Visual Resources, Volume 26, Number 2, June 2010ISSN 0197–3762 © 2010 Taylor & Francis

Reviews

Taylor and Francis LtdGVIR_A_475576.sgm10.1080/01973761003750542Visual Resources0197-3762 (print)/0000-0000 (online)Reviews2010Taylor & Francis262000000June 2010Professor UlrichBaerUlrich.baer@nyu.eduImages in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitzby Georges Didi-Huberman, trans. Shane B. LillisChicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008248 pp., 30 black-and-white illus., $35.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-226-14816-8

Reviewed by Ulrich Baer

In 1944 at the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau(part of the camp complex known today as Auschwitz), anunknown Greek camp inmate succeeded at extreme peril totake two photographs of bodies being cremated in open pits(Figs. 3 and 4). Two other photographs by the same manshow a group of women in an outside clearing on their wayto the gas chambers (Figs. 5 and 6). The four pictures weresubsequently smuggled out of Auschwitz as negatives, devel-oped on the outside, and delivered to the Polish resistancemovement. The photographer, whose identity is not knownother than his first name, Alex (p. 11), was presumablymurdered along with other Jewish inmates who were forcedto work the death details in the Nazi camps.

The unknown photographer and the other members of the Jewish resistance in thecamps hoped that this photographic evidence from inside the Nazi’s vast machine ofdestruction would persuade the outside world to take military action. Once photographsshowed what really happened to the Jews, it was reasoned, the outside world would inter-vene to keep the remaining hundreds of thousands of Jews, as well as gypsies and politicalprisoners in the camps, from being gassed and burned. As photographs, these amateurimages were thought capable of conveying the horrendous scope of the Nazi crimes thateyewitness testimonies from the camps had failed to communicate. Photographs, theJewish resistance hoped, would put the crimes before the eyes of the world. Such visualknowledge, they further assumed, would prompt the world to intervene.

We know today that these primitively shot and graphic photographs of massextermination did not alter the course of history in an appreciable way. These photo-graphs did not save one life. They did not sway the Allied commanders to order oneplane to bomb the crematoria or the rail tracks leading to Auschwitz. Since the photo-graphs do not allow for the identification of individual faces, they did not aid in theprosecution of Nazis after the war or help in the identification and commemorationof a single victim.

The four photographs were occasionally reproduced in postwar documentaryand historical publications about World War II and the Shoah. They were sometimes

180 Reviews

cropped, frequently misattributed, but rarely if ever awarded particular status orsignificance. Although these four pictures originated from a location as near to theAuschwitz killing sites as possible, other images dominated and shaped historical andcultural representations of the Shoah. The public’s imagination was impressed andcaptivated instead by the iconic picture of a boy with a cap in the Warsaw ghetto, aJewish star pinned to his oversized jacket, and his hands raised above his head; aportrait of Anne Frank (1929–1945); Margaret Bourke-White’s documentary imagesof the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp by the American troops; or HenriCartier-Bresson’s shot of an enraged female inmate shouting at a Nazi overseer justafter the liberation of a camp at Dessau. In her thorough Remembering to Forget:Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (University of Chicago Press, 1998),Barbie Zelizer has shown how journalists and historians reprinted those and otherdocumentary photographs to shape a particular account of the Holocaust but not tolet the pictures speak for themselves.

Thus, letting the four harrowing photographs from Auschwitz speak for them-selves is precisely what Georges Didi-Huberman, a foremost historian of art and aninsightful theorist of the role of images in our culture, seeks to do. In 2001, the fourphotographs from Auschwitz-Birkenau were displayed in a Paris show of photo-graphs from the concentration and extermination camps, curated by Erich Schwaband Clement Chéroux. Georges Didi-Huberman contributed a catalog essay to theshow.

Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (originally published asImages malgré tout in 2003) is comprised of the four-part catalog essay and a subse-quent four-part polemical retort to critics of his original reflections. Didi-Hubermansubjects the images from Auschwitz to a careful formal and contextual analysis. In thebook’s first half he reconstructs the scene of each photograph’s creation under extremeconditions by relying on published survivor testimonies and historical accounts of thecamps and reflects on the role of photographs in establishing the historical record. Inthe book’s second half, however, he extends these reflections to the status of the imagein relation to history in general terms. By showing how the purpose of these photo-graphs changed from documentary and evidentiary to testimonial, Didi-Hubermanexplains how photographs can convey something beyond the context of their creationand their use as historical documents. He brings his considerable expertise on thehistory of images in Western culture and his familiarity with French academic debatesabout the Holocaust to bear on these pictures to argue that these photographs saysomething that we as their viewers, in spite of all of the information available aboutthe Holocaust, do not yet know.

Didi-Huberman argues that photographs can redeem what they depict. This is asignificant departure from major theoretical understandings of photography, mostprominently expressed by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag, as amedium that testifies principally to the passage of time and the impending demise ofthe photographed subject. To insist on photography’s potential to “honor . . . the real,”as Didi-Huberman insists in citing from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1998 film, Histoire(s) duCinéma, is a bold claim indeed to make about four images from Birkenau that showpiles of corpses to be incinerated and a group of naked, helpless women headed for a

Reviews 181

horrific death (p. 165). But Didi-Huberman insists that these pictures are not simplydocuments but rather testify to the humanity of the victims that the Nazis sought toobliterate, and thus compel us as contemporary viewers, in an “ethics of the image,”not to avert our gaze (p. 39).

Images in Spite of All assumes a particular place in the enormous literature onhistorical representations of the Holocaust, among the growing number of works onthe role of images, and on photography in particular, in the depiction of atrocity andtrauma. Didi-Huberman charts a crucial way out of the impasse between an overlyaesthetic (or formalist) and historicist (or contextual) interpretation of historicalphotographs (and not only those of the Shoah). Even a photograph of atrocity, heargues, deserves to be subjected to close analysis and must not be dismissed as “theinvisible par excellence (the laziness of the aesthete), nor the icon of horror (the lazi-ness of the believer), nor the mere document (the laziness of the learned)” (p. 39).

In the book’s first part, comprised of four connected essays, Didi-Hubermanreconstructs how the images were taken at Auschwitz and then extrapolates what theJewish prisoners who took, developed, and smuggled them out of the camps couldhave intended as their possible destination. Operating in a practically hopeless envi-ronment of destruction, the prisoners maintained the improbable belief, in spite ofeverything pointing to the contrary, that these photographs could sway the outsideworld to intervene and save the remaining Jews of Europe, by now largely incarceratedin Nazi camps, from their almost certain fate of death. We know today that thereexisted in 1944 aerial photographs of the extermination camps taken by Allied planesand that news of the destruction of the Jews had reached the highest level of the Alliedgovernments. We also know that stopping the Holocaust was not a military prioritybut only a desired outcome of the Soviets and Allied Forces fighting Nazi Germany.And we know that since the end of World War II, several genocides have occurred inthe world in full view of the same public that had once declared, not so long after theend of the war, to be committed to an ethical and political imperative of “never again.”In short, we know that the Jewish inmates’ hope of their pictures’ role in altering thecourse of history was brutally disappointed.

Something in the photographer’s act of photographing the cremation of corpsesand the stripping of prisoners to be gassed, however, exceeds the immediate politicalpurpose of these pictures. What can such pictures convey? First, “when an image ofAuschwitz, suddenly, concretely, even if it remains an incomplete image, appearsbefore our eyes” (p. 62), it forces us to rethink the role of the image in light of whathas been called the event of the Holocaust as “unimaginable.” In addition to conveyinginformation, these photographs also challenge the assumption, especially widespreadamong academics, that the Holocaust presents particular problems for those seekingto represent it. Didi-Huberman does not suggest that we can comprehend a cata-strophic event from the position of those who took the pictures or are depicted inthem. But he identifies two important tendencies in dealing with historical photo-graphs. The first is to sacralize the image: the image is assumed or expected to tell thewhole story. The second tendency is to denigrate the image: the image is dismissed asshowing too little or adding nothing to what we already know (pp. 141–42). Bothpositions fail to do justice to the image.

182 Reviews

Without sacralizing these photographs as icons of hope, resistance, or defiance,Didi-Huberman identifies as their possible destination not only the Allied Forcesduring World War II but all of postwar culture. Once the photographer’s intentionshave been understood in this way, the photographs from Auschwitz become a formof testimony that exceeds the status of pure evidence that could confirm or refute alegal or historical truth. The photographs, like some survivor accounts, become testi-mony to the act of resistance and to the hope for remembrance when political andlegal solutions are no longer available, even once the historical record has beenestablished.

Didi-Huberman identifies and develops the inchoate claim of these photographsto address all of postwar culture in order to challenge and lay to rest, once and for all,the category of the “unimaginable” (p. 51). During the 1980s and 1990s, among histo-rians and others, the Holocaust became a case study in what is considered “unimagin-able.” Yet that zone of silence was more often simply invoked as the negative sublimeagainst which the field of historiography could work out its methodological anxietiesproduced by the predominance of poststructuralist thought in adjacent humanisticdisciplines. All this, it has been noted, belongs to the world of academe. The prolifer-ation of Shoah-themed movies alone seems to underline that this debate is arcane andall but removed from the larger culture.

But the trope of the Holocaust as defining the standard of what remains unrepre-sentable, unsayable, and unimaginable also allowed other genocides in the world topass as if unnoticed. Perhaps these atrocities did not measure up to a category of the“unimaginable” that shrouded what had happened to the Jews under the Nazis fromcertain kinds of analyses. What appeared to some, like a purely academic debate aboutwhat is imaginable even when we have images before our eyes, also shaped politicaldiscourse. By keeping the Shoah in the realm of the “unimaginable,” in spite of theexistence of photographic images, other genocides for which we had photographicevidence at the time of their occurrence, such as Rwanda, were allowed to happen. Theacademic category of the “unimaginable,” in short, had terrible effects in the realworld.

If the Holocaust is unimaginable, Didi-Huberman asks, how are we to viewthese images? What is the relationship between the imagination and the image? “Toremember, one must imagine,” Didi-Huberman writes (p. 30). But how to imagine ifthere are images, actual photographs, that depict what seems unimaginable? Oneanswer would be to create other images, the way Claude Lanzmann did by filmingsurvivors in his film Shoah (1985). Didi-Huberman subjects Lanzmann’s formalismto an important critique (p. 90–94), and draws especially on Georges Bataille’s,Maurice Blanchot’s, and Jacques Lacan’s1 understanding of the image as inherentlydouble: at once a screen for and yet also the violent intrusion of the real (p. 80). ButDidi-Huberman does not get lost in the intricacy of French thought, and, in spite ofsome reservations, he is ultimately quite close to Lanzmann’s position. As an arthistorian, however, he insists that we cannot dismiss these images but must analyzethem also on formal terms. The dark and obscure spots in these images allow us tosay something about what is seen in the pictures’ other parts. The pictures say some-thing at the edge of knowledge rather than defy all understanding or confirm all we

Reviews 183

know of the Shoah. They insist, as if explicitly addressed not only to those whomight intervene but also as if to resist the lingering effects of the Nazis’ horrendousscheme to kill and dispose of their victims like industrial waste, that the victims werehuman indeed. These photographs show, Didi-Huberman writes, the victims in theireffort to “maintain in the end the image of oneself: in other words, ‘to safeguard one’sself’ in the psychic and social meaning of the term” (p. 43). This is a decidedly art-historical understanding of the image, showing not only its subject matter but alsoinsisting on nothing but that. Instead of confirming or augmenting existing knowl-edge of the camps’ inner workings, these photographs are evidence of a fundamen-tally human gesture inherent in making an image of oneself even under extremeconditions. But Didi-Huberman knows that an image always contains the possibilityof blinding us to what we hope to see: it screens things from view by confronting uswith the real. His analysis proceeds from the assertion that Auschwitz “is only imag-inable, that we are restricted to the image and must therefore attempt an internalcritique” (p. 45).

