Sarah Lewis’s Shows How Photography Taught Americans to “See” Race

In the epilogue to The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America,Sarah Lewis describes the foundations of racial hierarchy as “a photograph with no true negative.” It is an image without an index. She gives a clarifying example earlier in the book, while describing a ca. 1890 photograph showing the white painter Frank Duveneck and his class at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Duveneck is flanked by an idiosyncratic group of mostly white men and women, few of whom are gazing at the camera. At the corner of the frame, a painting of the upper body of a black man is shown on an easel. In the foreground, there is a black man, likely the class model, sitting on the floor. His resigned pose calls attention, Lewis writes, “to the causal lean of his body against the wooden platform on which he likely sat or stood before the class.” There is a discrepancy, a false negative, between what the painting depicted—his “head upright and proud”—and what the photograph showed of his tired black body.

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Lewis is making a larger point in that passage about how Duveneck’s paintings were received in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His most contested work was A Circassian, an 1870 painting in which he depicted a man from the Caucasus region as anything but what his largely white audience might have expected to see of their supposed Caucasian kin, much in the same way the black model’s body is discordant from his portrait. The region, claimed as the homeland of white racial purity—owing to a 1795 tract by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach—had by then been revealed to be less homogenous than reputed. But it was too late: the fictions of scientific racism had already taken hold in the American imagination, leading many of Duveneck’s critics to question the accuracy of his study of a man from Caucasus.

Duveneck skilfully rendered plainthe visual negotiations and investigations that were transforming seeing and perception in the United States in his day. Lewis uses the term “racial adjudication” to describe sight in the aftermath of the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it a federal crime not to report a fugitive slave once sighted, turning “adjudication into a requirement for navigating civic life.”

Lewis’s exposition goes further to show how the unstable foundation of a “Caucasian” homeland sustained the narrative of racial superiority, and created a process of “unseeing.” To unsee was to eliminate through “studied disregard” any evidence that threatened long-held assumptions. For example, Jim Crow-era geography teaching manuals excised from maps any detail that tended to disprove the history of a superior white race.

Such conclusions had consequences. “Unseeing had so desensitized the nation to the terror and violence that advertisements for lynchings could run casually in main city newspapers,” notes Lewis. Photography helped normalize lynching in the eyes of white audiences: these extrajudicial acts were captured by government officials and published without shame, as though there was no debate on who was dispensable. Onlookers gazed back at the camera while surrounding lynched men, knowing full well their presence as accessories to murder would be taken for granted.

Lewis’s narrative is bookended by the American Civil War—which she describes as the Second Founding of the United States—and the period of segregation that followed. In the course of that time, race changed sight, she argues. The Civil War unfolded concurrently with the Caucasian War, and American newspapers covered the devastation of Circassian people as though it were an extension of the Confederacy’s demise.

This wartime period coincided with the popularization of photography, laying the groundwork for creating images that conditioned “racial sight.” One Civil War-era photographer Charles Eisenmann took pictures of performers known as Circassian Beauties, women supposedly from the Caucasus, displaying them as exemplars of pure whiteness. But in fact, they were descended from Africa. In a move fabricating racial difference, Eisenmann (or one of his operators) directed the technician to “make the hair as white as possible and smoke the sleeves so it blends into her white skin.”

Early on, black thinkers recognized the artifice in photography. Frederick Douglass, the most photographed American of his day, is one such thinker: writing on the galvanizing impact pictures could have in achieving the promise of democracy, he understood in the 1860s that the power of photographs could be harnessed to “achieve justice in American life.” He also understood, Lewis argues, “the force of contrast,” the distinction between what was shown in an image and a lived reality. More accurate photographs could help in negating stereotypes and change “how we processed… competing narratives of worldmaking.” Sitting repeatedly for daguerreotypes, he was signalling a call to black people to picture themselves as they would like to be seen.

“One of the gifts of the field of black Studies is a set of methods for seeing the shape of absence, of omissions, of silence,” writes Lewis. One such gift is Toni Morrison’s 1973 The Black Book, a compilation of images, texts, articles, photographs, and newspaper clippings—“an exhortation to take stock of what has fallen out of view but has, nevertheless, conditioned and contoured the shape of the world in which we live,” Lewis writes. Notably, in researching her compilation, Morrison discovered the story of Margaret Garner, who, as in her novel Beloved, preferred to murder her children than let them re-enter slavery.

Another gift is W.E.B. Du Bois’s contribution to the 1900 Georgia Negro Exhibit, where he presented an installation of photographs, maps, books and data visualizations, all centering the progress and achievements of black people. In an unpublished speculative novel about a “megascope”—a sociological machine that can look at data gathered over centuries—he argues that we ought to work with punctiliousness to discover the shapes “created by the invisible,” as Lewis writes, since “all issues that result in structural inequality and bias stem from the imbrication of race, perception, vision itself.” One place to start, as the book pointedly suggests, is to dispense with any assumption that “Caucasian” is a fixed, white racial identity. Until I read The Unseen Truth,I was unaware of the constructed nature of the term.

Still, this process of refusing fictions shored up by the visual regime not only requires courage but might be costly. Lewis tells of her grandfather, Shadrach Emmanuel Lee. As an eleventh grader in New York, he asked why the textbooks he studied mentioned only the excellence of white Americans. Undeterred by his teacher’s suggestions that black Americans had done nothing deserving of mention, he continued to press the question until he was expelled.

How is this masterwork of research relevant to the Black Atlantic world? It is not a question directly taken up by Lewis. Yet the overarching evidence she presents points to how unsettled and migratory the hierarchy, category, and formation of whiteness was and continues to be worldwide. When American whiteness sought a homeland, it looked outside its shores, justifying itself with the same kind of unfounded confidence underpinning narratives of supremacy that, in short order, informed colonialism. Any attempt to consolidate an identity turns to narrative, such as those stories told in the glee on the faces of a crowd surrounding lynched men.

The work of re-seeing, then, can work towards narrative, too. Not in order to consolidate an identity, but to show how heterogeneity is the true evidence of a shared humanity, much like the diverse demographic of the Caucasus.