Racial Identity and the Science of Photography

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Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography

Tanya Sheehan

To cite this article: Tanya Sheehan (2011) Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography, Photography and Culture, 4:2, 133-155 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/175145211X12992393431160

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Download by: [Colby College] Date: 04 October 2017, At: 08:02 Photography & Culture Comical Conflations: Volume 4—Issue 2 Racial Identity July 2011 pp. 133–156 and the Science of DOI: 10.2752/175145211X12992393431160 Photography Reprints available directly from the publishers Tanya Sheehan Photocopying permitted by licence only © Berg 2011 Abstract Comical associations between the science of photography and ideas about race were common on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades after the medium’s invention. Some humorists observed that no bourgeois sitter would welcome the sight of his “negative” or blackened self; others illustrated the cosmetic character of race by depicting the effects of photographic chemicals on human skin. This essay takes these racial jokes seriously by reading them as historically specific social commentary. Beginning with an analysis of the first book of photographic humor, Cuthbert Bede’s Photographic Pleasures (1855), it shows how this genre both reinforced and challenged popular conceptions of whiteness, blackness, and the photographic medium.

Keywords: photography, humor, race, African Americans, science

Shortly after the announcement of its invention in 1839, the first practitioners of photography noticed that there was something Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 funny about the medium’s relationship to race. Reflecting on what he would name the photographic “negative,” Sir John Herschel described the “figures” it represented as having a “strange effect,” whereby “fair women are transformed into negresses &c” (Herschel Papers 1839; quoted in Willis and Williams 2002: 1). Photographic literature on both sides of the Atlantic subsequently described the influence of darkroom chemicals on human skin in similarly racial terms. According to one report published in an American trade journal in 1866, a studio patron used the contents of a photographer’s evaporating dish to clean molasses candy off her children’s faces before they were to sit for a portrait. After repeated “dipping and washing,” the horrified woman “left the place crying, with three little negroes, the artist not even giving her anything to take it off” (The Philadelphia Photographer 1866: 62).

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How could a technology that was consumed were attached to it, [and] how it was structured ravenously by white bourgeois subjects depend and produced,” it poses similar questions about so much on blackness? Why, moreover, did light- photography itself, as the medium became a ground complexioned sitters seeking to look “white” in on which to reinforce and disrupt contemporary their portraits apparently require a change of ideas about race (Wickberg 1998: 124). race in the hands of the photographer? Such questions took shape in the immediate wake Chemical Comedy and of emancipation in the British colonies and at Photographic Pleasures the height of abolitionist activities in the USA, Scholars have long been fascinated by early when the social implications of bringing whites in photographic humor, selecting examples of the intimate relation to blacks were at the center of genre to illustrate their histories of photography. heated debate. Throughout this period, a pre- In the popular press, comic literature, staged modern image of blackness persisted, connoting photographs, and a wide variety of commercial filth and ugliness, darkness and disorder, evil and visual culture, humorists poked fun at the sin, disease and death—everything that whiteness overwhelming number of people who flocked was not—and fueling perceptions of the “Negro” to portrait studios and took up amateur race as wholly inferior to the Anglo-Saxon photography in the nineteenth century; they also (Jordan 1968; Hall 1995). Photography served as mocked the seeming impossibility of capturing a ready metaphor for this conception of social a “pleasing” expression and truthful likeness difference. It seemed, after all, to be based on a (Krauss 1978; Jay 1991, 1996; Henisch and play of racialized opposites: light stimulated silver Henisch 1998). Historians agree that the first nitrate to darken, or blacken, the white ground book of photographic humor was penned by the of a photosensitive surface. A photographer’s English cleric Edward Bradley, better known by manipulations under the skylight and in the his pen name Cuthbert Bede (Jay 1986; Henisch darkroom were seen as a constant struggle and Henisch 2002, 2004). Bede’s Photographic to keep these terms in balance, one that was Pleasures, Popularly Portrayed with Pen and Pencil comparable to conflicts in the British West Indies was printed in London in 1855, with its third, and the American South. final, and cheapest edition appearing in 1863. While early photographers like Herschel Even before the volume’s publication, British looked upon the possible connections between readers could have encountered a selection of Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 photography and the contemporary social its illustrations in the humor magazine Punch. scene with a mixture of trepidation and mild Bede’s visual humor engaged audiences abroad at amusement, British and American humorists the same time, although it is unclear how many cultivated a different response: raucous laughter. Americans ultimately read Photographic Pleasures; Their satirical writings and illustrations cast what would become the frontispiece to the book photography’s materials, technical requirements, graced the back cover of Philadelphia’s nationally and scientific principles in racial terms, inviting circulated Saturday Evening Post in 1853, alerting audiences to take pleasure in the medium’s readers to the ridiculous dangers that amateur many and seemingly essential incongruities. This photographers faced in capturing country scenes, article takes a close look at these comic texts specifically impalement by a charging bull.1 and their evolving cultural work in the second Contributing to this transatlantic dialogue, half of the nineteenth century. Responding to the book’s racial jokes make reference to Afro- modern theories of humor that ask “how humor American stereotypes and the institution of was talked about in [a] culture, what values slavery. Such a gesture was by no means unique

