A generation later was born the most famous photographer of indigenous peoples of the so-called ‘new world’ from the Kwakiutl and Duwamish to the Piegan and Blackfoot to the Aleuts. Edward Sheriff Curtis, backed by funding from financier J.P. Morgan, spent a lifetime around American Indian tribes, ultimately compiling thirty volumes of images in sepia tone and black and white. Aware that no different than those whom he captured, he was competing against the inevitability of time and the mandate of assimilation, which would result in the extinction of a culture, the ‘Shadow Catcher’ was beholder even as his collection of photogravure plates has been beheld. He has been met as friend and enemy. He recorded American Indians talking and singing on wax cylinders, the new technology then, and he compiled notes that were copious and sympathetic, running to seven thousand pages. Curtis had no rival before and his achievement cannot be replicated ever again.

    As enthusiastic as Curtis was about his project, his framing of it as memorializing the demise of the ‘noble savage’ might have damaged its reputation with posterity. That theme of exoticism attributed to Enlightenment intellectual Jean Jacques Rosseau argued for a positive interpretation of a negative state, that praise was due to ‘primitives’ not in spite of but because of their simple lives. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels revised the concept to romanticise aboriginal peoples; theirs was ostensibly a flattering generalisation. For Curtis, like sculptor Frederick Remington, the archetypal American Indian was a figure of dignity who embodied the landscape and could not be separated from it. His departure from the continent was due to Manifest Destiny, the notion that European Christians would exercise their dominion by divine right in a democracy no different than kings had in a monarchy. Curtis, renowned while active, has been reviled for his fiction since: his version of ‘the Indian’ was his own vision and not the Native Americans,’ bereft of ‘civilization.’ Curtis staged ceremonies for his view camera. His ‘head hunter’ movie reportedly starred Kwakiutl men wearing fake nose rings. From portrayals such as these, children have long been taught to play Cowboys and Indians, performing in their antics the rightfulness of conquest and establishment of empire. Their imagined Indian loyal sidekick, Tonto to the Lone Ranger, is as real in subservience as parody in legitimacy. But a contemporary collector’s edition of Curtis’s ambitious series, reissued on gilded paper, hand bound in leather, has garnered the commendations of influential Native Americans who wish to engage as equals, re-appropriating his exposures for a new narrative. Novelist Louis Erdrich, among others, an enrolled member of the Ojibwe (Chippewa) tribe, has endorsed the ‘intensity of regard,’ the disturbing appeal of the visualisation.

    During World War II, Nazi propaganda emphasised the physical attractiveness of the Aryan race, especially compared to the degenerate aesthetics of others. Harkening back to antiquity, the details of the desirable physiognomy were codified by reference works such as architect Paul Schultze Naumberg’s Nordic Beauty and physician Eugene Fischer’s Foundations of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene. Purity of the volksgemeinschaft was policed by bureaucrats with calipers measuring the shape and the slope of the nose, among variables asserted to be symbolic, the wrong dimensions indicating inferiority. Dancer turned movie director Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s darling, worshipped the athletic body in her propaganda movies, manuals encouraged rigorous child rearing techniques for citizens better able to serve the Fuhrer, a freikorperkultur (free body culture) movement extolled nudism to express natural masculinity, and the Faith and Beauty Society of the League of German Girls prepared members to be wives and mothers who would bring up the next generation for the Third Reich. Posters were printed to instruct the public in these matters. The irony is that the ubiquitous likeness of the perfect Aryan baby was in fact the countenance of Latvian Jew, Hessy Levinsons.

