on the authority of

47 American Art

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8, 9 "Jack (driver), Guinea. Plantation of B. F. Taylor, Esq., Columbia, S.C." Daguerreotype taken by J. T. Zealy, Columbia, S.C., March 1850. Peabody Museum, Harvard University

natural "facts." Supplying either too much or too little information, photo-

graphs soon muddied the easy distinctions

between subjective knowledge and what was called "objective." Owing to its indexical properties-that is, that a photograph retains a "trace" of an actual existence, as does, say, a footprint- photography seemed to be entirely objective. But the very literalness of photographs produces an uncontrollable multiplication of meanings in even the most banal images. And the equally complex acts of taking, reading, or organizing photographs animate all the

trajectories of power and desire, mastery and projection, self and other that

triangulate the visual field and govern reception.

By supplying an overabundance of information, photography confuses and

problematizes its message; it creates what author Roland Barthes calls a "reality effect," a semblance of realism bound to

detail. In nineteenth-century parlance,

two technical words gained a certain currency to describe how "reality" was

construed: the word daguerreotype was

distinguished from the word stereotype.'6

Stereotypes were originally molds for

creating multiple copies of printing type; the word, therefore, came to connote

generalized replication. The daguerreo- type, on the other hand, was characterized

by miniaturization, infinitesimal preci-

sion, and detail. These contrasting characteristics-the general category and the specific case-are precisely those poles that govern the logic of the archive.

The early ethnographic research conducted by Morton, Agassiz, and other members of the American School of

Ethnology depended on the collapse of the specific and the generic into "type."

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10, 11 (overleaf top left) "Drana, country born, daughter of Jack Guinea. Plantation of B. F.

Taylor, Esq." Daguerreotype taken by J. T. Zealy, Columbia, S.C., March 1850. Peabody Museum, Harvard University

12, 13 (overleaf bottom left) "Renty, Congo. Plantation of B. F. Taylor, Esq." Daguerreotype taken by J. T. Zealy, Columbia, S.C., March 1850. Peabody Museum, Harvard University

14, 15 (overleaf top right) "Delia, country born of African parents, daughter of Renty, Congo." Daguerreotype taken by J. T. Zealy, Columbia, S.C., March 1850.

Peabody Museum, Harvard University

16, 17 (overleaf bottom right) "Fassena (carpenter), Mandingo. Plantation of Col. Wade

Hampton, near Columbia, S.C." Daguerreotype taken by J. T. Zealy, Columbia, S.C., March 1850. Peabody Museum, Harvard University

The type represented an average example

of a racial group, an abstraction, though

not necessarily the ideal, that defined the

general form or character of individuals within the group; it subsumed individual- ity. As Herbert H. Odom explains, "The term type roughly implies that the ob-

served, apparently disordered phenomena are best explained as deviations from certain determinate norms .... The function of classification is then to decide

which observed creature may be consid- ered as deviations from each set norm

and, of course, how many norms exist.""17

Photography strengthened the seeming reality of the type by objectifying the

individual and by using props and other details to accentuate the "truth" of the

depiction. Typological photographs- particularly those that became popular in the 1860s and 1870s-were assumed to

be self-evident, to speak for themselves,

and, at the same time, to be generic.

Typically, natives were identified only by their country, tribe, or some other generic

label (for example, "A Burmese Beauty"). Another feature of type classification

and the typological photograph was the

emphasis on external appearance, on the measurement and observation of the

human form (that is, the skeletons and

skulls), rather than on cultural forms.