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to Photographic Pleasures. As Hazel Waters has bestseller had been sold to British readers, observed of English theater at mid-century, there providing them with a sentimental depiction was a “general climate that was so fascinated of black life in antebellum America that would by America, so ready to ridicule it in all its go on to be represented in numerous editions manifestations, so ready, too, to triumph as a (official and pirated) as well as in plays, musical monarchy that practised liberty over a republic scores, prints, commercial advertisements, and that practised slavery. The figure of the black memorabilia that featured characters or scenes was, and continued to be, a conduit for English from the novel (Lorimer 1978; Gossett 1985; attitudes towards America” (Waters 2007: 98). Fisch 2000; Wood 2000; Meer 2005; Morgan Marcus Wood has likewise shown how African 2007). It was in these multifarious forms that slaves in English print satire served as vehicles for Uncle Tom’s Cabin not only set the terms for attacking both the continued existence of slavery debate about slavery and abolition in British and the sentimentalism of abolitionists in the political discourse after 1852; it also became USA, while more generally ridiculing the nation’s the ground upon which a variety of questions “democratic pretensions” (Wood 2003; see also about social difference were packaged for both Chaney 2008, 2010). Although these forms of the edification and amusement of a popular popular visual culture were directed at “others”— audience. Marcus Wood’s observation that portraying Americans as hypocritical, morally “[s]trange conflations resulted when the newly corrupt, and as “uncivilized” as the blacks they expanding Victorian leisure and entertainment enslaved—they simultaneously looked inward, industries engulfed abolitionist texts” applies expressing “native” anxieties about race, class, directly to Photographic Pleasures, in which and national identity. This collection of anxieties Stowe and her book allow Bede’s light musings informed, for instance, the mid-century debates on photography to speak to one of the most on slavery and sugar in the West Indies sparked serious political issues on both sides of the by the inflammatory writings of Thomas Carlyle. Atlantic (Wood 2000: 143). Black “idleness” constituted an affront to the state, To see how Bede’s satire engaged Carlyle argued, insofar as it contributed to the contemporary discourse on race, consider a page decline of an industry that was essential not only of illustrations titled “Photographic Fancies,” which to the economic prosperity of English plantation is littered with verbal and visual puns (Figure 1). owners but also to the vitality of the rapidly The “negative papers” in the upper left corner Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 expanding British Empire. If the (white) English refer to both the negative-positive photographic cannot find “some just manner to command black process and London newspapers like The Morning men,” he reasoned, then “they may rest assured Advertiser, which were known for their harsh there will another come (brother Jonathan or still attacks on the royal family. The “photographers’ another) who can” (Carlyle 1849: 678).2 vices” in the upper right depict two posing stands By the time Carlyle expanded and reprinted engaged in a fist fight, suggesting that studio his “Occasional Discourse” and Cuthbert portrait photographers’ use of these devices, Bede published his first satirical illustrations of which gripped a sitter’s head like a vice and photography, both writers had found a new kept him still, was one of their most immoral object on which to project “native” anxieties practices. The racial joke on the page consists about the slave-owning USA: Harriet Beecher of a conversation between two illustrations: an Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life among the Lowly image of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the top captioned (1852). Within a year of its initial publication, a “best black varnish,” and a caricatured black figure staggering one million copies of the American on the left; described elsewhere in the book as

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Fig 1 “Photographic Fancies” (Bede 1855).