In the book’s second part Didi-Huberman explains lucidly how images, andphotographs in particular, work in relation to our current understanding of history.Montage emerges as Didi-Huberman’s key method in understanding how images mayadvance our thinking where knowledge fails. The book’s second half is a rejoinder toseveral critics who dispute that these photographs can be interpreted, that they shouldbe reproduced at all, or that they add anything to our understanding of the Shoah.Although his critics’ extreme positions can be dismissed as part of a particularlyFrench style of academic polemics, Didi-Huberman outlines an important differencein two intellectual and aesthetic positions about the Shoah. He identifies them with thefilmmakers Lanzmann and Godard. Lanzmann’s polemical position is that no archivalfootage of the Holocaust explains anything. We must ignore or even destroy thearchives and seek to present the event in our present time in order to approach it assomething that has yet to be understood. This purist position is largely in keeping witha Freudian understanding of trauma as an event that cannot be adequately understoodat the time of its occurrence and by definition must await expression or resolution ata later point. Godard’s position, in contrast, seeks to show how memories and evenactual images of the Holocaust haunt the postwar imagination and must be activatedin our culture’s image repertoire. Didi-Huberman elucidates how certain formal cine-matic techniques should not be taken as the only possible ways of representing theShoah, and how an avoidance or repression of archival footage can in some instancesamount to a failure of thought.

Didi-Huberman’s defense against his critics’ attacks is exhaustive, and occasionallyexhausting to follow. This is unfortunate since his argument about montage, as acrucial mode of thinking not only about images, but also with the aid of images, is animportant contribution to contemporary visual theory. To think about these photo-graphs from Auschwitz means to see only destruction and suffering, and to subordinatethese photographs to the status of documentary evidence is to group them with every-thing that is already known. It also means seeing the victims as nothing but victimssince they were not saved by the work of the unknown cameraman, and thus to regardthese photographs as futile at best. To think with these photographs, as difficult as that

184 Reviews

may be, means to see in them “the resistance by means of the image . . . to the destruc-tion of the human, which is documented nonetheless” (p. 161). This is “not a questionof ‘believing oneself to be there’” (p. 161), but of seeing the image of an effort, in spiteof all the Nazis did, to honor and commemorate the dead, recognize their dignity inspite of an undignified death, and protest the history that led to their killing (p. 165).These images can become “a source of knowledge . . . on condition that its responsibilitybe engaged with the formal mechanism of the image produced” (p. 178). A shred ofhistory is saved in order to rethink its part within the larger narrative that we have cometo accept as a foregone conclusion.

Didi-Huberman is a dialectical thinker who views the world in oppositions. Suchoppositions serve a heuristic purpose, but occasionally he overstates the contrastsbetween two points of view. The positions of Lanzmann and Godard, in particular, arecertainly not as far apart as he describes them. Not all of Lanzmann’s remarks areuseful when read out of context. Didi-Huberman’s main argument, however,concerns the way we must “imagine for ourselves” (p. 159) what can be seen in thephotographs from Auschwitz. To imagine for ourselves means to examine what we seeand how we see something, or how we have learned not so see something, or onlysomething rather than another thing in a given image. Images in Spite of All is anutterly illuminating book for anyone interested in how to think about as well as withimages.

As an art historian, Didi-Huberman teaches us that what we see in an imagedepends on the ways in which we have been taught to see. As a theorist, Didi-Hubermanteaches us that every image, no matter how shocking or harrowing, must be read withthe awareness that the categories of what is shocking or unimaginable are categories ofthought and not necessarily universal responses. As someone deeply committed to theethics of viewing images, Didi-Huberman shows that, even when we are confrontedwith actual photographs of horrendous suffering, we cannot afford to be defeated inour attempts to imagine and to know. To do so is to hand a posthumous victory tothose who wish the suffering they have inflicted on others be forgotten and even lostwhile in full view.

ULRICH BAER is vice provost for globalization and multicultural affairs and professor ofGerman and comparative literature at New York University. He is the author of, amongother books, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (MIT Press, 2002) and severalessays on Thomas Struth (b. 1954), Thomas Demand (b. 1964), and other contemporaryphotographers. He is currently completing a book manuscript titled “Photography and theWorld.”

1 Georges Bataille, L’expérience intérieure (Paris: Gallimard, 1973); Jacques Lacan, LeSeminaire I (Paris: Seuil, 1975); Maurice Blanchot, “Les deux versions de l’imagi-naire” (1951), in L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955).

Reviews 185

The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaningby John TaggMinneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2009392 pp., 65 black-and-white illus., $27.50 (paperback). ISBN 978-0-81664-288-5

Reviewed by Kate Palmer Albers

Failure and futility are invoked early on in John Tagg’s, TheDisciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture ofMeaning. Tagg’s deployment of these terms acts as a coun-terbalance to what might otherwise be read as decisivenessand certainty in the title. And, indeed, an oscillationbetween these two polarities—the photographic capture ofmeaning vs. the failure of an image to reveal much ofanything, the rigid framing of meaning via social andcultural context vs. the futility of that project—animates thedilemma at the heart of Tagg’s writings. To what degree canphotographic images act as documents, transparently medi-ating between reality and its representation? When and why

do they resist such a task? And is it possible to answer these questions with anydegree of uniformity?

Tagg’s answer to the last question would seem clear. In the introduction, he makesa point of clarifying the difference between “photography” as a monolithic and indi-visible medium and “photographies” and “a photography,” formulations that bothallow and account for differentiation among the fractured and multiple products ofthe medium of photography. He writes, “‘The medium’ of photography was not givenand unified. It was always a local outcome, an effect of a particular closure of thediscursive field, a function of a specific apparatus or machine, in the sense in whichFoucault used these terms. The ‘medium’ has to be constituted and it was multiplydefined” (p. xxviii). The clarification serves the dual purpose of explaining (asresponse to his critics) his purpose in his 1988 The Burden of Representation and fram-ing the ensuing essays. How it plays out in Tagg’s own analysis, though, is less straight-forward, though ultimately rewarding.

Tagg opens his book—visually frames it—with a photographic image that is tanta-lizingly uncertain, that clearly records a fact and that potentially could serve as evidenceto the degree that any other photograph could, but that doesn’t. It is a snapshot illus-trated in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (and in a refreshing display of materiality, Taggreproduces not just the image but the book as well, as an object with the image appear-ing amidst Sebald’s prose, a visual reminder of this snapshot’s new frame). We see asilhouetted figure, wearing a dark coat with the collar turned up and hunched againstthe cold, standing on the shores of an ocean, waves crashing behind him. Tagg offersan engaging analysis of the way photographs, including this one, seductively operateoutside the edges of fixed meaning in Sebald’s narrative. Rather than offering clues, theimages are reticent; in lieu of laying bare a historical moment, they puzzle and mystify,enigmatic in meaning. In Sebald’s narrative, photographs that may or may not be the

186 Reviews

ones illustrated are referred to in the text, meaning slips between the photographicillustrations and the characters’ encounters with postcards, framed photographs,archives, and albums. Rather than text working to reinforce a seemingly natural photo-graphic meaning, image and text serve to ambiguate one another. In these few openingpages, Tagg gets at the paradox of a photograph speaking for itself and its fundamentalinability to do so. He provocatively suggests through the example set by Sebald thatthe role of photographs is to elicit what can’t be documented, what resists coming tolight.

This initial framework for his reader of futility and failure in both text and imageis summoned in part to address the effect of pulling together somewhat disparateessays written over the course of seventeen years, several of which have been previouslypublished, but primarily to reinforce Tagg’s central challenge of understanding howmeaning is inscribed in and around images made in a medium that so clearly seems tofix meaning and yet is so extraordinarily susceptible to its contextual frame. Tagg isnow, as he has been, fundamentally concerned with where, how, and why photographscome to mean in particular ways, at specific social and culture junctures, and withinspecific kinds of apparatus. Tagg’s pursuit goes straight to the core of the medium (of“photographies”), and his ambition in this regard is impressive. Anyone serious aboutthe study of photography and, in particular, the often uncomfortable collisionbetween its theoretical and practical manifestations should be wrestling with the veryissues Tagg addresses.

Tagg’s insistence—rightly placed—on the multifaceted nature of the mediummakes his quick turnaround to dwell on the violence of meaning that he argues mostphotographs elicit, in contrast to Sebald’s snapshot, all the more jarring. Tagg turns inchapter 1 to the resumption of his long-standing interest in photographic meaning inthe realm of the instrumentalized and disciplinary state apparatus with material thatforcefully resists his own earlier suggestions of photographic indecipherability andreticence. He is concerned with photographs that are repressive, that hold their subjectin place, that insist on parameters of meaning, and that set into motion the disciplin-ary apparatus of archive, the state, the document.

Tagg’s interest in the disciplinary apparatus of photography is well known fromhis essays collected in The Burden of Representation, such as “Evidence, Truth andOrder: Photographic Records and the Growth of the State” and “A Means ofSurveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in Law.”1 Here, he extends this notion ofthe disciplinary function to the basic physical properties of photographic inscription.He compares a camera obscura to “a room in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon” andargues that the physical behavior of light as it enters a camera obscura amounts to adisciplining of light itself; it is a process in which light is “tempered, corralled, andorganized,” whereby practitioners “[subject] light to the punctual rule of the room’sinbuilt geometrical law” (p. 1). This bracingly restrictive analysis of photography, notjust at the level of image, but in the optical principles of the medium, is squarely atodds with the richly evocative impact of the Sebald material. Shackling the image to itsapparatus, its machinery, its system, “the mechanics of subjection of a bureaucraticapparatus,” Tagg leaves the compelling ambiguity of the untethered and ambiguousSebald image aside.

Reviews 187

Despite this analysis, Tagg argues forcefully for the specificity of photographicmeaning, and his work is strongest when he provides that specificity, as he does in hisstudy of the emergence of the term “documentary” in the mid-1920s and its specificuse by the British documentary filmmaker and theorist John Grierson (1898–1972).Here, in chapter 2, Tagg links his charting of the modern state in chapter 1 to specificlanguage Grierson used in defining goals for his work as a critic, a filmmaker, and anadministrator. Leading the reader through a rich history of Grierson’s career andintellectual formation in the late 1920s and early ’30s, Tagg effectively argues thatGrierson’s case study “ties ‘documentary’ to a particular conception of the liberaldemocratic state, of its relation to the individual, and of its structural problems at atime of crisis in the early 1930s” (p. 60). For Grierson, the primary function ofdocumentary in the 1930s was “the procurement of identification in order to producecitizens inculcate with a sense of responsibility appropriate to their role in the collec-tive whole” (p. 67). Building on a framework of the emergence of the modern state andextensive primary source material, Tagg ultimately locates this early period ofdocumentary practice in the cultural strategy of FDR’s New Deal State.

