Race and Photography

Book excerpt: Historian Amos Morris-Reich here tracks the trajectory of racial photography from 1876 through the Weimar and Nazi periods in Germany and, briefly, after WWII. With a particular focus on German and Jewish contexts, "Race and Photography "reveals the important role of racial photography within academic discourse on race. Photography was not simply a medium of illustration but rather it was a conduit for new forms of visual perception. Approaching the history of racial photography from an epistemic point of view raises questions concerning the similarity and specific difference of photography compared with other scientific media, and makes explicit the scientific and cultural assumptions in which different uses of photography were embedded. Paying particular attention to the effect of photography on concepts of visual perception and also to the intricate relationship between racial photography and the imagination, Morris-Reich examines numerous scientists and scholars, both prominent and obscure, who developed photographic methods for the study of race or made methodical use of photography for its study. His careful reconstruction of individual cases, conceptual genealogies, and emergent patterns points to transformations in the scientific status of photography throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and uncovers the agency of photographic media in the history of scientific racism. This work makes a distinctive contribution to the fields of history of science, history of photography, intellectual history, European and Jewish history, and the history of race.