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an “Uncle Tom servant,” the latter is shown here direct knowledge but an insatiable curiosity and “applying the black varnish.” While “varnish” can (economically) invested interest. Through these refer to a chemical compound that commercial performances, British viewers could sympathize photographers spread on the surfaces of tintypes with the plight of the oppressed slaves conjured or on the backs of ambrotypes in the 1850s, up before them, relishing in the moral superiority the black pigment the “Uncle Tom servant” of Britain over the USA, all the while imagining applies to his skin comes from a bottle labeled that these “emotional and hyperactive blackface “Day and Martin,” a British company known for characters” needed to be brought under (their) its shoe polish and whose name then served white control (Scott 2008: 147). Such responses as a colloquial term for “negro” (Waters 2007: to minstrelsy dovetailed with the idea that 61). Relying on his readers’ familiarity with such Britain’s colonial presence in Africa and the West iconography and rhetoric, Bede thus proposes Indies, which not only justified but also relied on similarities between four seemingly unlike objects: a paternalistic regulation of non-white peoples, photographic chemicals, the pigmentation of an was not only justified but natural and required African slave’s skin, a common shoe polish, and (Lorimer 1975; Bratton 1981; Pickering 1991; Stowe’s popular novel on American slavery. The Waters 2007; Scott 2008). modern reader is left to ask: on what bases are In Bede’s “Photographic Fancies,” we find these similarities constructed and what cultural references to minstrelsy in the figure “applying work do the resulting ironies perform? More the black varnish” and in the image of Uncle broadly, how and why does a humorist like Bede Tom’s Cabin. While the former is suggestive of use the medium of photography to articulate a theatrical blacking up, the novel borrowed popular ideas about blackness and whiteness? characters and narrative elements from American To begin, it is important to see Bede’s minstrel shows, only to become a favorite object illustrations as conversant with early blackface of blackface humor in Britain and contribute minstrelsy, an American form of theatrical directly to the genre’s surge in popularity there entertainment first popularized in the 1830s and (Meer 2005). The racial joke on this page, 1840s that featured white actors performing moreover, shares several important assumptions comic songs, speeches, and sketches in a kind of with the early minstrel show. First, both are racial drag (Toll 1974; Lott 2003). By mid-century, based on an objectification of blackness; more blackface acts had been incorporated into existing specifically, they treat it as a commodity that a Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 structures of reputable entertainment in Britain, white male actor/operator can manipulate for his from the music halls and theaters of London to commercial profit. Substituting burnt cork and provincial venues and even the private homes boot black for the materials of photography, Bede of the wealthy; this meant that they tended to compares racial blackness to photographic varnish be less raucous and bawdy than the American and likens the face of the “Uncle Tom servant” performances primarily enjoyed by working-class to the varnished surface of the photograph, whites in northern cities and that they increasingly producing a scenario often enacted upon the incorporated “local” comic tropes, such as the Victorian stage: black bodies are not autonomous English-style puns deployed by Bede. Historians subjects, he jests, but physical materials have shown that what most distinguished minstrel instrumental to the work at hand. shows in Britain from their antebellum American Second, Bede’s “Photographic Fancies” shares models, however, was the fact that the former minstrelsy’s assumption that black pigmentation brought audiences into close relation with a is a sign of the “negro” race, though one whose “black” population about which they held little stability is uncertain at best. In the case of the