This practice conformed to Agassiz's method as well. He had worked princi- pally with fossils and other "hard" evidence to determine his classification of

fish types. This objectifying method was

allied with physiognomy and phrenology, the early-nineteenth-century sciences that

analyzed the exterior form of the human

body in an attempt to understand connec-

tions between different human groups as

well as the inner workings of the mind

and spirit. As Agassiz said, "The material form is the cover of the spirit"; this he

regarded as "fundamental and self- evident." The discourse on slavery and abolitionism was typified by such external views of the body. Two images keyed to

outward markings received wide circula- tion in mid-nineteenth-century popular culture-the Branded Hand (1844) and the Scourged Back (1863), showing, respectively, a punished slave liberator and a slave's lash-scarred back (figs. 18, 19).18

Typological systems depended on the widespread contemporary interest in the body, especially the head. Silhouettes,

portrait daguerreotypes, and phrenology all directed special attention to the shape, size, or character of the head as a record of

individuality. The polygenesists, by contrast, were interested in defining

The very literalness ofphoto-

graphs produces an uncontrol-

lable multiplication of meanings

in even the most banal images.

separate racial types. Their charts, derived

from phrenological models, often showed

crude rankings from the primate head to the African to the classical Greek (fig. 20).

This thinly disguised racism was also reflected in their field research, which

involved not only the physical measure-

ment of the body, but an assessment of the moral character, manner, and social

habits of each racial type. For instance, Morton wrote that the African Hottentots

were the "nearest approximation to the

lower animals.... Their complexion is yellowish brown, compared by travelers to

the peculiar hue of Europeans in the last

stages of jaundice. . . . The women are represented as even more repulsive in

appearance than the men.""' Needless to say, such observations were often casual and rarely dependent on what would today be called fieldwork. But as scientific

description, such views were legitimized.

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....

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B

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18 Albert Sands Southworth and

Josiah Johnson Hawes, Captain Jonathan W Walker's Branded Hand, 1845. Sixth plate daguerre- otype, 6.2 x 8.3 cm (23/4x 3 1/4 in.).

Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston

The construction of racial types, their ranking in a hierarchy of intellect, and the

analysis of the meaning of their physiog-

nomy in the general scheme of things all required the presence of a standard.

Although these scientists argued that their

studies were made without prejudice or without models, there is ample evidence that a standard was in place to character- ize the Caucasian ideal. As historian

George Mosse has argued, this view emerged from the appropriation by

prerevolutionary Enlightenment anthro-

pology of the classicist idealism of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, best remembered as the founder of art history.

Winckelmann argued that the "physical beauty of the ancient Greeks accounted for the excellence of their art." The

ancient Egyptians and Africans, by

comparison, had been handicapped by their own physical appearance, "which lacked the features that could stimulate

the artist through an ideal of higher beauty."20

This aesthetic standard underlay every

classificatory system in the polygenetic program, guaranteeing that the races

would be considered not only separate but unequal. The embodiment of the classical ideal in America, the standard against which all the derogatory images of African Americans were judged, was the neoclassi-

cal statue in white marble, typified by

Hiram Powers's Greek Slave (fig. 21). Various versions of this life-size standing nude sculpture, ostensibly representing a modern Greek woman captured by Turks, were wildly popular among American audiences from the time of its creation in

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19 McAllister & Brothers, The Scourged Back, 1863. Albumen silver print carte-de-visite. Collection of Nicholas M. Graver

1844 until its triumph at the London Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851. Critics praised its chaste purity and its classical proportions; male and female viewers

swooned. Rather than suggesting violence,

the slight chains on the Greek Slave's

wrists only accentuated the work's mildly

erotic and highly sentimentalized view of

slavery and the body. But the irony that

the model of purity and ideal beauty is

depicted as a slave was not lost on the

sculpture's earliest audiences, and the statue was embraced by the abolitionist

cause. More pointed, however, was the cartoon in Punch that depicted the anti-

ideal-an image of a black slave on a pedestal (fig. 22).21

In nineteenth-century anthropology,

blacks were often situated along the evolutionary ladder midway between a classical ideal and the orangutan. From these pseudoscientific studies a Negro type emerged that was highly distorted

and almost unique to ethnographic illustration. In comparing various skulls, taxonomists often relied on the

