Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1870-1940 (review)

In this detailed study, Anne Maxwell provides a unique perspective on visual culture and its relationship to racism. Rather than focus on racialist writings and theories that influenced the eugenics movement, she concentrates on how the movement was "presented to the public and what techniques were used to ensure that the race theories promulgated by its scientists came to meet with wide acceptance" (p. vii). In order to make her task more manageable, Maxwell focuses solely on photography's role in supporting both "positive" and "negative" eugenics within the Social Darwinist camp—respectively, "encouraging those of good heredity to breed" and "preventing those of inferior heredity from reproducing" (p. 1). Following a brief overview of the eugenics movement in Britain, the US, and Germany, Maxwell introduces the scientific use of photography, and its particular conventions, in the context of racial identification and the "furtherance of European imperialism" (p. 11).

In Part I, Maxwell addresses the historical development of racial-type photography beginning in the late nineteenth century, first as a tool for physical anthropologists, and second for use in prison photography. She credits Louis Agassiz, a Swiss advocate for theories of polygenesis, Creationism, and permanent racial types, with some of the earliest American racial-type photographs. In Britain, Thomas Henry Huxley used photography to support a Darwinian theory of human development and devised an anthropometric record comparing the "races" of the British Empire. The method was not applied systematically, owing to what Maxwell terms the "unequal power dynamics of the colonial enterprise" (p. 33). The author contrasts this method with John Lamprey's more flexible technique, in which subjects were photographed against a grid in the "more relaxed and graceful poses of classical sculptures" (pp. 34-35). Working in South Australia, Paul Foelsche photographed Aborigines in a manner similar to Huxley's, though with less methodological rigor, producing images that focused on the shape of the head and facial features. Maxwell argues that this was a crucial development for both racial-type photography and later eugenicists. Finally, in Imperial Germany, Carl and Frederick Dammann organized photograph albums of racial types from around the world in a way that would emphasize evolutionary hierarchy. In doing so, they relied on emerging theories that coupled linguistic distinctions with racial characteristics and nationalistic sentiments—important linkages for eugenics. As Maxwell suggests in Chapter Three, eugenicists were also interested in prison photography's presumed objective techniques—such as the "mug shot"—because they "permitted criminologists to make increasingly confident assumptions about people's social worth based on their physical appearance" (pp. 48-49).

In part II, Maxwell discusses the emergence of eugenic photography. She dates it to Francis Galton's first use of such photography in England in 1878—five years before he coined the term "eugenics" itself. This period saw much scientific speculation on the "dark side to Darwin's evolutionary hypothesis," or "racial degeneration." According to a view widespread at the time, social welfare for the "weakest" members of society allowed the "poorest, not the fittest, hereditary traits" to be passed on (p. 79). Galton developed a composite photographic process aimed at producing a physiognomic profile of the criminal and degenerate "types"—among whom he included Jews—as well as of supposed ideal types such as Royal Engineers and geologists. Most famously, in 1883, Galton created and distributed a Life History Album, a template in which family members were encouraged to include profile and frontal photographs taken according to his method, anthropometric data, and medical histories. Individuals might use such genealogical records, he proposed, to predict future health and regulate sexual reproduction.

Compared to the British model, in the American model there was a greater emphasis on negative eugenics. Many states had passed compulsory sterilization legislation by the 1930s, in part due to the influence of eugenic social-documentary-style photography. One influential organization during this period was the Eugenics Record Office, whose researchers used photography to document supposed hereditary defects; another...