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“Uncle Tom servant,” the dark color of his skin symbol of impossibility and miraculous rebirth, as would seem to require continuous application, as if well as a literary figuration of blackness, since the race were purely cosmetic in character. According Renaissance period (Newman 1987; Hall 1995; to this fantasy, it is the stuff of photography that McClintock 1995; Ramamurthy 2003). While the enables the figure to perform and maintain misguided “sanitarian” in Photographic Pleasures was his blackness, which was crucial to maintaining unsuccessful in his efforts, the joke explains that the value and integrity of whiteness. Bede thus the photographer is not. His “black Positive,” or endows photographic chemistry with an invaluable the exposed photographic print, is infinitely more social function: the very (re)production of racial receptive to the whitening effects of repeated difference. But if blackness and whiteness are washing and soaking than its human counterpart, imagined to be nothing more than skin deep in this whom Bede calls the “positive black.” Not only is image, what are we to do with the stereotyped photography responsible for manufacturing an ideal physiognomy of the figure “applying the black “black” that is obedient and capable of sanitary (read: varnish?” In a period when race science in Britain social) reform, in other words, but its chemistry also and the USA was preoccupied by the notion that has the ability to carry out such reform. Where there are essential, measurable differences between other social measures had failed, photography the races (Stanton 1960; Jordan 1968; Stepan succeeded; the medium managed to tame blackness 1982), it is unlikely that this figure would have by reducing it to “the desired tint,” thereby mitigating signified anything other than “black,” even in the its transgressive potential (Bede 1855: 66–7). absence of photographic varnishes. We can make As satire, of course, Photographic Pleasures a similar observation about the graphic illustrations cannot celebrate photographic chemistry as a of Anglo-American blackface performers at solution to America’s race problems and as an mid-century, which often depict these racially ideal means of safeguarding whiteness without white men not only with darkened faces but ambivalence and irony. In fact, we can read with the facial structure that Samuel Morton and the book’s humor as the direct result of Bede others associated with the “negro.” Rather than attributing unrivaled social power to photographic undermining the logic of minstrel performances, chemistry, assuming that readers would see such these indications of the so-called fixed character power as an unlikely characteristic of a popular of race were precisely what blackface contributed visual medium. The illustrations in Photographic to and satirized. In this vein, Bede’s photographic Pleasures encourage viewers to remain skeptical Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 humor acknowledged contemporary thought on of photography’s ability to effect any real, let the nature of social difference at the same time it alone valuable, social change. Consider the book’s poked fun at its logic. chapter on amateur photography, in which we Time and again, Bede combines such work with find a photographer who had an unfortunate a representation of photography’s unique powers accident with her darkroom chemicals. The in matters of race. Anticipating the rhetoric of young lady’s carelessness with her nitrate of silver, Victorian soap advertisements, for example, he which darkens surfaces in the presence of light, reminds readers of an ancient fable in which a man reportedly produced black spots and stains on attempts to scrub his “Uncle Tom servant” white her otherwise “fair” countenance and “lily white and clean, assuming his blackness to be the result hands,” causing her to appear, as Bede puts it, “like of neglect on the part of a former master. The a half-washed Othello at some private theatricals.” reference here would have been all too familiar to This necessitates a trip to the chemist for British readers, for whom the notion of washing an immediate remedy, which is where we find her in “Ethiop” or “blackamoor” white had served as a Figure 2 (Bede 1855: 51).3

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Fig 2 “A Photographic Positive” (Bede 1855).

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Fig 3 “The Girl Who Inked Herself and Her Books, and How It Ended” (Hoffman 1860). Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

While Bede claimed in a private letter that own racialized punishment in “The Girl Who this illustration depicts a true incident, it also Inked Herself and Her Books.” Motivated by employs a popular literary trope that represents carelessness and a general desire to misbehave, the blackening of racially white subjects as she smears the ink at her writing table over Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 punishment for their immoral behavior.4 At the her hands, face, and clothes, and even swallows time Bede published Photographic Pleasures, the black liquid, causing her entire body to turn this trope would have been readily associated brown, then slate, then “dusky black” (Figure 3). with Heinrich Hoffman’s collection of illustrated “Blacker than a Guinea negro,/ Blacker than the stories for children, translated for British and sootiest sweep,/ Blacker than the shiny beetles/ American audiences as The English Struwwelpeter. O’er the chimney’s back that creep,” Mopsa Among the collection’s most frequently reprinted ultimately becomes “too hideous for a daughter” stories were those that featured “white” bodies and is sold by her parents as a “black doll” to a darkened with “black” ink. In “The Story of the “rag-shop” where she is hung up on an “iron link” Inky Boys,” a figure modeled on Saint Nicholas (Hoffman 1860).5 Invoking both the so-called dips three light-skinned lads into an inkwell ugliness of blackness and the violence of chattel to teach them not to make fun of a dark- slavery, these are disastrous consequences indeed, complexioned “blackamoor,” while the naughty intended to encourage right/white behavior in “Miss Mopsa” accidentally administers her impressionable readers.