A subsequent Lacanian analysis, also in chapter 1, is less convincing, despite itsunflinching language, primarily because Tagg discards the specificity that so animatedhis reconstruction of Grierson’s mission and its direct links to New Deal policies. Interms that seem to indicate a fundamental hostility to photography, Tagg describesthe photographic image as “burned in by a scorching light incarcerated in the geomet-rical prison of the camera” (p. 78). As part of this brutal and restrictive process (aviewer looking at an image formed by light falling on a negative) “the viewer’s eye iscaptured and surrenders to a Cyclopean vision that functions as the operation of adisembodied punctual eye and that serves as the alibi for the space of cognition of apunctual subject” (p. 79). While Tagg cautions against understanding “photography”rather than “photographies” and champions—as well as expertly delivers—highlyspecific and deeply researched frames of meaning, the temptation to subsume all ofphotography under one scorching prison of repression seems here to prove too rich toresist.

Tagg’s comparative analysis of individual photographs by Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) and Walker Evans (1903–1975) and their contextual surround inchapter 3 emerges as a lynchpin for the essays’ formation as a book and for the questto understand how meaning is inscribed in photographs. With the same historicalrigor and detailed analysis that enlivened his discussion of John Grierson, Tagg honesin on two well-known photographs. The first is Bourke-White’s iconic image made inthe aftermath of the 1937 Louisville, Kentucky flood showing African Americansstanding in a bread line in front of a billboard plastered with the smiling faces of awhite family of four, driving in a gleaming automobile, and framed between theslogans, “There’s no way like the American Way” and “World’s Highest Standard ofLiving.” Tagg attends closely to the specificity of the photograph’s reproduction andcirculation in the 15 February 1937 volume of Life magazine and extends his discus-sion to the framework of Henry Luce’s strategically effective publication and the vora-cious market for images, Life’s broader coverage of the floods, and, remarkably, ananalysis of the National Association of Manufacturer’s propaganda campaign of which

188 Reviews

the billboard in Bourke-White’s photograph was part. Ultimately, Tagg argues that inBourke-White’s practice of engaged journalism, she reorganized “the unruly dissemi-nation of photographic meaning into an immediately readable message” (p. 123).Indeed, Tagg emphatically hammers home the meaning of this famous photograph,declaring by turns that, “The rhetoric of the image cashes out in a decisive way” (p.113), “the message of the photograph . . . is the message of the Real itself” (p. 114);“the photograph . . . is put beyond adjudication” (p. 114); and that its meaning is“watertight. Nothing leaks” (p. 114).

Not surprisingly, Evans is summoned to provide a counterweight to all thisphotographic certainty. His 1936 photograph of frame houses and billboards inAtlanta was made for the Resettlement Administration and exists as an archivalrecord in the Library of Congress as well as in Archibald MacLeish’s 1938 Land of theFree and Evans’s Museum of Modern Art publication of the same year, AmericanPhotographs. These considerably persuasive frameworks provide a kaleidoscope ofmeaning, but ultimately it is Tagg’s formal reading of the spatial relationships in theimage that cements his characterization of it as “disturbingly undecidable” (p. 167).Tagg ultimately concludes that for Bourke-White, “meaning always arrives” while forEvans, meaning is “encrypted, locked away in layers of representation like an infiniteseries of Russian dolls” (p. 173). It is Evans whose work embodies the “melancholyrealism” of the chapter’s title, a poignant phrasing that Tagg locates as a place“where melancholy figures as a marking of the vain excess and inadequacy of signifi-cation in relation to its object, against which melancholy holds to an impossibleencounter with a real that is the condition of existence and failure of all systems ofmeaning” (p. 176).

While it is difficult not to feel that Tagg overargues the case for the unshakablyiron-clad certainty of meaning in Bourke-White’s image and, in an opposite manner,the case for formal confusion and uncertainty in Evans’s image, the central contradic-tion embodied by the comparison as well as the historical richness of Tagg’s contextu-alizations are powerful. With this analysis we are back in the territory earlier occupiedby Sebald, in which the photograph can be described most effectively in ambiguouslypoetic terms, “Inadequate and overwhelming thing, poor compensation, impossibletestimony, it offers itself as a ruined monument to the inescapability of an unencoun-terable real” (p. 178).

Tagg returns us here to the framework of failure and futility with which we beganand poses a question at the start of chapter 4 about “the possibility of an event ofmeaning that evades capture, resists incorporation, encrypts itself, or breaks the frame,disrupting the regimes of normative sense as it does the regimen of art historical expla-nation” (p. 180). In his briefest chapter, Tagg makes a case for the end of the momentof social documentary in 1943. Summing up the social transformations aroundwomen in the workplace and moving on to the racial displacements and violence ofthe period, particularly as embodied in the counterculture styling of zoot suits, Taggpaints an overview of an unstable social dynamic, though makes less clear the connec-tions between this material and the broader concerns of the book.

Tagg closes with his oldest material; earlier versions of chapters 6 and 7 werepublished in 1992 and 1993. Here, Tagg studies various methodological approaches to

Reviews 189

the relationships among archive, history, testimony, and photography, focusing firston the 1916 British publication The Camera as Historian in which the three authors(H. D. Gower, William Whiteman Topley, and L. Stanley Jast), all at one pointemployed by the Photographic Survey and Record of Surrey, develop a regimen ofphotographic truth and transparency that relies nonetheless on the system of thearchive to produce meaning. This is followed with an engagement with Roland Barthesin which the efficiency and certainty of photographic evidence, as furnished in TheCamera as Historian, is contrasted with a tracking of Barthes’ evolving understandingof the relationship of photography to history which, though shifting, is never straight-forward and logical. Ultimately, Tagg argues that we not—indeed, that we cannot—choose sides between the two seemingly competing lenses for understanding the imageand its frame.

In the final chapter, Tagg turns most directly to the idea of the frame, the edgingthat determines, “what is interior to [the document] and what is exterior, what isinternal evidence and what is background, what is text and what is context, what isstructure and what is history” (p. 235). Artist John Baldessari’s (b. 1931) two workstitled “Two Crowds with Shape of Reason Missing” (1984) provide a visual represen-tation of the powerful effect of edging, and the demarcation of power and ritual, whichTagg links to the Derridean analysis of the frame that underscores Tagg’s entireproject. As the photograph’s meaning is never reducible to either interior or exterior,text or context, but is always bound by both, as argued in chapter 5, so too the frameworks in this capacity. “Marking a limit between the intrinsic and the extrinsic, it isneither inside nor outside, neither above nor below. Its thickness and depth separateit both from the integral inside of the so-called work itself and from the outside, fromthe wall or the space in which the work is site” (p. 246).

In the end, Tagg’s continual oscillation throughout the essays between photo-graphs whose meanings remain stubbornly elusive and photographs onto whichmeaning is powerfully, even violently, inscribed, emerges as the key strategy throughwhich to demonstrate his point. Though Tagg’s framework of choice is the institu-tional disciplinary apparatus of the archive, the state, or other such regimes of struc-ture and power, his argument is more applicable to a range of photographies than itmay first appear, as demonstrated through his own breadth of image choice that itselfspans from personal snapshot, to government sponsored documentary in the 1930s,to the conceptual practice of Baldessari. Though the analytical and theoretical densitythat supports the rich historical and material readings will be a challenge to a generalreader, Tagg’s expansive reach and core ambition to understand how photographscome to have meaning demonstrate a depth and intensity of inquiry into the mediumthat is rarely matched.

KATE PALMER ALBERS is assistant professor in the Art History Division at the Univer-sity of Arizona, with a specialty in the history and theory of photography. Prior to joiningthe UA faculty, she taught at the Massachusetts College of Art and Boston University andheld curatorial positions in the photography departments at the Fogg Art Museum inCambridge, Massachusetts, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her researchfocuses on the relationships between and among photography, memory, and history, with

190 Reviews

specific attention to photographic technologies and ways in which photographs are struc-tured and compiled to produce knowledge. Her current book project, “It’s Not anArchive”: Photography, History, and the Limits of Knowledge, focuses on the photographicconstructions of Christian Boltanski (b. 1944), Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), and Dinh Q. Lê(b. 1968).

1 John Tagg, “Evidence, Truth and Order: Photographic Records and the Growth ofthe State” and “A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in Law,” in TheBurden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 60–102.

The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcockby Victor I. Stoichita, trans. Alison AndersonChicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2008252 pp., 16 color and 105 black-and-white illus., $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-22677-521-0

Reviewed by Emerson Bowyer

Victor Stoichita’s rich and risky work stages a history ofsimulacra, those images that are never merely copies ofcopies, but which dissolve the very categories of model andcopy, of original and reproduction. According to the author,the simulacrum “does not necessarily copy an object from theworld, but projects itself into the world.” In other words, itsimply “exists” (p. 2). In 1970, French philosopher, MichelFoucault envisaged the “arrow of the simulacrum” streakingtoward contemporary thought and experience.1 Since thattime simulacra have received protracted theoretical inquiry,largely stemming from the influential contributions of conti-

nental philosophers Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida.2 Althoughsimulation is widely argued to be a unique and characteristic feature of postmodernsociety, the simulacrum is, as Stoichita endeavors to demonstrate, a concept thatenables reinterpretation of a vast historical array of seemingly idiosyncratic images. Toaccomplish this task, Stoichita looks to Ovid’s celebrated account of Pygmalion andGalatea. In that saucy tale, a Cypriot sculptor is smitten by his own creation, thecarved effigy of his ideal woman, and that object is subsequently brought to lifethrough the intervention of a sympathetic—though certainly amused—Venus. Ifsimulacra subvert the very notion of origin, then Ovid is indeed their spokesperson,for his Metamorphoses is a liquescent mosaic of transformation and flux thatungrounds the apparently fixed identities and essences of its protagonists. ThusStoichita proceeds from his thesis that the story of Pygmalion—“the founding myth ofthe simulacrum” (p. 203)—and artistic engagement with it from antiquity through tothe 1950s, is a crucial lens through which to reconstruct the historical longevity ofsimulacra in visual production and aesthetic theory.

Reviews 191

As Stoichita notes, The Pygmalion Effect “does not seek to be exhaustive, but rather,exemplary” (p. 5). It unfolds in a series of discrete episodes from a diversity of historicalperiods, a sweep that suggests the ambitiousness—and difficulty—of fashioning acoherent narrative from such diverse material. Lurching between the medieval Romande la Rose (for example, f. 137r, Ms. ADD. 42133, ca. 1360; London, British Library)and Jacopo Sansovino’s notorious sculpture, Bacchus (1510–1512; Florence, BargelloMuseum), between the slick stage sets of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s (1824–1904) paintingsand the lurid dreamworld of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (Paramount Pictures, 1958),the reader encounters an eccentric and entertaining patchwork of characters andimages. While postmodernity is supposedly its playground, Stoichita demonstratesthat the simulacrum “was not completely banished by Platonism, and it was notmodernity which (re-)discovered it” (p. 3). Accordingly, the author avoids obvioustwentieth- and twenty-first century cultural manifestations of the “hyperreal”—allthose Disneylands and casino-cities that so palpably repulsed (and enthralled) Baud-rillard. Instead, The Pygmalion Effect attempts a “prehistory” of our late-capitalistimage world.

