Purifying Bodies, Translating Race: The Lantern Slides of Sir Everard im Thurn

Abstract

In 1893 the colonial administrator and anthropologist, Everard Ferdinand im Thurn, gave an illustrated lecture, entitled Anthropological Uses of the Camera, in which he used more than thirty lantern slides. Im Thurn argued that, in addition to photographing the measured physical body, ‘primitive folk’ as ‘living beings’ in their ‘natural conditions’ could also be captured on film for the advancement of anthropological science. Although this lecture has been seen as representing a humanistic turn in anthropological photography, little attention has been given to the ways in which lantern slide technology participated in and facilitated this shift. The present paper demonstrates that im Thurn used the lantern slide to re‐assert and re‐define the scope of anthropological inquiry, altering the connections between morality and race and culture and nature. Lantern slides not only permitted heightened public visibility of particular selections of the body but also normalized classifications of race, nature, and culture. By situating lantern slides as photographic translations that travel through various spaces, we can begin to understand how the lantern slide was enlisted by im Thurn to uphold anthropology as a science, to alter what constituted a proper anthropological subject for the photograph, and ultimately to legitimize himself as a scholar.