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Similar scenarios were entertained by the ‘twas you!/‘Nay, dearest, do not shrink—/ American photographic press around the time ‘This face and chin!—I’ve washed it in/ ‘YOUR of the Civil War, as we have already seen in the PHOTOGRAPHIC INK!’” (Cholmondeley-Pennell case of a white mother mistaking photographic 1868: 127–9).6 chemicals for body wash. That she left the portrait Returning to Photographic Pleasures, we find studio with “three little negroes” would have that Bede similarly characterizes the wealthy made the commercial photographers who wrote white women in Britain who picked up cameras and consumed such stories laugh by confirming in the 1850s as socially and sexually transgressive. the naiveté of their clientele. Bound up with their In the very first line of the book, he presents laughter, however, were serious anxieties about the these women as objects of disdain by comparing destabilizing effects that photographic chemistry them to white female abolitionists in the USA; could have on social identities if it fell into the these are the days, Bede writes, “when calotyping “wrong” hands. Since women and children were young ladies in civilised society talk about their called upon to function as reliable signifiers of ‘blacks’—with all the unctuousness of a Mrs whiteness and respectability in and out of the Beecher Stow [sic], when she converses on a portrait studio, their exposure to photography’s subject of a kindred saturnine character …” (Bede many blackening agents posed a troubling threat to 1855: ix). Framing the discussions of amateur such signification, one which could be extinguished photography that appear later in the text, this only if their curiosity about and involvement in remark establishes the growing number of lady photography’s operations were carefully controlled amateurs in Britain as a threat to the professional by white men, literally or comically. photographic fraternity, to dominant notions of There was in this humor also the anxious female respectability, and to the integrity of the fantasy of blackness posing a sexual threat to young white bourgeois family.7 Bede relies on Stowe as women, as implied by the image of a white mother a model for such gendered transgression, bringing producing “negro” children. Miscegenation is made to mind her much-publicized trip to England in a more explicit threat in a British poem from the 1853 and its production of a controversial anti- 1860s titled, “Perils of the Fine Arts,” which opens slavery petition, which led many international with an angry husband interrogating his wife: critics to condemn the outspoken American as selfish, irresponsible, and even dangerous, having Good gracious Julia! wretched girl, released powers beyond her control (Wood

Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 What horror do I see? 2000; Meer 2005).8 Like the throngs of women What frantic fiend has done the deed who rallied around Stowe, Bede suggests, female That rends your charms from me? … photographers speak fervently of processes that What fiend, I ask, in human mask they do not understand and that take their minds Has dared to black your face? away from their domestic duties, all the while Describing her as darker than “any black-a-more,” introducing into polite social gatherings topics he goes on to threaten violence against the that were best discussed elsewhere by male “wretch” (consistently gendered masculine) that authorities. What is more, he imagined that these “painted” the once “stainless pure” woman, whose white bourgeois women shared a sexualized “black and blue” body has already been violently attraction to “blacks” that was as unavoidable as it punished by an “other”—justifiably so, the verse was troubling. suggests. It is in the last lines of the poem that That attraction is articulated most colorfully the wife reveals the source of her defilement in Bede’s “A Photographic Positive,” when he as none other than her husband: “‘Oh! Charles, described the blackened young lady as “a

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half-washed Othello at some private theatricals.” Holmes devotes considerable attention to the Extremely popular on both sides of the characteristics of the negative, or the “reversed Atlantic at this time, Shakespeare’s vision of picture on glass” then essential to producing the fair Desdemona falling in love with a dark- photographs on paper. After a glass plate is complexioned Moor who murders her in their sensitized, exposed to light in the portrait studio, marriage bed posed obvious challenges to and washed in developer, he explains, a set of Victorian prohibitions of miscegenation and the dizzying relations result: warnings of race scientists against the dangers of amalgamation. Serious performances of Every light spot in the camera-picture [the Othello on the London stage worked to mitigate image before the lens] becomes dark … these challenges by minimizing the pair’s sexual But where the shadows or dark parts of the encounters and deemphasizing the blackness camera-picture fall, the sensitive coating is of Othello; the many minstrel parodies of the less darkened, or not at all, if the shadows Shakespearean drama did just the opposite, are very deep, and so these shadows of grossly caricaturing Desdemona’s sexuality and the camera-picture become the lights of portraying Othello as either a buffoon in blackface the glass-picture, as the lights become the or as a white-washed “negro” in order to render shadows. Again, the picture is reversed … their union a laughable absurdity (MacDonald Thus the glass plate has the right part of the 1994; Collins 1996; Lhamon 2003). With his “half- object on the left side of its picture, and the washed Othello,” Bede echoes this latter genre, left part on its right side; its light is darkness, but does more than simply reproduce its complex and its darkness is light. Everything is just as comic relations, or “white men imitat[ing] black wrong as it can be, except that the relations men who aspired to be white but were actually of each wrong to the other wrongs are like black” (Collins 1996: 98). By inserting these into the relations of the corresponding rights to the body of an aristocratic (white) lady, the each other in the original natural image. This kind of woman who would partake in “private is a negative picture. (Holmes 1864: 134–5) theatricals,” Bede brought contemporary criticism of Stowe forcibly to bear on the practice of For Holmes, the negative’s reversal of things as they amateur photography among the upper classes.9 appear in nature is not only curious and “strange,” as What is remarkable about Photographic Herschel once put it; this “mass of contradictions,” Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 Pleasures, then, is not Bede’s stereotyping of the this “lie,” is “perverse and totally depraved”— Afro-American slave and the female “amateur,” ungodly even, as if possessing “some magic and nor his references to transatlantic debates diabolical power …” Even more extraordinary surrounding Uncle Tom’s Cabin; rather, it is the is that the negative gives birth to a positive print, book’s insistent insertion of photography into which the American writer celebrates as a perfect the political and cultural frame occupied by the “copy of Nature in all her sweet gradations and American bestseller. Ironically, this engagement harmonies and contrasts.” This allows Holmes to with the serious matters of slavery and abolition, conclude that the negative is morally redeemable; class conflict, imperial power, and the rights of like the “temporary arrangements of our planetary women gave birth to photographic humor. life,” its ugliness and darkness hold out for him the promise of a “better” world thereafter (Holmes Making Light of Black and White 1864: 136–7). In his influential essay on the stereoscope What made the negative-positive process first published in 1859, Oliver Wendell an apt metaphor for the Christian dualisms of