The animation of Pygmalion’s statue is of critical importance. This overchargedmoment dramatizes the illicit autonomy of the image of Galatea, its literal indepen-dence from any prior model. The transgressive desire for the autonomous presence ofimages is charted within and between texts, illustrated texts, paintings, sculptures, andfilms. We read of Helen dispatching a statue to Troy in her stead, of Shakespeare’sHermione (A Winter’s Tale), and tableaux vivants; of Gérôme’s “photo-paintings” andtheir sculpted and fleshy doubles. Cold, inert matter blushes and palpitates, rigid stonevacates its plinth, and actresses imitate characters imitating painted portraits on irra-diated cinema screens. Throughout this kaleidoscopic narrative, vision vies with touchand speech for predominance in the portrayal and perception of simulation. WithStoichita, the story of Pygmalion launches a multisensory adventure, one that compli-cates our understanding of “visual” culture since antiquity.

Stoichita’s erudition is consistently astonishing. Temporally, thematically, andmaterially diverse evidence is synthesized in unexpected and challenging ways. Theauthor’s stunning first chapter, a subtle and prolonged analysis of Ovid’s tale, high-lights many neglected and problematic elements of that text. Most profitable here isa clever discussion of the scale and material attributed to Pygmalion’s statue. Thisfirst chapter provides a touchstone for the remainder of The Pygmalion Effect, estab-lishing principles and hypotheses for examination. For this reader, the most success-ful chapter addressed imagery of the eighteenth century, particularly a rivetingexplication of the connections between images of the Pygmalion myth, includingAnne-Louis Girodet’s (1767–1824) famous painting Pygmalion et Galatée (1819;Paris, Louvre Museum), and fledgling scientific investigation of magnetism and elec-tricity as animating energies.

Stoichita is clearly more comfortable with premodern visual culture. His dense,close analyses of such material give way to a broader swagger as the book moves into thenineteenth century (and the copious footnotes decrease accordingly). At thesemoments, Stoichita’s desire to marshal exemplary artists to his overarching schemacauses him to overlook the bounty of archival materials, which, appropriately

192 Reviews

consulted, might have further advanced his argument. For instance, while heartening tohave a chapter devoted to the much-maligned Academic painter Gérôme, that materialwas not presented as carefully as one would have hoped. Here Stoichita lacked famil-iarity with textual sources and with the intricacies of the artist’s oeuvre. A lengthy,somewhat confused account of a photographic reproduction of Gérôme’s The Artistand his Model (Le travail du marbre; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale) would have profitedfrom research presented by the Dahesh Museum in 1996.3 The photograph most prob-ably documents that museum’s version of Gérôme’s painting (signed 1890, rather thanthe 1895 version from the Haggin Museum [Stockton, California] illustrated byStoichita in color plate 11), and in a state prior to its reworking by the artist to includean embedded image of his Pygmalion et Galatée. This information speaks directly to theissue of the photograph’s autonomous, or simulating, presence, and adds complexity toStoichita’s characterization of the image as “a scene of ‘finishing’” (p. 170). Also withinthis chapter, attention is lavished upon famous and well-trodden literary passages fromÉmile Zola (1840–1902) and the Goncourts (Edmond, 1822–1896 and Jules, 1830–1870) at the expense of underexamined contemporary accounts of Gérôme’s ownstudio practice. Nineteenth-century articles identifying Gérôme with Pygmalionabound, and contain remarkable descriptions of his models and their sculpted doubles.One wonders how such evidence might have buttressed Stoichita’s analysis.

The Pygmalion Effect closes with a short section, appropriately titled “In Guise ofa Conclusion.” Here the author presents twenty short “theses” on the simulacrum,including:

13. The Pygmalion Effect is an effect of death.14. The Pygmalion Effect is an effect of resurrection. (pp. 203–4)

While clever (and true), these obfuscating statements prove somewhat unsatisfying,serving only to further disaggregate the heterogeneous contents of the book. But, ofcourse, this might simply be a function of the subject itself. By its very nature, thesimulacrum resists historical explanation and escapes the constraints of language.This deviance marks both its interest and theoretical potential, as demonstrated byStoichita’s lively and speculative examination. The Pygmalion Effect successfullyreveals the significant presence of the simulacrum throughout the history of Westernrepresentation. In doing so, Stoichita compels us to reexamine both the hegemony ofthe mimetic ideal within art history, and existing characterizations of our “society ofsimulacra.”

EMERSON BOWYER is a PhD student in the Department of Art History and Archaeologyat Columbia University, New York. His essay, “Monographic Impressions,” will appearthis year in Reconsidering Gérôme (ed. Scott Allan and Mary Morton, Getty Publications).He is currently editing a volume of essays on the subject of visual reproduction in the nine-teenth century, as well as completing a dissertation centered on the portrait medallions ofFrench sculptor, David d’Angers (1788–1856).

1 Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum” [1970], repr. in Donald F. Bouchard,ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by MichelFoucault (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 172.

Reviews 193

2 See, for example, Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila FariaGlaser, (Ann Arbor: University Michigan Press, 1994); Gilles Deleuze, “The Simu-lacrum and Ancient Philosophy,” in The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas,trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Jacques Derrida,“The Double Session,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1981).

3 Stephen Edidin, John David Farmer, and Cristina Portell, Jean-Léon Gérôme and theClassical Imagination: Dahesh Museum, October 22 1996–February 15, 1997, exh. cat.(New York, Dahesh Museum, 1996).

The Strange Case of William Mumler Spirit Photographerby Louis KaplanMinneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008288 pp., 16 color and 48 black-and-white illus., $24.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-81665-157-3

Photography and Spiritby John HarveyLondon, Reaktion Books, 2007176 pp., 81 color and black-and-white illus., $29.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-86189-324-6

Reviewed by Russell Lord

Shortly after Michael Jackson’s death in the summer of 2009,the beloved pop star’s ghost was reportedly seen stalking thehalls of his California Neverland Ranch during an on-sitebroadcast of Larry King Live (CNN television). A few days later,the figure was declared to be nothing more than the shadowcast by a crew member walking in front of a lighting fixture.By that time, however, the viral explosion of slow-motion andclose-up clips devoted to the confirmation of—or the debunk-ing of—the presence of Jackson’s ghost had already occurred.The hubbub surrounding the event, and indeed the attentiongiven to the death itself, blurred the line between absence andpresence, even asserting that absence is a kind of presence. In

fact, in the months following his death, Michael Jackson was in many ways more presentthan he had been in the time leading up to his demise.

The insistence on Jackson’s ever-presence is just one of many examples of thegrowing interest in all things ghostly and undead, a phenomenon evidenced by popu-lar television programs such as Ghost Hunters (Syfy/NBC Universal television) and theTwilight series of vampire romance books. Fascination with otherworldly contact is sowidespread that James “The Amazing” Randi (b. 1928), a magician and skeptic, hasmade a career of debunking psychics, a modern day P. T. Barnum (1810–1891) if youwill, exposing the humbugs of the contemporary world. In the photography world, the

194 Reviews

phenomenon is marked by the recent publication of several books addressing themedium’s relationship to the paranormal, including even a manual explaining how tophotograph ghosts.1 This pervasive interest begs the question: why this topic now?

Louis Kaplan, in his excellent book about William Mumler (1832–1884), suggestsan answer to this question: “Spirit photography has been taken up in recent yearsexactly on account of our fascination with that which reeks of the notorious and thescandalous in popular culture and visual cultural studies” (p. 2). Not unlike Jackson,notoriety and scandal also played a large role in the life of Mumler, who claimed tophotograph ghosts in the 1860s. The suspicion with which this claim was regardedultimately resulted in a trial, with Mumler as defendant against charges of defraudingthe people of New York by having taken money from “sundry credulous people” by“trick or device” (pp. 182, 143). The 1869 trial included the testimony of otherphotographers, who proposed ways in which the deceit might have been carried outtechnically. Most sensationally, P. T. Barnum took the stand, having previouslydenounced spirit photography in his book Humbugs of the World (1866), and inducedlaughter with a series of responses intended to defend his own enterprise and defameMumler’s.

Much of Kaplan’s book consists of transcriptions of primary documents includingnewspaper accounts of Mumler’s photographic practice, Mumler’s own memoir,prosecutor Elbridge T. Gerry’s (1837–1927) argument against Mumler in the famouscourt case, and Barnum’s essay which intended to expose the duplicity of spiritphotography. These documents are framed by two essays: an introduction exploringthe emergence of spirit photography as a cultural and historical phenomenon and aconclusion in which Kaplan heavily mines the links between deconstruction, psycho-analysis, and spirit photography. These two essays are at once the most succinct andexpansive essays yet written about spirit photography. Using Mumler’s fascinatingstory as a departure point, Kaplan explains how the spirit photography phenomenondirectly addresses issues that persist throughout the history of photography—such asthe medium’s connection to truth—as well as how spirit photography in the 1860scircumscribed arguments that continue to plague modern life (e.g., faith vs. science).The conclusion, however, is not recommended for the academically disinclined, as itrelies heavily on theoretical rhetoric. At its most entertaining, Kaplan cleverly unpacksJacques Derrida’s concept of “hauntology.” Consider what happens to the word whendelivered with French pronunciation: the leading “h” itself becomes a silent, ghostlypresence, diaphanously separating the study of being from the study of being haunted.

John Harvey’s Photography and Spirit is the structuralopposite of Kaplan’s book. It consists of a broad examinationof over 200 years of spirit images, beginning with the graphicrepresentation of spirits in other media. Whereas Kaplanilluminates a particular strand of spirit belief (Spiritualism inthe United States during the 1860s), Harvey explores it as apervasive phenomenon in Europe and America. Bothbooks address the intersection of science, religion, and art,but for Harvey these topics dictate structure: he devotes

Reviews 195

one narrative chapter to each, as if to suggest that spirit is the element that unifiesthem all.

Harvey’s broad time frame allows for the consideration of multiple kinds ofphotographic practice relating to the paranormal including photographs of spirits,visitations, demons, and auras, as well as effluviographs and Kirlian photographs(named after the Russian inventor, Semyon Kirlian). The book is no mere chronolog-ical survey, however. It includes several polemical statements about the nature ofspirit photography and about the affirmation or denunciation of belief in it. Thisdescription might remind some readers of Daniel Wojcik’s recent article “Spirits,Apparitions, and Traditions of Supernatural Photography” that appeared in this jour-nal.2 Wojcik identifies spirit photography’s historical persistence as a result of itsconsoling and therapeutic properties: as events beyond one’s comprehension tran-spire, the desire to comprehend gives way to faith, making the “truth” of a spiritphotograph irrelevant. In fact, both Harvey and Kaplan also take this stance, choosingto explain the cultural impetus for spirit photography rather than pronounce it arti-fice or document. To fully explore the phenomenon, it is particularly informative toread Harvey and Kaplan in tandem, as each applies this approach in a different way:the former provides a considered framework while the latter presents a focused casestudy. Both books are valuable additions to the rapidly expanding field.

