Project: Social documentary and race

Composer, film-maker and photographer Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was born into a society which was segregated and where black people could not make it out of menial work and poverty. Like other black people, Parks was on the receiving end of intolerable bigotry in New York. He vowed to document this after benig made to eat at the back door of resteraunts and being refused service in shops. However, he soon found that photographing bigotry was no easy task; the type of experience he had endured elided the camera so he set off to photograph the plight of black people in New York City. His work straddles documentary (his workon the FSA project) photojournalism and editorial phtography.

American Gothic - Gordon Parks Parks' most famous image, taken in 1942 during his involvement with the FSA project. It shows the subject (a black woman) as object, an object to be pitied or derided, as well as the conflict between nationhood and nationality.

The story of how parks came to take this photograph: http://layersofmeaning.org/archives/000246.html

In American Gothic Parks uses the medium of photography to expose aspects of the treatment of black people in America. However photography has also been used in a less positive way in relation to race.

There was widespread interest in eugenics in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Eugenics is based on the idea that some characteristics are 'better' than others and that you can improve the human gene pool by encouraging reproduction between people with the desirable genetic traits and discouraging reproduction amongst those with less desirable traits. Clearly the belief that some groups were inherently genetically inferior could be used as a justification for all kinds of behaviour, from colonial rule to the sort of discrimination that Parks and others experienced on the streets of New York. The Nazis too this to the extreme by exterminating groups who failed to match the Aryan ideal - Jews, black people, homosexuals, Roma, people with learning disability - and eugenics fell into disfavour after World War II as a result. In America, Margaret Sanger's 'Negro Project' sought to restrict the black population, and thus improve the American population, through 'planned parenthood' masquerading as health care and family planning.


Malthusian eugenics and the Harlem Project

Citizen review online - the negro project

One hour BBC4 documentary Scientific Racism: The Eugenics of Social Darwinism:
www.utube.com/watch?v=eX5T68TQIo

Implicit in eugenics was the idea of classification or objective measuring - pigeon-holing people into particular groups according to their genetic characteristics and treating them accordingly. The Victorians, for example, believed that you could identify criminal 'types' through their facial characteristics. In America the eugenics movement was well funded and they produced plenty of indicative material.. The chart below shows what to expect visually of the Negroid Insane Criminal and the Negroid Criminal.


Photography was adopted as a useful tool to facilitate classification. Francis Galton photographed immigrants as they arrived in America, often at Ellis Island. He identified 46 different races through measurement and through facial characteristics on photographs.

Such photography effectively dehumanised its subjects and turned them into research objects although its creators might have argued that it was simply documentary - showing what was there. Photography was manipulated and used by racists and propaganda of the day to endorse a 'science' to the public. It also served a journalistic function, publicising and legitimising racist organisations and 'celebrities' like Margaret Sanger.
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Chapter 4 - course reader 'The Subject as Object - photography and the human body'
This chapter looks at social differences, objects of desire and disgust, technological bodies and the body in transition.

Since the 18th century the focuses has been on anatomy, describing the body as skeletal and as  a muscular structure, organs and tissues. Today the focus is on endocrinology, immunology and genetics, the constructive body as informational and communicative. The informational model of the body is the body as data, which informs visual practices, fingerprinting, scanning, vernacular photography, people translate their own bodies into data, selfies and by using online networks.

The 'body' is not the hot topic that is was at the end of the 20th Century. In the late 1980's/90's, photography has been used to address perceptions of gender, of ageing and for racial differences. Digital and analogue techniques were also used to produce unlikely, illusionistic images, manipulation and body altering and the emergence of seeing the body in specific ways and the role of photography has a place in the role of desire.

In the 1990's the body 'awareness' was liked to political and social crisis, AIDS was highly publicised and photography was used to document the impact on society. There was a new found visibility which resulted in attacks on funding of exhibitions that were seen as 'undermining the norms of decency'. The representation of the body was fought over in the 1980's and 90's in a way that no longer exists.

By the end of the 19th Century photography had certain 'types', there were the Victorian scenes of phenology and physiognomy used to gain insight and understanding of what ay beneath a persons visual appearance. Visual appearance was used to classify deviants rather than understand or rehabilitate. A significant legacy of the 19th Century was the disciplinary use of photography as a biometric data system, using digital photograph, incisions and finger printing to sort and classify people.

Francis Galton - the pioneer of fingerprinting used composite portraiture in the 1880's to identify people with shared characteristics, with different 'types' of faces relating to crime or ethnic groups. Galton introduced the 'science' of Eugenics - 'self direction of human evolution'.  Eugenics, claimed to quantify intellectual and immoral qualities which were hereditary. He claimed that 'stock' could be improved by selective breeding, a theory embraced by Adolf Hitler.

Early in the 21st Century, a new crisis appears to be obesity, the highlighting of poverty and starvation, in all parts of the world, and the contrast between the two and the general distribution of global wealth. Today, the smartphone accelerates photographic production, circulation and consumption and happens instantly. The body, is used as a form of visual data, it produces so quickly has become an instant form of communication, Snapchat,- photo's disappear after between 1 - 10 seconds, Instagram is communication by photograph, almost a running commentary of everyday lives.

Today, the main way data is generated is through our own submission of images and information through online databases and social networks. Self portraiture, the selfie, means to gain celebrity status , the selfie is currency in fragile social interactions (Schwartz 2010:171)