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Fig 4 Detail of “Photographic Faces” (Bede 1855).

evil/good, pagan/holy, and earth/heaven was conditions and racial identity, that photographic also what made it common grist for the racial surfaces were intimately related (even analogous) humor mill. The reversals Holmes attributes to to human skin, and that no white bourgeois the negative—of left and right, up and down, reader of Household Words would welcome the dark and light—constituted the building blocks sight of his “negative” or “black” self. of a comical world-turned-upside down, which For a contemporary illustration of this last yielded some surprising things about race in assumption, we need not look further than Bede’s Britain and the USA. Anticipated by Herschel Photographic Pleasures. A page of cartoons titled at the moment of photography’s invention, the “Photographic Faces” presents us with a comic details of such a world were explored in an 1853 “before” and “after” in which a gentleman named issue of Charles Dickens’s Household Words, which Brown “sees himself in the glass and thinks himself observed of a portrait on paper that “the light rather an agreeable looking fellow,” or one with parts were all depicted by the blackest shades, a light complexion. Brown then “sees his face in and the black parts were left white,” such that the negative,” now blackened thoroughly by the the subject of the picture “was there represented strokes of Bede’s pen. “His second thoughts,” Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 as a negro.” As Holmes would do, the magazine we are told, “are by no means the best” (Figure found comfort in the “obvious” fact that the 4). To find this pair of images entertaining was “negro stage” was not the “finished portrait” but to acknowledge the absurdity of photography’s rather the glass negative, whose placement on material effects on the white sitter’s body as well light-sensitive paper and exposure to light would as to ascribe considerable value to whiteness as a soon set things right: “The black face will obstruct physical and social ideal. Readers were unlikely to the passage of the light and leave a white face have missed its reference to minstrelsy, moreover, underneath, the white hair will allow the light just as they would have been attuned to the to pass, making black hair below, and so on …” double entendre of the “negro stage” described in (Household Words 1853: 61). Underwriting these Household Words. remarks were several important assumptions, Julia Munro has proposed that the racialized so fundamental to mid-century Anglo-American description of the photographic negative, such culture as to not require justification: that as we find in Bede’s and Dickens’s texts, is there was a close connection between lighting “an exaggeration that reveals an underlying

