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 That might be an artifact of any display, since even an unpublished photograph is as a document more permanent than the ephemeral moment which disappears—as the Blade Runner replicant adversary Roy Batty says in his requiem for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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