Photography on the Color Line

W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture

Author: Smith, Shawn Michelle
Publisher: Duke University Press
Serie: a John Hope Franklin Center Book
ISBN: 9780822333319
eISBN Pdf: 9780822385783
Place of publication: Durham , United States
Year of digital publication: 2004
Month: June
Pages: 272
DDC: 770/.8996/073
Language: English

Caption

Through a rich interpretation of the remarkable photographs W. E. B. Du Bois compiled for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, Shawn Michelle Smith reveals the visual dimension of the color line that Du Bois famously called “the problem of the twentieth century.” Du Bois’s prize-winning exhibit consisted of three albums together containing 363 black-and-white photographs, mostly of middle-class African Americans from Atlanta and other parts of Georgia. Smith provides an extensive analysis of the images, the antiracist message Du Bois conveyed by collecting and displaying them, and their connection to his critical thought. She contends that Du Bois was an early visual theorist of race and racism and demonstrates how such an understanding makes the important concepts he developed—including double consciousness, the color line, the Veil, and second sight—available to visual culture and African American studies scholars in powerful new ways.

Smith reads Du Bois’s photographs in relation to other turn-of-the-century images such as scientific typologies, criminal mugshots, racist caricatures, and lynching photographs. By juxtaposing these images with reproductions from Du Bois’s exhibition archive, Smith shows how Du Bois deliberately challenged racist representations of African Americans. Emphasizing the importance of comparing multiple visual archives, Photography on the Color Line reinvigorates understandings of the stakes of representation and the fundamental connections between race and visual culture in the United States.

Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Photography on the Color Line
Chapter One: Envisioning Race
Chapter Two: The Art of Scientific Propaganda
Chapter Three: "Families of Undoubted Respectability"
Chapter Four: Spectacles of Whiteness: The Photography of Lynching
Epilogue: The Archivist in the Archive
Notes
Bibliography
Index