And yet, neither author offers a satisfying explanation for this rapid expansion, asif they are unwilling to admit to their participation in a kind of Zeitgeist. Kaplansuggests the cult of celebrity as a driving force, but this only applies particularly inMumler’s case. Two other explanations come to mind. The debate between scienceand faith has recently resumed with renewed vigor in the face of biological andcomputer driven innovations. Perhaps a cultural anxiety provoked by this debate hasled us to seek consolation in the knowledge of the historical persistence of this issue.If this is the case, it is not surprising to find photography chosen as a surrogate forthis debate, considering that its conception coincided with (and was perhaps born of)the Romantic era, in which science and faith were notably conflated. It is almost as ifphotography engendered the debate itself. The second explanation is informed by thefirst and concerns the casualty of photography as a result of technical innovation. Formany, the development of digital media, combined with the closing of traditionaldarkrooms, and the discontinuation of photographic papers and chemicals signalsthe potential death of photography. Perhaps this renewed interest in photographs ofthe dead masks an anxiety about photography’s death, as if the study of photographyof ghosts is really an attempt to comprehend the ghosting of photography. Thepotential absence of photography has resulted in a strange kind of presence withinthe literature, suggesting that photography, like the deceased for the believers, willnever leave us.

RUSSELL LORD is a PhD candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, City Universityof New York, and the Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in the Department of Photographsat the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His research focuses on early photography and itsrelationship to painting and printmaking.

196 Reviews

1 These books include Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, DenisCanguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult,(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Mark Alice Durant and JaneD. Marsching, Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and theParanormal (Baltimore: Center for Art and Visual Culture and New York: D. A. P.,2005); Martyn Jolly, Faces of The Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography (WestNew York, NJ: Mark Batty Publishers, 2006); the manual is Leonore Sweet, How toPhotograph the Paranormal (Newburyport, MA: Hampton Roads, 2005).

2 Daniel Wojcik, “Spirits, Apparitions, and Traditions of Supernatural Photography,”Visual Resources 25, no. 1 (March–June 2009): 109–36.

Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics 1870–1940by Anne MaxwellEast Sussex, UK, and Portland, Oregon, Sussex Academic Press, 2008286 pp., 122 black-and-white illus., $79.50 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-84519-239-6

Reviewed by Fae Brauer

In her preface, Anne Maxwell acknowledges the importantroles played by a vast diversity of visual cultures in instantiat-ing racialist ideologies that she considers lies at the root ofeugenics. Paintings, drawings, cartoons, illustrations, comics,films, photographs, posters, cards, advertising, cigarette pack-ets, book covers, wallpaper, and even biscuit tins all played avital part in popularizing eugenics, turning it into what I havecalled a transnational culture.1 In the past two decades, manyof these visual cultures and their interrelationships have beeninvestigated as demonstrated by The Wellborn Science: Eugen-ics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (Oxford, 1990),edited by Mark B. Adams; Pauline Mazumdar’s Eugenics,Human Genetics and Human Failures: The Eugenics Society, Its

Sources and Its Critics in Britain (Routledge, 1992); Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour ofEugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Cornell, 1996); ChristinaCogdell’s Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (University of Pennsylvania,2004); Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s(Ohio University Press/Swallow, 2006) edited by Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell;and by the book I edited with Anthea Callen, Art, Sex And Eugenics: Corpus Delecti(Ashgate, 2008).

In only citing Nancy Leys Stepan’s 1982 book The Idea of Race in Science andStephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Maxwell identifies a lacuna inscholarship that her research into eugenic visual cultures could breach. Yet due to theoverwhelming scale of these visual cultures, she stops short of pursuing their interre-lationships, instead focusing upon a single medium, photography. Pragmatically plau-sible as this may be, methodologically it seems contradictory. While prepared to cross

Reviews 197

disciplines in art, anthropology, ethnography, paleontology, science, and medicine,Maxwell appears unprepared to cross disciplines in visual cultures. Despite the potentdisciplinary intercourse in visual cultures, disciplinary integrity seems to be assumedin photography as it was in formalism; i.e., photographers only take their lead fromother photographers just as Clement Greenberg once argued painters did from paint-ers. It also seems as if Maxwell pursues Heinrich Wölfflin’s Hegelian methodology of“period style” to consider how the application of a particular medium could reveal“eugenic style.” That being said, photography did prove a dominant medium in thehistory of eugenics. In her pioneering investigation of this medium, Maxwell chartshuge terrain and forges groundbreaking connections, which this review will endeavorto identify.

Like Shawn Michelle Smith, Maxwell starts her investigation with one of the firstzoologists to commission photography, Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), to proveCreationist polygenesis and disprove Darwinian monogenesis.2 A fervent disciple ofthe French naturalist and zoologist, Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), Agassiz dismissedenvironmental adaptation as a deciding factor, as Maxwell explains on pages 22–23,convinced that evolutionary variation would result in degeneration, sterility, andextinction or in reversion to racial type. Racial immutability was supposedly proven,she points out on page 24, by the series of fifteen daguerreotypes Agassiz commis-sioned of first and second generation Africans enslaved to white plantation ownerswho bore as little change to their bodies’ parts as those of the mixed and pure-bloodedNegroes he stripped naked and photographed in Brazil. According to Smith, thesedaguerreotypes demonstrate how quickly photography was harnessed to the sciencesof biological racialism in efforts to provide “evidence” of racial difference and inferi-ority. Yet while Maxwell highlights the brutal objectification of enslaved Africans inthese photographs from pages 25–28, unlike Smith, she does not unravel how theirdehumanization by the camera acted as a corollary of polygenesis, in order to justifytheir slavery.

To capture the “vanishing races” in the evolutionary race for survival in the BritishEmpire, from page 29 Maxwell turns to the anthropometric photography developedby Darwin’s “bull-dog,” Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), as well as by Britishethnographer, John Lamprey. From her examination of the Pitt Rivers Collection andLeonard Huxley’s journals, Maxwell ascertains that Huxley galvanized British resi-dents and agents worldwide to help him create an anthropological archive of all races.Despite Huxley’s staunch defense of Darwinian monogenesis and attack of Creationistpolygenesis, Maxwell’s examples reveal that paradoxically neither his phrenologicalmethods nor his degrading objectifications of “natives” differed much from Agassiz’s.Just like Agassiz, he demanded frontal and profile full-length shots of each subject,naked, and in poses that, as Maxwell observes on page 31, Europeans would dismiss as“degrading.”

To facilitate measurement of each subject’s body and to furnish somatic statisticsof racial difference, unlike Agassiz, Huxley insisted upon inclusion of a detailedanthropometer. He also insisted that the arms not obstruct the torso, especially suchsignifiers of racial difference as the curvature of women’s breasts. NeverthelessMaxwell considers it was due to Huxley’s unrealistic instructions for taking

198 Reviews

anthropometric photographs in Britain’s colonies that his archive failed, whereasLamprey’s straightforward method succeeded. There was simply no need for exactmeasurements of racial difference, as demonstrated by Maxwell’s examples on pages35–39 of the widespread collection and exhibition of anthropometric photographs byPaul Foelsche (1831–1914) of Australian Aborigines and by Carl Dammann’s (active1870s) of “racial types” in Africa, South America, Australia, and Polynesia. Evenwithout an anthropometer, these photographs were readily accepted within scientificracism as empirical documentation of the evolutionary inferiority of non-Westernraces. Since their acceptance occurred at the very moment when Bismarck wasproclaiming the German Reich and when—although unsaid—nations and racesbecame ranked according to Darwin’s “survival of the fittest,” Maxwell considers thatthis was why anthropometric photography proved so instrumental to eugenics, as diddegenerate photography.

The development of degenerate photography is linked by Maxwell from pages 57–63 to the study of phrenology and physiognomy, whereby every portrait could beranked in a social and moral hierarchy, as illustrated by Cesare Lombroso’s (1835–1909) photographs of the criminal type. Following the phrenology of its founder, theGerman physiologist, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), in 1870 Lombroso had begunexamining the skull of a notorious gangster, Giuseppe Vilella. Due to the hollow hefound, he diagnosed the criminal as “an atavistic being who reproduces in his personthe ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.”3 Due to thepersistence of physiognomy and phrenology, I have argued that the body was longconceived as transparent.4 Skin and physiognomy seemed able to betray not justcharacter and morals, but heredity, evolutionary status, and degeneration in terms ofcriminality, alcoholism, syphilis, prostitution, hysteria, smallpox, and tuberculosis.5

As I have pointed out, it was Head of Medicine at the Saint-Yon Asylum in France,Bénédict Morel (1809–1873), who produced the definitive theory for divining degen-eracy.6 It was Morel who diagnosed that degeneration took the form of a “morbiddeviation from a normal type,” which left an indelible stain on the body.7 No matterhow hard degenerates may try to conceal or erase this condition, Morel found their“stigmata” betrayed them. While disclosed by skin markings, it was inescapablyexposed by corporeal asymmetries. While hereditary underlies Lombroso’s concept ofcriminality, the Morelian model underlies his detection of criminal types. This is whyphotography alone was regarded as capable of eliciting the atavistic stigmata of thoseLombroso identified as “The Born Criminal” without the aid of an anthropometer.8

Although this issue is unscrutinized, Maxwell’s analyses admirably elicit the socialprejudices coloring Lombroso’s readings, particularly about prostitutes, and traceshow his specious model of the criminal as an evolutionary throwback was readilyaccepted, particularly by American criminologists. Yet in order to catch a thief duringthis time of escalating crime, it was Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) at the ParisPréfecture de Police who adapted a range of anthropometric tools, especiallyphotography, a subject that becomes Maxwell’s next avenue of inquiry in the chaptertitled “The Degenerate Face: Nineteenth-Century Prison Photographs.”

Not only did Bertillon adapt to criminology the instruments used by anthropolo-gists and craniologists, including his father, the eminent statistician, Louis-Adolphe

Reviews 199

Bertillon (1821–1883), but also photography. Like Huxley, Bertillon devised detailedinstructions for taking what are today called identikit photographs. Like Lombroso, hewas concerned with capturing both the full-face and profile of criminals, althoughunlike Lombroso’s disregard of consistent light sources and camera distance, Bertilloninsisted upon a fixed position and strong light. Yet for his system to function as fool-proof or indeed, recidivist-proof, Bertillon insisted that these mug shots be correlatedwith the eleven measurements of the body parts he devised and the portrait parlé—detailed descriptions of scars and warts, tattoos and birthmarks missed by the camera.In proving just as applicable to surveillance and normalization of the innocent citizenas the culpable one, “Bertillonage" photography could facilitate “panopticism,” as longestablished by the British historian of photography, John Tagg, rendering JeremyBentham’s Panopticon redundant.9 Although Michel Foucault’s theory of “panopti-cism” is unacknowledged in this book, Maxwell points out in this chapter thatBertillon’s systemization of information, as conveyed by the mug shot, did increase thecapacity of the modern nation-state to discipline and control its subjects. While thephotography of Bertillon, like that of Lombroso, Huxley, and Lamprey, is not strictlyspeaking eugenic, Maxwell justifies its inclusion by arguing that “Bertillonage,” likeanthropometric photography, provided the tools for surveillance of those carrying“hereditary defects” by race scientists and eugenicists, particularly the “father ofeugenics,” Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911).