device of the facial angle. This technique,

invented by the eighteenth-century Dutch

taxonomist Peter Camper, involved the systematic evaluation of the profile

measurement from the tip of the forehead

to the greatest protrusion of the lips. For Camper and others, the mathematical capability of scientifically classifying such information offered a new tool for the

investigation of evolution, or linear

development. Camper described his project: "I observed that a line drawn

along the forehead and upper lip indi-

cated a difference in national physiog- nomy.... When I made these lines incline forwards, I obtained the face of an

antique; backwards of a negroe; still more

backwards, the lines which mark an ape, a dog, a snipe, &c."22 Representations of the facial angle of the Negro skull almost always showed an abnormally pronounced brow, protruding lips and teeth, and a

back-sloping forehead. Curiously, these "scientific" representations preceded most of the more familiar stereotypes and derogatory images of African Americans

in popular culture. The popular images

53 American Art

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built on the scientific ones and enhanced

or exaggerated distortions of the black body. The subject's clothes were often

shown torn, partially removed, or missing altogether; the body itself was often

shown being whipped, beaten, hung, pierced, bitten, branded, or otherwise

subjugated to a white oppressor. More- over, many of the exposed and attacked

bodies were shown in explicitly erotic

poses, raising the question of how these

largely proslavery images functioned as a

type of pornography.

It is perhaps not coincidental that by their unprecedented nudity, the slave

This aesthetic standard underlay

every classificatory system in the

polygenetic program.

daguerreotypes intersect with pornogra-

phy, that other regime of photography so central to the 1850s (at least in Europe) and so exclusively concerned with the

representation of the tactile surface of the

human body. While there is no absolute connection between photographs of the

nude body and pornography, the vaguely

eroticized nature of the slave daguerreo-

types derives from the unwavering,

voyeuristic manner with which they indiscriminately survey the bodies of the

Africans, irrespective of the subjects' lives.

Agassiz was undoubtedly influenced in this regard by his great mentor, Baron

Cuvier, who took a particular-if not perverse-interest in the Hottentot Venus, an African woman who was

exhibited naked as a curiosity in Europe because of her unusually prominent

posterior. After her death, Cuvier con- ducted an autopsy of her body and

published a text about its distinguishing

features.23 The case of the Hottentot

Venus marked the collapse of scientific

investigation of the racial other into the

realm of the pornographic. This sort of

elision of the exotic and the sexually illicit explains in part the mid-nineteenth-

century fascination with distorting the features of blacks in popular representa-

tions. In many texts (including Agassiz's letter to his mother), blacks were made

not only animal-like or simian, but also

vulgar and overtly seductive.

The Type and the Portrait

Given this history of the distortions

wrought by typologies, it is particularly

ironic that historian Alan Trachtenberg,

in writing of the Agassiz slave daguerreo- types, refers to them as portraits and even likens them to classical Roman busts.24

Here, it is necessary to draw the funda-

mental distinctions between the type and

the portrait. Formally, the type discour-

ages style and composition, seeking to present the information as plainly and

straightforwardly as possible. Thus, the

images are frequently organized around a clear central axis with a minimum of external information that could distract

from the principal focus. Since objectivity

is the goal, the typological image appears to have no author. (In the case of the slave

daguerreotypes, authorship is irrelevant, though it clearly pertains more to Agassiz

than to the photographer Zealy.) And, finally, the type is clearly situated within a

system that denies its subject even as it establishes overt relations between its

mute subjects. The emphasis on the body occurs at the expense of speech; the

subject as already positioned, known, owned, represented, spoken for, or constructed as silent; in short, it is

ignored. In other words, the typological photograph is a form of representational colonialism. Fundamentally nonre- ciprocal, it masks its subjective distortions

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Fia. 839. -Apolle BevWldereS Ri. 846.5R

FIo. 840.510 FIo. 846.*

ho.. 847.s4 Fio. 341. Negrope

FIo. 842.367

Obimpansee Hottentot from Somet.

Creole Negro.

