Photography and the Work of Class and Race

Abstract

Photography and the Work of Class and Race Janet Zandy (bio) Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture. By Shawn Michelle Smith. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. 225 pages. $74.95 (cloth). $21.95 (paper). Milton Rogovin: The Making of a Social Documentary Photographer. By Melanie Anne Herzog, with a foreword by Douglas R. Nickel and an afterword by Catherine Linder Spencer. Seattle: University of Washington Press and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, 2006. 176 pages. $30.00 (paper). In his astute juxtaposition of the photography of Alfred Stieglitz and Lewis Hine, Alan Trachtenberg draws distinctions between Stieglitz's Camera Work and Hine's Social Work.1 Rather than cementing a bifurcation, however, Trachtenberg is careful to show the inseparability of photography as art and photography as document. That dialogic relationship informs these two books under review and their treatment of the cultural and political work of photographs, archives, and photographers. Authors Shawn Michelle Smith and Melanie Anne Herzog construct contexts for their studies of the archival work of W. E. B. Du Bois and the photography of Milton Rogovin, respectively, that enlarge our understanding of how photographs can work against the grain of specific historical and cultural assumptions. That is, they underscore how camera work is also political work. Shawn Michelle Smith's important Photography on the Color Line establishes W. E. B. Du Bois as a visual archivist who understood the power of photographic representation to disrupt, perhaps unmoor, the pseudo-scientific racial taxonomies undergirding systemic racial oppression. Du Bois visited the Paris Exhibition of 1900, where his contribution as archivist to the American Negro Exhibit, what he described as "a little display showing the development of Negroes in the United States," won a gold medal. Du Bois re-presented 363 photographs, archived in albums titled Types of American Negroes, Georgia U.S.A. [End Page 183] and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. These photographs were gleaned from an earlier ethnographic project, Georgia Negro Exhibit, which Du Bois developed in collaboration with students at Atlanta University. As Smith cogently notes, this archive exposed a complicated narrative and counternarrative. The presence of Du Bois's words about the photographs signals the emerging power of his theorizing about race. One display was introduced with what would become his signature: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." However, the absence of captions to accompany the archived photographs obscures any literal rendering of names, places, and their meanings. The photographs, whether in paired frontal and profiled head shots in oval frames or in studio settings, presented an alternative narrative of Negroes living in the deep South. These are images of well-dressed, mostly young, middle-class men and women and beautiful children. The studio portraits are carefully situated within bourgeois settings of laced curtains, opened books, and potted plants. The men's suits are well tailored and the women's and children's garments are beautiful confections of bows, pleats, and lace. As Smith interprets Du Bois's intent, these portraits challenged the racial typology that relegated blacks to an inferior caste and fueled white supremacist violence. Arguing for the importance of these photographs in advancing Du Bois's "new cultural vision," Smith employs a comparative theoretical framework to locate the images within their own cultural context and to theorize their contemporary meanings. Noting the literal and metaphoric meanings of his visual tropes of "the Veil" and "second-sight" and emphasizing that double consciousness emanates from the burden of being seen through the eyes of others, Smith makes a convincing case for recognizing Du Bois "as an early visual theorist of race and racism" (25). She argues that Du Bois adapts William James's Principles of Psychology to illuminate how race informs—if not shapes—the process of identity formation. She then moves into a Lacanian reading of Du Bois's double consciousness/double vision and explores a "fundamental fracture" in development, a "psychological splitting of black consciousness under a white gaze" as evidenced later in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (33). This theoretical line could have taken her to James Baldwin...