At the beginning of chapter 3, Maxwell outlines the importance of the pseudo-science of physiognomy developed in the eighteenth century by the Swiss pastor,Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801) in the formation of what contemporary Americanphotographic historian, Allan Sekula, has called a “shadow archive.”10 Functioning, inMaxwell’s words, as the “obverse to the honorific portrait tradition,” this archivemediated a new scrutiny of the body that she says on page 56, “allowed people to judgeothers as superior or inferior on moral grounds.” For all of his obsession with scientificexactitude through measurement, as I have pointed out, paradoxically, Galtonsubscribed to Lavater.11 Although Galton insisted, “whenever you can, count,” ananthropometer was not used for his eugenic photography. Conceiving of the body astransparent, like Lombroso, I have argued that Galton seemed to regard the face assufficient to betray heredity, talent or degeneracy, morality, and character.12 WhileMaxwell does not explore this issue, she does pursue the ways in which his compositephotography was developed to ascertain the physical features of eugenic and dysgenicgroups.

While the glowing health and facial symmetry elicited from composite photo-graphs of engineers, ministers, scientists, and doctors were designed to be aspirationalfor the practice of eugenics and herald the degree of perfection of their progeny,Galton’s photographs of degenerates were meant do the opposite, particularly hiscomposites of criminal, phthisis, and Jewish types. Nonetheless the conclusions drawnby Galton were far from infallible, as Maxwell’s data reveals. Galton’s ranking ofJewish people as morally inferior to Anglo-Saxons was supposedly corroborated by hisphotographs of their faces bearing a “cold, scanning gaze.”13 While readily affirmedby Galton’s anti-Semitic acolytes, Maxwell reveals on pages 88–89 that this rashdeduction was hotly contested. Unlike other Galton scholars who have not delved into

200 Reviews

the discourses of dissension, Maxwell does, particularly through her investigationof reactions to Galton from such Hebrew scholars as Dr. Adolf Neubauer (1831–1907) and founder of the Jewish Historical Society, Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916).Disputing the Jewish male gaze as a general characteristic, Jacobs points out that evenwhen found in isolated cases of seventeen- and twenty-year-olds, this does not occurdue to their pathological heredity but these youths’ constant struggle with social alien-ation and oppression. Maxwell then examines the close professional relationshipforged between Galton and the British Association for the Advancement of Science toclassify the British into types and to rank them racially through photography andanthropometry.

Classified as Type C, the Anglo-Saxon was located at the apex of British races,particularly as they could be correlated with genius, as illustrated by the map devisedunder Galton, “Distribution of Genius in England.” Maxwell shows on page 104 howthis map was regionally divisive, Galton’s eight classes of intellectually gifted English-man being located in the southern counties, particularly those spanning Kent toSurrey, while those of greatest beauty were identified in London. Far from beinginnocuous documents, Maxwell discusses how these maps and photographs acted asforms of ethnographic policing. While they identified those classes to be encouragedto procreate, they also identified those who were to be prevented from reproducing, asconfirmed by one of Galton’s apostles, R. Austin Freeman (1862–1943), who Maxwellquotes on pages 106–7: “Our purpose is to eliminate the elements of unfitness . . . .”This policing, according to Maxwell, culminated in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Actwhereby, although not sterilized, the feebleminded were incarcerated and segregatedto ensure they did not pass on their defects.

In chapter 5, “Building a Healthy Nation: Eugenic Images in the United States,1890–1935,” Maxwell charts the impact of Galtonian eugenic photography across theAtlantic. Galton’s eugenic theories and composite photography were first pursued inthe United States, according to Maxwell, by the Dean of the Harvard Medical Schoolfrom 1883, Henry Bowditch (1840–1911). After scrutinizing Galton’s published expla-nation of the composite technique, Bowditch made his own composites to prove thecorrelation of physical beauty, talent, and affluence. At the same time, he began corre-lating the heredity and growth rates of American women and children to demonstratethe need for selective immigration. Despite contestation from no lesser anthropologistthan Franz Boas (1858–1942), in her section titled “The composite photographs ofHenry Bowditch,” page 109–11, Maxwell points out that Bowditch’s composite photo-graphs and eugenic research were not only prized well into the 1930s, but alsodisplayed at the Second International Eugenics Congress in 1932. Nevertheless, hisimpact upon American eugenics has been overshadowed by the Eugenics ResearchOffice (ERO).

While the American Breeders Association, the American Eugenic Society, RaceBetterment Foundation, and the ERO were all formed within the first decade of thetwentieth century, it was the ERO under the directorship of Charles Davenport (1866–1944) that became, Maxwell writes, “at the core of almost every aspect of eugenicactivity in the country.”14 A fervent Galtonian eugenicist after his 1902 visit to Galtonand Karl Pearson (1857–1936), the mathematician who became the first Galton Chair

Reviews 201

of Eugenics at University College London, Davenport became a committedMendelian. To document the dominant and recessive genes among the Americanpopulation, photography was essential to ERO fieldworkers. Given the long history of“freak spectacles” established by leading disabilities scholar, Rosemarie GarlandThomson, unreferenced by Maxwell, it is not altogether surprising that the “freaks”working at Barnum and Bailey’s Circus on Coney Island in New York became thefocus of the fieldworkers’ lenses, including the Irish Albino woman, “LillianMaloney,” whose photo is among those on the cover of this book.15 Not only werethey photographed following the anthropometric principles laid down by Huxley(and, although unmentioned, elaborated by Pearson into biometry), but Maxwell tellson p. 114 how ERO fieldworkers also collected their professional postcards (one ofwhich also appears on the cover) and collated their biometrics, particularly those ofdwarfs. Yet far from commemorating their normality, as did their Coney Islandmanager and also the 1939 MGM film, The Wizard of Oz, from page 117 until the endof chapter 5 Maxwell reveals how this data became what I have called “incriminatingevidence,” inscribing dwarfs as undesirable genotypes and dangerous citizens.16

Photography under the direction of Davenport, as Maxwell demonstrates, was instru-mental in also inscribing as “feebleminded” colored people, paupers, and the progenyof cross-racial and interfamily marriage, and in implementing their sterilization. Yetby the First World War, social-documentary photography began to displace anthro-pometric photography as revealed in the section titled “Photographs of America’sdegenerate white families.”

Working from the spurious reflectionist premise that external cultures mirror thephysiological and neurological state of their subjects, Elizabeth Kite (1864–1954),Mina A. Sessions, Arthur Estabrook (1910–1943), and Ivan McDougle all focused theircameras upon the surroundings and squalid living conditions of feebleminded anddestitute families, renown for inbreeding, particularly in the southern United States.While Maxwell’s illustrations, plates 5.14–5.18, pages 125–32, show the dilapidatedhouses and tattered clothing they photographed particularly of the notorious Isshiefamily, she also mentions how the rooms inside these houses were snapped withanimals, babies, and children sleeping together to illustrate their disregard of hygiene,if not their sexual depravity. The constant repetition of such signifiers, alongside thegaping mouth and slouching posture, constituted an iconography. Despite whatMaxwell calls on page 128 their “selectivity and doubtful sources,” as well as their“fundamental dishonesty,” when Estabrook’s and McDougle’s photographs werepublished in Mongrel Virginians: The Win Tribe (1926), they contributed to the steril-ization of 8,300 in Virginia—including the notorious Carrie Buck—and the introduc-tion of compulsory sterilization in thirty-three states by the late 1930s. Other interwarphotographs contributed to immigration legislation, particularly those exhibited atthe 1921 Second International Eugenic Congress and Exhibition at the Museum ofNatural History in New York.

The juxtaposition of two women photographed side-by-side, one tall and“Nordic,” the other short, dark-skinned, and haired, was meant to infer, as Maxwellidentifies in her reading of plate 5.20, pages 136–37, that “the genetically superiorNordic type was in danger of being overtaken by the notably inferior Mediterranean

202 Reviews

type.”Other photographs revealed the purportedly deleterious result of crossingNordic and Asian races. The corollary of these images in the Second InternationalEugenic Exhibition were charts such as the “Future of America” display showing theexponential number of mixed-race persons living in the United States since 1890 andthe birthrate displays calculating the dramatic decline of the Mayflower’s descen-dants and the probability of their extinction. Such data fueled the selective-immigra-tionist argument of Madison Grant (1865–1937), director of the Natural HistoryMuseum, Chairman of the Eugenics Committee, and advisor to the United StatesCommittee on Selective Immigration. These xenophobic images were played offagainst such exhibitions as the Fitter Family Contests, photographed and supportedby the American Eugenics Society founded by Grant, Harry Crampton, and Harry R.Laughlin in 1925 and designed to increase America’s Anglo-Saxon population. Theywere also played off, as I have demonstrated, against body culture photography,although the interrelationship of eugenics to modern sport and physical cultures iscuriously absent from this book.17 Staged in state fairs, families were graded eugeni-cally according to their heredity, intelligence, fitness, teeth, and although unstated,their race, the highest Caucasian middle-class family receiving a silver trophy. WhileMaxwell points out on page 143 that few winners seem good looking, the family thatwon the trophy at the 1925 Texas State Fair looks the very picture of health andprovided the snapshot most commonly associated with these contests. This photo-graph (plate 5.25), featured on the cover of this book, showing a pair of muscularswim-suited parents and their five fit daughters lined up according to height as theyprepare to dive in unison, curiously echoes Wilhelmine and Weimar Korperkülturwhile uncannily presaging Hitler’s youth culture.

It is at this point in her book that Maxwell examines the role of eugenic photog-raphy in “Creating the Master Race,” the title of chapter 6. Bypassing the impact ofAugust Weismann’s (1834–1914) theory of germ plasm on German eugenics, as wellas the role played by photography in the Race Hygiene Society of Alfred Ploetz(1860–1940) and at the Dresden Hygiene Museum from 1903, Maxwell goes straightto its use by Hans F. K. Günther (1891–1968) to distinguish the Nordic fromMediterranean, Alpine, East Baltic, and Dinaric races for his book, Rassenkunde desdeutschen Volkes, first published in 1922. To idealize Nordics, while downgradingnon-Nordics, Maxwell identifies some of the techniques he deployed. WhileMediterranean, Alpine, East Baltic, and Dinaric races were photographed in awkwardposes and dark lighting, Maxwell points out from her reading of plates 6.1 and 6.2 onpages 151–52 that backlighting was used to endow Nordics with luminous skin, eyes,and hair. In his second book, The Racial Elements of European History, Güntherexpanded his photographic gallery of racial types to include Czechoslovakians,Norwegian, Portuguese, Scots, Spaniards, Swiss, Swedes, Romanians, and Ukraini-ans, as wells as Jews, in order to illustrate the dangers that racial miscegenation posedto Nordic civilization and the need for a government policy of sterilization. Bycontrast, in Günther’s third book, Deutsche Köpfe nordischer Rasse [German HeadTypes of the Nordic Race], there were fifty photographs of Nordic heads framed inthe bourgeois portrait tradition in order to convince readers of the need to preservethe Nordic race from extinction. It was Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) who,

Reviews 203

Maxwell notes on page 161, put Günther’s theory into practice, with the help ofanthropometric photography.