FIG 843 .- euiag ChhapnxeeA\

FIG. 844 Moibe Negro, 186. Mobe Ne

Fl. 861. FIo. 852.

20 Pages from Nott and Gliddon, Types ofMankind (1854)

in the guise of logic and organization. Its formations are deformations.

The portrait, on the other hand, is of

value principally because of the viewer's relationship to the sitter, the ability to

recognize the subject when he or she is absent. In this sense, the portrait is like a caricature that accents the telling features of an individual. Generally, the nine-

teenth-century photographic portrait was

designed to affirm or underscore the white middle-class individual's right to

personhood, a fact underlined by legal and social structures as well. Further, the

portrait signaled an individual's place in society, which explains why so many

daguerreotypes feature sitters posed with the tools of their trade or other attributes.

As Sekula makes clear, "Every portrait

implicitly took its place within a social and moral hierarchy. The private moment of sentimental individuation, the look at

the frozen gaze-of-the-loved-one, was shadowed by two other more public looks:

55 American Art

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4e

?- i-?:::: : ----- :

-`ii- i

:: :

:::::::: - : :

:: "' :

IB~P~ ;

-1

i : :

li-li~~

:; ::

?i:

_:-ii--iii?

i

?;i:? ~i:? : ::::::::i :::?~lli ;:--~?F: _~;::- ~b_; I*;~,k0~

~8&~S?~

,. -;?--??i?-

i? -I:

:: ::: I : ?-? ^-i~? ~:~~ `: ~~i?g?a-

21 Hiram Powers, Greek Slave, 1869. Marble, 11.7 x 35.5 x 34.2 cm (44 x 14 x 13 1/2 in.). National Museum of American

Art, Smithsonian Institution,

Gift of Mrs. Benjamin H. Warder

22 "The Virginian Slave, Intended as a Companion to Powers' 'Greek Slave."' Engraving published in Punch 20 (1851): 236

a look up, at one's 'betters,' and a look down, at one's 'inferiors."'25 Few slaves,

however, had the luxury of projecting any look at all. That slaves were denied

individual identity in the antebellum

South is merely underscored by the near-

total absence of photographs depicting them.

This process of social ranking was most apparent in the work of early criminolo-

gists, ethnologists, and medical photogra- phers. In such fields, it was necessary to construct a standard, or mean, to establish

deviance and thus identify and isolate the

ultimate threat to the ideal. Trachtenberg has astutely noted the similarity between

the slave daguerreotypes and a slightly earlier project (ca. 1846) by Mathew Brady to record images of inmates at

mental institutions.26 These images, now

lost, are preserved in the line engravings published as illustrations (fig. 23) to the American edition of Marmaduke

Sampson's Rationale of Crime (1846), edited by penal reformer Eliza Farnham.

Brady's images fortified Farnham's argument that criminals and cretins could be recognized by their outward appear- ance, that the mark of deviance was

presumed to be emblazoned across the head and body like a stigmata. With the rise of urbanism and industrialization in

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the mid-nineteenth century, such typo-

logical readings were deemed practical to protect oneself from strangers by immedi-

ately assessing their character. This process of identifying another

person by superficial physical characteris-

tics structured the logic of racial classifica-

tion. Surprisingly, such distinctions did not really exist before the nineteenth

century. To be sure, various forms of

prejudice and subjugation had existed in many societies, but prior to 1800, none of the variety of discriminatory terms and

attitudes employed were based on race. Racism, as it emerged in the early nine- teenth century, was a heavily encoded and naturalized belief that racial characteristics

The typologicalphotograph is a

form of representational colo-

nialism. Fundamentally

nonreciprocal it masks its sub-

jective distortions in the guise of

logic and organization. Its for-

mations are deformations.