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anxiety about photographic representation” that the origins of racial differences. Between the should be treated like the references to magic publication of Samuel Stanhope Smith’s influential that pervade early transatlantic writings on essay on human variety in 1787 and its reprinting photography (Munro 2008: 124; see also Munro in 1810, environmental explanations for skin color 2009). While this reading finds support in the dominated Anglo-American scientific thought. examples above, it does not fully account for According to Smith, mankind had originated in what nineteenth-century writers found especially Asia fully civilized and with white skin. Dispersion absurd about the negative-positive process—that of the population to different climates across is, its radical reordering of a binary (black/white) the globe led to unfavorable deviations from this whose terms were imagined (or at least desired) “natural, best, and original” state, with excessively to be in a fixed and hierarchical relationship. hot regions darkening the skin and generally Significantly, this was what British critics saw giving rise to savagery. Focusing much of his as most troubling about abolitionist texts like observations on the “Negro” race, he further Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose narrative was built predicted that the mass transplantation of blacks upon shifting and at times incongruous relations from Africa to the American environment would between blackness (darkness) and whiteness “whiten” their racial character over time (Smith (light). Stowe allowed the “darkest” African 1787; Stanton 1960; Jordan 1968: 517). Smith’s Americans in the novel to embody the “light” of views continued to shape discussions of racial Christian virtue, they observed with alarm. She change in the early-nineteenth century but were also described the “mulatto” slave George in increasingly challenged, especially by the rising tide stereotypically “white” terms; well-mannered and of polygenism, which threw out the very notion highly skilled, he presents himself as “tall, with a that man originated as a single species. Before dark Spanish complexion, fine expressive black Darwin, even monogenists were thinking in new eyes, and close curling hair, … aquiline nose, ways about the differences among the races, straight thin lips, and … finely formed limbs.” Such proposing that these may have been caused by “facts” led a reviewer for the London Times to breeding or civilization itself, and tracing human condemn the book on moral grounds, declaring origins back to the “Negro.” that an “error … is committed by our authoress This latter controversial view received a large in the pains she takes to paint her negroes, international audience when it was promoted by mulattoes, and quadroons in the very whitest the English physician and anthropologist James Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 white, while she is equally careful to disfigure her Cowles Prichard in the early nineteenth century whites with the very blackest black. The worst (Prichard 1813; Stepan 1982; Augstein 1999).10 negroes are ultimately taken to Heaven, but few Its influence can also be found in Mill’s vehement of the fair colored are warranted, living or dying, response to Carlyle’s “Occasional Discourse,” without blemish” (Uncle Tom in England 1852: which describes the “earliest known civilization” 4–5). These racial reversals also served as fodder as a “negro civilization.” According to Mill, the for comic interpretations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin “original Egyptians are inferred, from the evidence on the English stage, which were full of puns that of their sculptures, to have been a negro race; challenged audience expectations about what it was from negroes, therefore, that the Greeks was “black” and what was “white,” substituting learnt their first lessons in civilization …” (Mill moral outrage for gales of laughter (Waters 2007: 1850). While this is not the same as saying (as 166–7). Prichard did) that blacks biologically gave rise to Jokes about the blackness of the negative whites, the equation of civilization and whiteness further dovetailed with period debates about in bourgeois Victorian culture meant that Mill’s

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“curious” facts pointed to the same radical what they saw as a laughable absurdity. Such is the implications: Anglo-Saxons had not been born case in Elbert Anderson’s Photo-Comic Allmynack naturally superior to “Negroes” and had no innate of 1873, which juxtaposes monthly weather rights to dominate them. predictions with horoscopes, dialect jokes, and Associating the negative with racial blackness caricatures; to these the practicing photographer proposed a similarly disruptive social view added satirical commentary on photography in by suggesting that every “white” face in a the form of illustrations, poems, and dialogues.11 photographic portrait originated as a “black” The entry for July features a racial joke, made in one. Whiteness, in other words, depended on a fictional lecture that Anderson delivered to the blackness for its very existence, for without the American photographic profession at its 1873 negative there could be no paper print. This convention: notion would not have proven to be so troubling in early writings on photography if those texts Have you ever thought to yourselves, my had not placed such a strong emphasis on the friends, that when you blow out your candle technology’s role in aiding performances of to go to bed, that you are about as black as social identity, specifically that of the white lady the ace of spades? Because, if you hav’n’t, it’s or gentleman. The reflections on the negative- time you did. Yes, my friends, it is believed positive process in Household Words, in fact, that nothing of itself has any color; and that celebrate such work by concluding that “it is not a yellow cat and a green man are certainly only—or indeed chiefly—by the reproduction of of the same complexion in a totally dark our own features that we bring photography into cellar. You are not to suppose that because the service of our race.” It is the repeated “our” it is dark, you cannot see the colors of these in this line and its implication of the magazine’s animiles [sic]! … [A]s the saying is, they are predominantly white bourgeois readers that perfectly black, which means destitute of places strict limits on the word “race,” which color. is being asked here to represent mankind (Household Words 1853: 61). Ensuring that the At this point in Anderson’s speech the audience blackness of the negative would not interrupt this interjects. One voice explains, “According to that, privileging of whiteness therefore meant stressing then, a nigger is just as good as a white man,” the temporariness of the “negro stage,” its visibility then a second voice tells the first to “Close your Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 only to the photographer, as well as the “natural” head” (Anderson 1873: 35). The implication and “original” character of the body/image before of Anderson’s claims in this exchange—that the lens. whiteness and blackness carry essentially the The problem of the negative in early same value—is so disruptive to conceptions photographic discourse speaks to larger of white dominance in the wake of black concerns about the relationship between light emancipation in the USA that it can only belong and race that became the frequent subject of to the world of humor. For Anderson’s fictional comic representation in the second half of the audience and his readers, “color” was much nineteenth century. Take the idea that color is more than a “property of light,” just as reflection not inherent to a body but is instead the measure and absorption were much more than physical of a body’s reflection of the sun’s rays. This principles; in Reconstruction America, it was a principle of physics formed the logical basis of all sign of racial identity whose boundaries were photographers’ operations, but when humorists anxiously being drawn and redrawn, as much by applied it to postbellum America, it resulted in republican legislation as by popular humor.