The undisclosed role of the national archive of German racial heredity initiated byHimmler after the passing of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 was, according to Maxwell,designed to reveal the pure Nordic in the German population for Himmler’sSchutzstaffel (SS) and for breeding of the Master Race. The most reliable instrumentfor doing so was the anthropometric photograph. Those eligible for the SS were subjectto the measurement of their height, arms, legs, torso, thorax, skull, face, forehead, anddistance between their eyes before being photographed according to strict anthropo-metrical rules. This entailed, according to Maxwell on page 163, being naked or inswimming trunks, standing with head up facing forwards, arms by the sides, and heelslocked tightly together.Before marrying, both SS officers and their prospective spouseswere also required to submit photographs of themselves in swimsuits and supplygenealogical charts dating back to 1750. Photographs were even seminal to theVolksdeutschen.

A Bertillon-style mug shot taken against a blank white background plus a genea-logical chart were affixed to racial examination cards (Rasse-Kartei) to determinewhether those born in Hitler’s reconfigured “Fatherland,” particularly Polish orCzechoslovakian Germans, were not only eligible for German citizenship but also forthe SS. Photographs of those who were, especially young men who looked like NordicAdonises, featured in the Master Race magazine of the Third Reich, Volk und Rasse.They were juxtaposed with photographs of those prized by the Third Reich forbreeding the Master Race and embodying it: German mothers wearing theMutterkreuz—the bronze, silver, and gold cross awarded to women with four or morechildren—and Hitler youths exercising in nature as illustrated by plate 7.12, showinga teenage girl playing with a ball in the German countryside (also reproduced on thecover). This photography burgeoned with the group of professional photographers,epitomized by Maxwell’s example, Erna Lendvai-Dircksen (1883–1962), who wereonly too ready, willing, and able to capture both the Nordic ideal and the Volk—the“folk” seemingly united by Blut und Boden, German blood and soil. This is illumi-nated by plate 7.10, also reproduced on the cover of this book. Showing four ofLendvai-Dircksen’s photographs of blond, blue-eyed, Nordic looking girls, it featuredin Volk und Rasse, as models of the Volk who were “racially valuable.” Maxwell doesnot pause to explore the seductive biopower of these photographs and the ways inwhich, as I have argued, they were choreographed to produce desire for the Aryanbody and thus eroticize eugenics.18 Instead she focuses upon how these photographs’idyllic framing of the aspirational body appears in stark contrast to the photographsof Slavs and Jews, particularly those published in the book and film from the exhibi-tion, The Eternal Jew, in which Jews were made to appear as abject forms of conta-gion, like plague-bearing rats, without any right to German citizenship. Designed toarouse persecutionist paranoia, these photographs were instrumental, as Maxwellominously concludes on page 181, “at getting the public to approve the mass killingsof Slavs and Jews that the Nazis had been instigating in secret.” Yet as Maxwell pointsout, the use of incriminating framing did not stop there. Once Hitler launchedOperation Barbarossa, similar techniques were applied to the Soviet “Red” soldiers,

204 Reviews

with Stalin’s officers being portrayed as the opposite of Hitler’s: shabby, shifty, andsubhuman.

Due to the “sensitivity” surrounding the Lebensborn experiment—Himmler’scampaign for German Aryan women to procreate with SS officers and bequeaththeir children to the Third Reich—Maxwell argues that Himmler refused to permitLebensborn mothers to be photographed or the files of Lebensborn children to be openfor inspection. By contrast, she points out that those Lebensborn children forciblytaken or kidnapped in Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Russia were extensively photo-graphed and screened in RuSHA, the SS Race and Settlement [Rasse- undSiedlungshauptamt] office created by Himmler to safeguard the racial purity of the SS.Given the prime index of Nordic heredity was the length from the forehead to the backof the cranium, their heads were fully measured. They were then photographed fromthree angles. When correlated with a testing chart scaling every part of the body fromone to five, even for the bridge of the nose, these anthropometric photographs sealedtheir fate. If they managed to achieve a high score in the eleven-part racial criteria,Maxwell notes on page 167, they could be sent to a Lebensborn home and be adoptedby a German couple. Otherwise they were deported to concentration camps to facedeath by starvation.

Had the book ended there, it would have painted a grim picture of photographyas a medium so vulnerable to co-option, it only ever functioned as a cultural agentof eugenics. However, in her closing chapters, Maxwell returns to the photographyof Franz Boas’s 1894 and 1897 expeditions, some of which was taken by NativeAmericans. She examines them in conjunction with those by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) to consider how this medium could act as a counterculture. In compiling thetexts for Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, it is a strategy I also deployed by includ-ing Shaw Michelle Smith’s readings of the photographs of W. E. B. Du Bois as a coun-terdisplay at the 1900 Exposition Universelle and Roger Blackley’s identification ofMaori Haka as an act of defiance against Victorian propriety and “doomed race”theory.19 Just as DNA tests have demonstrated that the genetic differential withinthe same race is invariably greater than between races, as succinctly surmised byNancy Burson’s billboard, There Is No Gene For Race, so Boas’s photographs of NativeAmerican peoples show that their physiognomic and cultural differences were oftenfar more pronounced within tribes than between tribes and other races. By contrast tothe bestial and devolutionary portraits of African Americans, Maxwell points out thatthe Negro exhibition of Du Bois’s photographs at the 1900 Exposition Universellehighlighted their evolution and civilization. In using the tools of scientific racism todeconstruct its precepts and to dismantle the color line, Boas’s photographs andanthropometric data challenged, as Maxwell deduces on page 214, “the Darwinistassumption that each major race corresponded to a distinct physical type whosefeatures were more or less stable because inherited.”

In his 1934 book, Aryans and Non-Aryans, Boas not only refuted Galtonian andMendelian eugenicists’ conflation of extinction with miscegenation but also theMaster Race mythology promulgated by the Nazis. By no means alone, the photo-graphs chosen by Julian Huxley (grandson of Thomas Huxley) and Alfred C. Haddonto illustrate their 1935 book, We Europeans, as Maxwell indicates, also contested Nazi

Reviews 205

eugenics. By exposing the similarity between Europeans, regardless of nationality,these photographs, as Maxwell writes on page 228, “cast doubt on the idea of distinct‘races’ by showing that over the centuries racial mixing among Europeans hadprogressed to such an extent that it was no longer meaningful to talk of pure races oreven distinct racial types.” Nevertheless it was only with the Holocaust that eugenicswas finally discredited.

Well before eugenics was stigmatized by the Holocaust and Western historiessanitized of its prevalence, the nine chapters in this book amply demonstrate howanthropological, ethnographic and eugenic societies, congresses, conferences, exhibi-tions, and photographs flourished throughout America, Australia, Britain, andGermany. Each chapter establishes how different theories and practices of eugenicswere able to traverse such disciplines as anthropology, ethnography, medicine, andscience and circulate across these nations as an insidious culture, particularly throughtheir relationship to the medium of photography. In charting the genealogy of eugenicphotography, from Agassiz to Lendvai-Dircksen, from America to Nazi Germany, thisbook reveals how this medium that was widely touted for objectively capturing realitywas able to “frame” the human face and body, inscribe its eugenic identity, and act asan insidious instrument of coercion and surveillance. By focusing upon this medium,it is able to reveal the uncanny similarities that emerged between the photography,capturing the eugenic ideal in America and Britain, and those capturing the Nordicideal of race and Volk in Nazi Germany. In so doing, this book exposes that far frombeing an isolated or isolatable manifestation, Nazi eugenics may be then perceived asthe extreme realization of these transnational eugenic cultures to cultivate corporalperfection and to eradicate any taint of “degeneracy.” Hence despite my reservationsabout the methodology used in this book and omissions within the text, the complex“picture imperfect” it paints well before the word genocide was coined in 1944 throwsa stark and invaluable light on the dark history of eugenics.

FAE BRAUER is research professor in visual theory at the University of East London andsenior lecturer in art history and theory at the University of New South Wales, College ofFine Arts, Sydney, Australia. She is author of Modern Art’s Centre: The Paris Salons andthe Civilizing Mission (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010); coeditor of The Art of Evolu-tion: Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual Culture (University Press of New England, 2009), andcoeditor of Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti (Ashgate, 2008). She has written many bookchapters and articles on eugenics and visual cultures, including “Rationalizing Eros: The‘Plague of Onan,’ the Procreative Imperative and Duchamp’s Sexual Automatons,” in MarcelDuchamp and Eroticism, ed. Marc Décimo (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), and“Representing ‘Le moteur humain’: Chronometry, Chronophotography, ‘The Art of Work’and the ‘Taylored’ Body,”Visual Resources XIX, no. 2 (June 2003): 83–105, among others.

1 See Fae Brauer, “The Third Reich and Transnational Cultures of Eugenics,” subsec-tion of “Making Eugenic Bodies Delectable: Art, ‘Biopower’ and ‘Scientia Sexualis,’”in Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen, eds., Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti (Alder-shot: Ashgate, 2008), 1–34.

2 Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race andVisual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

206 Reviews

3 Fae Brauer, “Dégénéréscence,” in Michela Marzano, ed., Dictionnaire du corps (Paris:Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), 278–85.

4 Fae Brauer, “The Transparent Body: Biocultures of Evolution, Eugenics and ScientificRacism,” in A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilization from the 18th to the 21stCentury, ed. Jane Kromm and Susan Benforado Bakewell (Oxford: Berg Publishers,2009), 89–103.

5 Fae Brauer, “The Stigmata of Abjection: Degenerate Limbs, Hysterical Skin and TheTattooed Body,” in Kromm and Bakewell, A History of Visual Culture, 169–83.

6 Fay Brauer, “Eradicating Difference: The Bioethics of Imaging ‘Degeneracy’ andExhibiting Eugenics,” in “Art and Ethics,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art1 (2004): 139–66.

7 Bénédict A. Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales del’espèce humaine et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives (Paris: J. B. Ballière/Libraire de l’Académie impériale de médecine, 1857), 5: “Dégénérescence et déviationmaladive du type normal de l’humanité . . . .”

8 Cesare Lombroso, L’Uomo Delinquente (Milan: Hoepli, 1876).9 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); see also Fae Brauer, “Biopou-voir,” in Dictionnaire du corps, 137–40.

10 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64. (This textis incorrectly identified in the Maxwell’s bibliography as “The Body in the Archive.”)

11 Fae Brauer, “Framing Darwin: A Portrait of Eugenics,” in The Art of Evolution:Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual Culture, ed. Fae Brauer and Barbara Larson (Hanoverand London: University Press of New England, 2009), 133–35.

12 Brauer, “The Transparent Body,” 89–103.13 “Note by Mr. Galton,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (1886): 62, as

quoted by Maxwell, Picture Imperfect, 88.14 Maxwell, Picture Imperfect, 111.15 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body

(New York: New York University Press, 1996).16 Fae Brauer, “Incriminating Evidence: Displaying Race, Exhibiting Eugenics,” confer-

ence session, “Figurations of Knowledge,” convened by Sabine Flach, FlorianDombois, and Bergit Arends, European Conference of the Society for Literature,Science and the Arts (SLSA) at the Centre for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin(ZfL), 3–7 June 2008.