and behaviors were grounded in biology and conformed to a qualitative hierar-

chy.27 But, as historian George M. Fredrickson has argued, "for its full

growth, intellectual and ideological, racism required a body of 'scientific' and

cultural thought which would give credence to the notion that the blacks

were for unalterable reasons of race, mor-

ally and intellectually inferior to whites."28

Agassiz's slave photographs constitute a perfect example of the conjunction of

scientific and cultural thought in the

formation of racist ideology. In attempting to understand the

origins of racism, it is important to avoid

removing it to a historical past or displac-

ing its sources onto the oppressed. Any

investigation of representations of African- American blackness, then, must actually take a critical look at Euro-American whiteness to understand the construction

of race as a category. As critic Coco Fusco

has insisted, "To ignore white ethnicity is

to redouble its hegemony by naturalizing

it."29 In this regard, it is crucial to under- stand the arsenal of institutional means

geared toward the enforcement of white

male superiority. Photography, typologies, archives, and museums serve as disciplinary structures, socially constructed means of

defining and regulating difference. Like all representations of difference,

Louis Agassiz's slave daguerreotypes exploit the familiar ethnographic convention of

introducing the comfortable white viewer to that which is not only exotic and safely

distant, but also generally and deliberately

invisible. But not all designations of difference are the same. As Frederick

Douglass noted in a review of the work of

the American School of Ethnology in 1854:

It is fashionable now, in our land, to exagger-

ate the differences between the negro and the

European. If for instance, a phrenologist or

naturalist undertakes to represent in portraits,

the difference between the two races-the

negro and the European-he will invariably present the highest type of the European, and

the lowest type of the negro. .... If the very best type of the European is always presented,

I insist that justice, in all such works,

demands that the very best type of the negro

should be taken. The importance of this

criticism may not be apparent to all;--to the

black man it is very apparent.30

As Douglass so pointedly noted, the meaning of representations is governed not only by who makes the image but also by who looks. If this view accords with much

recent critical theory that acknowledges the role of the observer in constructing knowl- edge, it also points to the part that muse-

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23 "S. S., a vagrant, formerly a prize- fighter sent to the State Prison for five years for assault and battery, with intent to kill." Engraving by Tudor Horton, after lost daguerreo-

type by Mathew Brady, ca. 1846.

Published in Marmaduke Sampson, Rationale of Crime, ed. Eliza Farnham

(New York: Appleton's, 1846)

A PI'ENID)IX 157

S. S. is a vagrant, and inmate of what is termed the Luna. House, on Blackwell's Island. He is an Irishman; was for- merly a prize-fightei'; was sent to the State Prison for five years for assault and battery, with intent to kill, and since his liberation, a period of some six or eight years, has spent most of his time in the city and county prisons of New-York. Be- fore his mind became deranged, lie exhibited great energy of passion and purpose, but they were all of a low character, their sole bearing being to prove his own superiority as an animal. He was both vain and selfish.

The drawing shows a broad, low head, corresponding with such a character. The moral organs are exceedingly deficient, especially benevolence, and thle intellect only moderately devel- oped. The whole organization, indeed, indicates a total want of every thing like refined and elevated sentiment. If the higher capacities and endowments of humanity were ever found coupled with such a head as this, it would be a phe- nomenon as inexplicable as that of seeing without the eye, or hearing without the ear.

ums and archives play in fixing meanings. By adhering to immutable versions of historical truth, such institutions structure

information according to ideologically inflected principles. But rather than dismissing or rejecting these institutions, it is important to critically examine their

practices and to recognize that their versions of history are not absolute. Such

critical methods will help foster multiplic- ity, subjectivity, and relativity in the construction of histories.