    It would be difficult to deny, then, that skin color is intrinsic to photography. A picture cannot be generated without considering the exposure triangle of aperture, shutter speed, and sensitivity of the recording surface (ISO). White balance must be set in advance. An image is correctly exposed by calibrating to the 18% middle gray of the Ansel Adams zone system. When the Kodak company enjoyed a monopoly on processing film, it offered a ‘Shirley’ card, named for the employee who was a model, to assess temperature and tone; a moving picture counterpart was called the ‘China girl,’ not for her nationality but for her porcelain skin. In the 1990s, Kodak introduced a version with multiple women, each illustrative in her own right, and by then it was competing against the Japanese import Fuji, inspiring debates over which stock was superior. Anyone who is not within the range of normal, is deemed a problem. It is not their presence but the inaccurate measurements which ruins the picture. Yet autofocus and facial detection are rated sufficiently satisfactory to be sold to consumers in their devices if they function fine for whites, even if they demonstrably fail with non-whites. Viral videos on the internet bear out these defects in the feature even as haters dismiss their significance. In 2008, while Barack Obama won the presidential election, becoming the first African American to hold the office as leader of the United States and by extension ‘the free world,’ his photos allegedly were darkened by adversaries to provoke anxieties. All editors have choices, in burning and dodging as in cropping, and with digital tools any aspect can be manipulated for effect. That is even before the advent of the deep fake.

    Our observation of others would be easy if character were revealed on the surface, the good as lovely and the evil as ugly. How much can photographs show of what matters?



BENJAMIN RASMUSSEN

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03ARCHETYPE



By Frank H. Wu

Our observation of others would be easy if character were revealed on the surface, the good as lovely and the evil as ugly. How much can photographs show of what matters?

      Photography is suited to stereotypes. Individuals in photographs are easy to perceive as representatives of a category of like items. Even if the images are not explicitly presented as exemplary, it is common enough to extrapolate casually from a person to the people. That might be an artifact of any display, since even an unpublished photograph is as a document more permanent than the ephemeral moment which disappears—as the Blade Runner replicant adversary Roy Batty says in his requiem for himself, ‘like tears in the rain.’

    In some instances, portraits are deliberately exhibited as scientific rather than artistic, enabling the viewer to draw conclusions about ethnicity. Books have been written to explain how pictures have been deployed for this purpose, classification inexorably giving rise to ranking, even if not designed to do so. Before the camera and processing with silver iodide was invented to reproduce a print of what the human eye could perceive of the world, the Spanish Empire promoted the genre of pinturas de castes (caste paintings), depicting a European man and an indigenous woman, with their ‘mestizo’ child, the permutations arranged according to a hierarchy which renders physiognomy a social status.

    Photography though could be deployed with greater persuasiveness, because of the semblance of objectivity. In 1850, Harvard professor Louis Agassiz commissioned a set of photos to advance ‘ethnology,’ the study of how racial groups purportedly relate to one another. The scholar was interested in slaves as specimens— persons defined by their condition, they were ‘slaves’ rather than persons who were enslaved, a distinction so subtle yet beyond significant as to be lost on those without sympathy. These impressions were the first ever taken in the medium of


  the subject, methodically frontal and profile for each who posed when the art had to be painstakingly planned rather than spontaneous practiced. The five men and two women, chattel property in what was euphemistically designated ‘the peculiar institution,’ were identified in their miniatures by name, African tribe alleged to be ancestral, and then their ‘owner.’ They were Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jim, and Renty.

    Agassiz had an agenda. The foremost scientist of the era—’natural philosopher’ would have been the title appropriate for that time—the Swiss immigrant is credited with discovering the Ice Age. An opponent of Darwinian evolution, he championed ‘polygenesis.’ For

    Agassiz, a ‘big picture’ thinker about systems, these attitudes were related. He preferred a theory that was creationist, but with separate origins for each race. Since Adam and Eve begat whites and whites only, racial mixing resulted in racial degeneration. ‘Miscegenation,’ a word coined during the Civil War as a pejorative, was an abomination by biological rule. The ‘curse of Ham’ has been invoked as a Biblical rationale for hereditary bondage. The tribe descended from Ham, Noah’s son who glimpsed his elder drunk and naked, is dishonorable, and that transgression, by the standards of antebellum white Southerners, justified Ham’s darker lineage being relegated to ongoing servitude. Agassiz, an ichthyologist by training, gained a new obsession. Although he claimed he himself had not encountered Blacks before arriving in America, he traveled to Brazil to look at his specialty of fish as well as human beings of hybrid heritage, both of which might be brought to bear against evolution and in favor of white supremacy.

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