Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. DuBois, Race, and Visual Culture (review)

The unique display of research on the "Georgia Negro" assembled by the young Atlanta University professor W. E. B. DuBois for the American Negroes exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition has become a focal point for scholars interested in visual culture and race. Such literature includes David Levering Lewis's useful contextual setting for this exhibit and Deborah Willis's documentation on DuBois's so-called Georgia Albums and other display photographs in a 2003 Library of Congress publication. Shawn Smith's book, an expansion of an essay she published in 2000, is the newest contribution to this literature. Smith uses DuBois's three Georgia Albums as "texts" for her distinctive readings of scientific photography, patriarchy, and lynching. Her purpose is to "restore signifying context" to the "enigmatic" quality of these photographs, which lack captions and identification, and hence stand in need of "decipherment" and "decoding." Smith further proposes that these albums demonstrate DuBois's decisive role as an "archivist" from which his own visual practice and theory can be excavated.

In her first chapter Smith takes on the task of re-reading DuBois's much-discussed "double consciousness" concept (looking at one's self through other's eyes) and "the veil" (experience of cultural separation), arguing for his role "as an early visual theorist of race and racism" (p. 25). In chapter 2, the focus shifts to Smith's readings of the Georgia Albums against the contemporaneous "scientific photography" (profile and frontal views) popularized by Francis Galton in his eugenic studies, as well as against the pictorial conventions of the commercial portrait photography of Thomas Askews, one of the few identified creators of such images. The fact that DuBois draws on both of these "codes" receives far less consideration, but is actually the essential issue.

The third chapter begins with a reading of race representation in caricature and criminality before moving on to the photographs of "patriarchy" and the family that draw on DuBois's ideas as expressed in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). What receives relatively little attention in Smith's readings—and is possibly more critical in understanding the Georgia Albums—is DuBois's seminal 1896 study The Philadelphia Negro, which provided the model for his Georgia Negro research. This was started when he first moved to Atlanta University, well before initial plans for the display at the 1900 exposition. Smith's final chapter on the important subject of photography and lynching, which draws on the Without Sanctuary exhibition and book of 2000, astutely shifts attention to the subject of the viewer, both in the crowds present at these events and in the exchanges between the senders and receivers of the (postcard) images. Reading these photographs against DuBois's later essay, "Souls of White Folk" (1920), provides Smith with her conclusion that they "make very clear that the power of whiteness is not only invisible and dispersed but also particular and embodied in U.S. culture" (p. 139).

Smith's readings of DuBois's texts and the Georgia Albums draw on her synthesis of a large and diverse trove of scholarly literature. The interesting discussions and rich reference material in the endnotes should be read carefully. In subsuming these unique photographs within her own particular strategy of visual analysis, however, Smith tends to make the Georgia Albums disappear behind her more ambitious discourses on race and visual culture and to detach them from their own distinctive histories as objects of research and display. This is a book that will generate wide discussion, given the growing interest of scholars from many disciplines in understanding more fully the connections between visual culture and race.