In the case of the slave daguerreotypes, this suggests that their meaning extends

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24 Carrie Mae Weems, Sea Island Series, 1992. Three color prints: two panels, 50.8 cm in diameter (20 in. in diameter), one panel, 40.6 x 50.8 cm (16 x 20 in.). P.P.O.W., New York

well beyond the empirical proof that

Louis Agassiz sought. Quite different- but no less valid-histories and personal meanings can be connected with these images. If colonialism and ethnographic exploitation depend on appropriation, one must acknowledge that what is taken can always be taken back. In 1991, for example, the African-American artist and

photographer Carrie Mae Weems jour- neyed to the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina to record the remnants of

the culture of the Gullah, the survivors of

slaves from Africa. Weems photographed brick shelters and other surviving records

of the Gullah, producing a series of works

that combined texts, narratives, photo-

graphs, and plates. Among the images incorporated into Weems's works were old pictures of several slaves who had

come from Africa-reproductions of Agassiz's slave daguerreotypes (fig. 24).31

She did not alter or transform the images; she only selected, enlarged, and

recontextualized them. By placing them beside pictures of remnants of the African

culture the Gullah brought to America,

Weems viewed their lives empathetically from a black point of view. She saw these

men and women not as representatives of

some typology but as living, breathing ancestors. She made them portraits.

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Notes

1 Rosalind Krauss, "Photography's Discursive Spaces," Art Journal 42 (winter 1982): 311-19. See also Douglas Crimp, "The Museum's Old/The Library's New Subject," Parachute 22 (spring 1981): 32-37; and Allan Sekula, "Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation)," Massachusetts Review 19 (winter 1978): 859-83.

2 See Martha A. Sandweiss, ed., Photogra- phy in Nineteenth-Century America (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1991). One of the slave daguerreotypes was also featured on the cover of the catalogue for the exhibition "From Site to Sight," organized by the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, and circulated by the Smithsonian Institution in 1986.

Agassiz's fifteen slave daguerreotypes are published here in their entirety for the first time.

3 On Louis Agassiz, see Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960).

4 For the best discussion of Morton and

the American School of Ethnology, see William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815-59 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960). See also Stephen Jay Gould's classic The Mismeasure ofMan (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1981), pp. 50ff. Gould restaged many of Morton's cranial measurements and

discovered important discrepancies that demonstrated that there is little differ-

ence in the size of the cranial cavity of different individuals, regardless of race.

The culminating document of the anti-Darwinist American School of

Ethnology was J. C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types ofMankind (Philadel- phia, 1854), which featured an introduc- tion by Agassiz. Nott and Gliddon, though distinguished scientists, were both rabid segregationists who distorted art historical and archeological evidence (mainly from Egyptian tombs) to promote their view that blacks were historically inferior to other races.

5 Agassiz to his mother, December 1846 (Houghton Library, Harvard University), quoted in Gould, pp. 50, 44-45.

6 Agassiz, quoted in Elinor Reichlin, "Faces of Slavery: A Historical Find," American Heritage 28 (June 1977): 4.

7 Agassiz, "The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races," Christian Examiner 49 (1850): 113.

8 See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

9 For more on Gibbs and the plantation owners around Columbia, see Carol Bleser, ed., Secret and Sacred: The Diaries

of ames Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1988).

10 See George M. Frederickson, "Masters and Mudsills: The Role of Race in the

Planter Ideology of South Carolina," The Arrogance ofRace: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), pp. 15-27.

11 This daguerreotype, taken by W. & J. Langenheim, is reproduced in Melissa Banta and George Hinsley, From Site to Sight: Anthropology, Photography, and the Power of1magery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 34.

12 For more on French attempts to use daguerreotypes for anthopological study,

see lEtienne-Reynaud-Augustin Serres, "Observations sur I'application de la photographie a l'dtude des race humaines," Comptes Rendus des Seances de l'Acadimie des Sciences 21 (1845): 242- 46; Hartmut Krech, "Lichtbilder vom Menschen: Vom Typenbild zur anthropologischen Fotographie," Fotogeschichte 4 (1984): pp. 3-15; and "Anwendung der Photographie zum Studium der Menschenracen," Dingler's Polytechnisches Journal (Stuttgart) 97 (1845): 400. On Theisson, in particular, see Janet E. Buerger, French Daguerreo- types (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 90-91, 229.