17 Fae Brauer, “Dangerous Doubles: Degenerate and Regenerate Body Photography inthe Eugenic Imagination,” in Image and Imagination,” ed. Martha Langford(Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 91–102; Fae Brauer, “Le duodangereux: «L’homme normal» et le corps dégénéré au temps de eugénisme,” inReprésentations du corps. Le biologique et le vécu. Normes et normalité, ed. GillesBoëtsch, Nicole Chapuis-Lucciani, Dominique Chevé, and Jean-Pierre Albert(Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2006), 94–112.

18 Fae Brauer, “Introduction: ‘Making the Eugenic Body Delectable: Art, “Biopower”and “Scientia Sexualis,”’ and “Eroticizing Lamarckian Eugenics: The Body StrippedBare during French Sexual Neoregulation,” in Brauer and Callen, Art, Sex andEugenics, 97–138.

19 Shawn Michelle Smith, “The Art of Scientific Propaganda,” and Roger Blackley,“Improper Moves: Maori Haka and Racial Destiny,” in Brauer and Callen, Art, Sexand Eugenics, 35–95.

Reviews 207

Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography,Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980–2000by James ElkinsStanford, Stanford University Press, 2008320 pp., 85 black-and-white figs. and 21 color pls., $29.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-0-80474-148-4

Reviewed by Jutta Schickore

This is an odd and curious book. I took it up thinking—okay,here comes yet another contribution to visualization inscience and art. But, in fact, this is a book about the impossi-bility to visualize and about the difficulties of writing aboutvisualization. And it is a book about the strained relationsbetween the sciences and the humanities.

The introduction briefly reviews the so-called TwoCulture problem as it was posed in 1959 by the physicist andnovelist C. P. Snow and revived in the mid-1990s by the phys-icist Alan Sokal in his critique of postmodernist intellectuals.Both scholars lamented the ever-widening gap between thesciences and the humanities. Based on his review, James

Elkins identifies three fundamental problems with those “interdisciplinary” writingsthat aim to bridge that gap between the sciences and the humanities. First, becausehumanist accounts of science often leave out equations, they misrepresent the natureof scientific texts. Secondly, interdisciplinary work is often not clear about what disci-pline is used to elucidate another. Is art supposed to explain science? Is science used toexplain art? Or are both explained in terms of yet another discipline, such as philoso-phy? Thirdly, the framework used to interpret a particular discipline is drawn from adiscourse other than the one to be interpreted. According to Elkins, all three of thesepractices produce accounts that will dissatisfy the members of the discipline understudy because the interpretation of their disciplinary practice will appear irrelevant atbest, if not distorting or even harmful.

Elkins then sets out three methodological principles that respond to those prob-lems and should help make a scholarly book on art and science palatable for bothscientists and humanists. They are: discipline-specific terms, discourses, and problemsshould be preserved. In particular, texts about science should not shy away from tech-nical language and equations but keep as close as possible to them. Secondly, thenarrative should avoid constructing cause-and-effect relations between differentdisciplines, that is, one should not seek to explain a discipline in terms of anotherdiscipline. Thirdly, metaphors that do not originate in the discipline under consider-ation (concepts that are not “‘actors’ terms”) should be avoided. The common ideaunderlying these principles is that the narrative should as much as possible let eachdiscipline “speak its own language.”

Throughout his book, Elkins deliberately abstains from participating in thediscussions and disputes that are taking place in any of the disciplines his essays are

208 Reviews

covering; and only rarely does he embark on considerations about points of contactbetween the arts and the sciences. In fact, his book is a demonstration of the funda-mental differences between the two cultures, both in terms of the means and goals ofscientific and artistic image-making and in terms of scientific and humanist interpre-tations of images.

The six chapters can perhaps best be described as essays grouped around acommon theme: images which arise from a preoccupation with what cannot bedepicted. The book features several figures and color plates, but none of them displaysa “pretty picture” in the usual sense of the term. Elkins is fascinated with images thatare frail, cold, subtle, feeble, unobtrusive, and require a lot of abstract engagement andeffort from the viewer, not with the powerful, provocative, “hot” images screaming atus from the pages of newspapers and magazines, from television screens, and from thewalls of museums of contemporary art.

The images discussed in the book are what Elkins describes as “the results of inves-tigations into the limits of representation” (p. xv). Two chapters are devoted to latetwentieth-century paintings and artistic photographs. Four chapters explore scientificimages. Here Elkins moves from astronomy to microscopy, particle physics, and quan-tum mechanics, from depictions of very large and distant objects to images of smallerand smaller things—of entities so small and peculiar that even the word “object” nolonger seems appropriate for them.

Each chapter examines in what sense a particular image-producing discipline haswithdrawn from traditional conceptions of representation, that is, from the notionthat a representation should be in some sense “adequate” to the objects depicted. Thechapters on painting and photography concentrate on images that exemplify “ameasured retreat from obvious or unequivocal meaning” (p. 57). Elkins arrives at hissample of images not just through a survey of recent artistic productions but ratherthrough a combined analysis of images, artists’ statements, and art historians’discourses. To me, the selection criteria Elkins applies in these two chapters are thehardest to grasp. The distinctive feature of the set of images discussed appears to bethat they are also about the move away from adequate representation, that they insome way exemplify the very process of stripping away the techniques of realisticrepresentation. For instance, photographs are often blurry and in this sense “inade-quate,” but certain artistic photographs consciously utilize blur and darkness toexplore what it means to see well—and what it means to fail in this effort. Obviously,this is an important distinction; however, I sometimes find it difficult to see Elkins’sactual examples as images that have as their theme the very process of retreating fromadequate representation. The fact that art historians profoundly disagree aboutwhether or not Agnes Martin’s (1912–2004) canvasses are landscape paintingscertainly indicates that there is something special about the representational quality ofthese paintings, but Elkins seems to take this disagreement as evidence for his view thatMartin’s images are “about the strain of moving away from landscape, toward abstrac-tion, and back again” (p. 40).

I find more compelling the chapters on scientific images. The main distinctionbetween artistic and scientific image-making is of course in the attitude to the limitsof representation and visualization. While artists may consciously seek to retreat from

Reviews 209

the idea of adequate representation, scientists will hold on to this idea and experiencethose limits as obstacles. Like artistic photographs, astronomical images also exemplifyblur and darkness, but these features are, of course, not intentionally created. On thecontrary, they are the best that can be produced by today’s instruments, and it is thetask of astronomers to develop techniques of image analysis and computation toextract information from the faint and hazy pictures of elusive objects at the very endof the “visible” universe.

Microscopical image-making is confronted with limits of representation ofanother kind. Microscopical images and their meanings are wrought from theattempts to overcome the limits poised by the very means of vision and image-making.There are different types of microscopes—light microscopes, various types of electronmicroscopes, acoustic microscopes, scanning probe microscopes—but in one way oranother, their performance is limited by the very means that enable the image-forma-tion process, be it diffraction, spherical aberration, or the size of the probe-sampleinteraction volume. Microscopical images thus represent not only microscopic objectsbut also the limits of the process of their production.

The final two chapters on particle physics and quantum mechanics move evenfarther away from traditional notions of representation. But here the crucial limit isposed by the very nature of the entities featured in particle physics, which challengeour common conception of objects. Cloud and bubble chamber recordings are depic-tions of traces of motions of particles, and for the physicist, they are nothing but meresurfaces for highly complex mathematical operations to obtain information about themomentum, energy, and velocity of a particle. The diagrams produced in quantummechanics, then, are no longer meant to depict objects. In fact, it would be a funda-mental mistake to understand them as visualization of quantum phenomena.

Elkins refrains from making a sustained argument; and he does not draw an over-all conclusion. This is, in fact, a reflection of his main concern: The six essays are sixattempts at expressing what artistic and scientific images do, if they do not depictobjects, and how scientists and artists negotiate various inadequacies of representa-tion. And as explorations of these inadequacies, the essays expose various challengesthe analyst may encounter in his or her attempt to produce an adequate representationof artistic and scientific image-making and use. How can one further specify the “inad-equacy” of representation in the different kinds of images? Would it be a violation ofthe discourse of particle physics to claim an aesthetic quality for bubble chamberimages? Can the concept of the sublime do justice to image-making processes outsidethe arts? Elkins’s solution to the problem of how to write about inadequate images isto let the makers and users of these images speak their own language and express theirown concerns. His account aims to be adequate to his subject matter. Following themethodological principles set out in his introduction, he consciously seeks to avoidemploying new interpretative concepts and metaphors from disciplines other than theone under consideration in each chapter. Instead, he draws out and amplifies conceptsthe scientists and artists themselves use to work with their images, and invites thereader to consider these images in light of those concepts.

For instance, the chapter on astronomy introduces and utilizes the concept ofmagnitude, which is of course an astronomical term for the brightness of a celestial

210 Reviews

object. At the same time, “order of magnitude”—the number of powers of ten—servesas a conceptual aid in Elkins’s narrative to indicate just how distant the celestial objectsare. The chapter on microscopes uses the concept of contrast to draw attention to thediversity of techniques for enhancing the difference between objects and backgrounds,ranging from practices of mounting and rearranging the light source to image-analysissoftware. Only in the chapter on quantum mechanics does Elkins move well beyondthe vocabulary of the discipline, emphasizing the “inconceivable,” “unpicturable”quality of the submicroscopic realm. But even in this chapter he seeks to stay close tothe disciplinary practice under consideration, using the gap between the intuitive-looking pictures used to introduce quantum mechanics to beginning students and theactual physical theory. The exploration of this gap demonstrates the impossibility ofbringing the submicroscopic realm into pictures.

Does Elkins succeed? I think he succeeds beautifully with the exploration of thelimits of representation. His book is a welcome antidote for all those students of“visual culture” who take the concept of visualization for granted. The identificationof different kinds of limits—limits posed by the distance and size of objects, by theinvestigative tools, and by the very nature and properties of those entities that are nolonger objects—is most helpful, particularly as a framework for the analysis of scientificimage-making.

I am not so sure about his second agenda. His book will certainly appeal to readersfrom both “cultures,” and I am assuming that physicists, astronomers, and biologistswill not be alienated by the way in which Elkins approaches their disciplines. But theseaudiences will respond differently to the book. Even though Elkins actively tries to stayaloof from current academic squabbles, the book still remains firmly rooted in thehumanist camp; and while scholars of “visual culture” will (and will have to) engagewith Elkins’s work and make it part of their scholarly discourse, scientists most likelywill not. For them, it might be a book of “general interest,” to be read after hours. Theywill find it hard to put down.

JUTTA SCHICKORE is associate professor in the Department of History and Philosophyof Science at Indiana University. She works on methodological aspects of scientific exper-imentation, the history of physiology, and the problem of error in science. Her publica-tions include Going Amiss in Experimental Practice, coedited with G. Hon and F. Steinle(Dordrecht, 2009); The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections, 1740–1870(Chicago, 2007), Revisiting Discovery and Justification: The Context Distinction in Historicaland Philosophical Perspective, coedited with F. Steinle (Dordrecht, 2006), as well as severalarticles in history and philosophy of science journals.

Copyright of Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation is the property of Routledge and its

content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's

express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.