The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (review)

When I was growing up in the 1970s, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, a favorite rainy-day activity involved drawing clothes onto the naked tribal women of the National Geographic. My two female cousins and I would surround ourselves with the piled-up back issues that were kept in the storeroom/ironing room that was off the kitchen in my aunt's house, a room significant to us because it also contained the only framed studio portrait of my maternal grandparents. The stark contrast between the two images representing dark-skinned women struck me even then, for as we sat on the floor coloring black female bodies with blue, red, and black ballpoint pens, my stern-eyed grandmother looked down upon us from the wall. Seated stiffly on a straight-backed chair, she peers out at the camera without a glimmer of a smile on her dark face. Even in a black-and-white photograph, it is clear that she is very dark, especially when compared to her lighter-skinned husband. My grandmother Rebecca wears a starched and pleated sari, draped and pinned to look like a Victorian gown, and unbelievably (at least to my tropical-island child's eyes) long, white lace gloves that cover her hands and arms up to her elbows.

Her carefully clothed body and familiar studio pose—a pose duplicated in hundreds of similar framed photographs of the 1930s (husband standing next to a finely clothed seated wife, both looking at the camera stiffly) in upper- or middle-class Indian and Sri Lankan homes—signifies her comparatively exalted position in British colonial society. The wife of a tea planter, her pose is not that of the smiling tea pluckers in the National Geographic, the particular issue on Sri Lanka that I carried with me for many years. It is as if she is imitating the solemn dignity of the young Queen Elizabeth II, whose ornately framed photograph had graced the dining-room wall of my grandmother's house and was remembered fondly by my mother and her sisters each time a British royal wedding or death occurred. And in spite of my grandmother's mimicking of a pseudo-Victorian mode of address, she was not an alien figure to us: after all, even then I could see my mother in her smooth-skinned, dark face.

In contrast, the naked black women in the pages of the National Geographic—a magazine that from the first time it published a tribal woman's bare breasts in 1896 has defined its purpose in terms of scientific inquiry and a broadly humanist, nonjudgmental interest in other cultures (see Lutz and Collins, Reading National Geographic)—were strange creatures from a darker, more savage country. Even when the articles touched geographically close to places like the Andaman Islands, and the photographs showed a landscape not unlike our own with men and women with skin tones and features just like ours, the very fact that the women were framed by the magazine in terms of wearing no clothes made their cultures primitive, unchanging, and alien. As children, my cousins and I saw no connection between our postcolonial selves and the images of the naked black women in the National Geographic. And yet I also remember cutting out and keeping pictures of beautiful, bejeweled young women from Mali and Rajasthan, of being drawn to the glossy photos of women with Indian features or dark-toned skin who were rarely seen in the British women's magazines commonly found in our homes.

In the preface to their superbly produced volume on The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, the authors Deborah Willis and Carla Williams admit to the dearth of accessible black women's photographs, especially the lack of early images, when race and gender politics conspired for only certain genres of photography to flourish. Willis and Williams categorize the long history of photographic representations of black women into three broad groups: the naked female of the National Geographic or the "'Jezebel' aesthetic" (the...