13 Robert W. Gibbes to Samuel G. Morton, 31 March and June 1850, Library Company of Philadelphia. Although little is known about Joseph T. Zealy, we can imagine the slaves' shock upon entering his gallery. The local newspaper editor wrote that Zealy's gallery was "fitted up with great taste. . . . The room where he takes his pictures is handsomely furnished, and we notice therein an

elegant piano, for the accommodation of his lady visitors. Immediately off this is

an ante-room, for the proper adjustment of toilette, etc., by his visitors. It is

magnificently lighted, having, besides numerous windows, a large skylight adjusted and constructed for the purposes of his art, and will undoubtedly insure a most perfect finish to his pictures." Photographic Art-Journal 2 (December 1891): 376-77.

14 Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39 (winter 1986): 3- 64.

15 Ibid., p. 10.

16 See Roland Barthes, "The Reality Effect," in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), pp. 141-48. For the etymology of the word stereotype, see Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotype of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 15-35; on the uses of the word daguerreotype, see Alan Trachtenberg, "Photography: The Emergence of a Keyword," in Photogra- phy in Nineteenth-Century America, Sandweiss, ed., pp. 13-47.

17 Herbert H. Odom, "Generalizations on Race in Nineteenth-Century America," Isis 58 (spring 1967): 5-18. See also Elizabeth Edwards, "Photographic 'Types': The Pursuit of Method," Visual Anthropology 3 (1990): 235-58. Edwards notes that the Socidtd d'Ethnographie in Paris had initiated a master archival

project recording "human types" as early as 1866.

18 Agassiz, quoted in Dictionary ofAmerican Biography, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1928), p. 120. For information on the Branded Hand and

the Scourged Back, see, respectively, Robert Sobieszek and Odette M. Appel, The Spirit of Fact: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes, 1843-1862 (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980), p. 23; and Kathleen Collins, "The Scourged Back," History of Photography 9, no. 1 (January-March 1985): 43-45.

19 Morton, Crania Americana (Philadelphia: John Pennington, 1839), p. 90.

20 Winckelmann, paraphrased in Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, pt. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p. 14.

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21 See Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens & Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

22 Peter Camper, quoted in Honour, p. 14.

23 See Sander L. Gilman's important but controversial treatment of this history in "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature," in "Race, " Writing, and

Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Stephen Jay Gould, "The Hottentot Venus," Natural History 19 (1982): 20-27.

24 See Alan Trachtenberg, ReadingAmerican Photographs: Images as History: Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989), pp. 54-56.

25 Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," p. 10.

26 See Madeleine B. Stern, "Mathew Brady and the Rationale of Crime: A Discovery

in Daguerreotypes," Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 31 (July 1974): 127-35. This series is also discussed in

Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," p. 20; and in Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, pp. 57-58.

27 Literary theorist Anthony Appiah makes a distinction between what he calls "racialist" and "racist" discourses. The first involves a distinction of difference

that may have no moral or evaluative distinction attributed to it; the second

involves the application of that distinc- tion to a hierarchical evaluation that

signals the inferiority of one group in relation to another. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Racisms," in Anatomy of Racism, ed. Gary David Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 4-5.

28 George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro- American Character and Destiny, 1817- 1914 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), p. 2.

29 Coco Fusco, "Fantasies of Oppositionality," Afterimage 16 (December 1988): 6-9.

30 Frederick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered: An Address Delivered in Hudson, Ohio, on 12 July 1854," in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ed. John W. Blessingame, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 510, 514.

31 See Andrea Kirsh and Susan Fisher

Sterling, Carrie Mae Weems (Washing- ton, D.C.: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1994), pp. 102-9.

In conjunction with the Getty Museum's "Hidden Witness" exhibition

(28 February-18 June 1995) of early photography of African-American subjects, Weems was invited to produce her own installation, "Carrie Mae Weems Reacts to 'Hidden Witness'," in an

adjacent gallery. Using the format of her Sea Islands work, she rephotographed older images and added texts to comment on the photographs' hidden information and the changing representations of black subjects.

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