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In a period when cultural anxieties about that’s white. I want mine in the group integrating blacks into a predominantly white white as that” … The artist politely informs social body reached new heights, the challenges him that all things are not possible with a of photographically “exposing” raced subjects photographer; that by sitting him alone, with frequently found comic expression. These jokes a view of producing a “white picture,” he were based on serious discussions in American would be required to sit longer. The clear trade journals about the difficulties portrait white and rosy complexion of the ladies photographers faced when illuminating different did not require one half as much time in the sitters in their studios. The specific arrangement light, as his dark hued features, black hair and of top and side lights that a photographer coat absorbing the rays of light … (Rodgers would employ on a given subject, this literature 1872: 175–6) surmised, depended upon the relative whiteness of the sitter, for it was a face with a “rather fair Rodgers anticipates that his readers will find such complexion” and “regular features” that would a scenario amusing, just as he assumes that the imprint itself rapidly on a photographic plate object of their laughter is plain: the ridiculousness and was most likely to generate a “pleasing” of the “dark” sitter’s desire to look “white” when print. Dark-complexioned sitters, on the other he is obviously “otherwise.” He could also count hand, “required” lighting at a much greater on readers’ sympathy with the “impossibility” of intensity in order for their skin to be “properly” the group portrait he describes. The only solution exposed, which often meant looking as “white” it presents, after all, is a photographic segregation as possible.12 In this way, photographers’ lighting of the sitters based on their “natural” inequalities. schemes were predicated on a taxonomy of Like the burlesque performances of Othello social difference whose disruption was likely to that graced the Victorian stage, Rodgers’s “light” have extreme consequences not only for the humor proposes a justification for, and a means technical quality of a finished portrait but also for of, severing intimate relations between “dark” photography’s capacity to serve “our race.” men and “white” women. That photography Like the many other American photographers seemed to preclude such mixing—even if only in who embraced the comic mode, H. J. Rodgers the realm of representation—would continue to chose to express and assuage the anxieties make the medium a powerful tool for addressing generated by the possibility of such “failure” fears about miscegenation and African American Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 by satirizing the expectations of sitters when citizenship after the close of Reconstruction. it came to photographic lighting. In his popular memoirs, Twenty-Three Years under a Sky-Light Darkness and Dawn (1872), Rodgers recounts a case in which one of Having witnessed the invention of photography, his colleagues was asked to sit a “gentleman of the proliferation of commercial portrait studios, dark brown complexion and black hair” with “two and the emergence of amateur photographic ladies of blonde complexion and hair.” When the practices, humorists in Britain and the USA photographer presented the picture to the group, attempted to answer a question on the minds of the dark-skinned sitter declared the portrait nearly everyone who encountered the camera in the mid-nineteenth century: what made this “horrid! altogether too dark and the ladies technology so popular yet so estranging? Their too light” and at the same time with an air of comic responses posed additional questions in the dignity taking a faint, indistinct vignette card context of debates about slavery and its abolition, picture of himself from his pocket, “There! demonstrating that early photographic humor

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shaped the cultural identity of photography light in the visible spectrum. It was precisely this and defined the medium’s relationship to a physical property of the common black pigment, predominantly white bourgeois public at the same created from soot deposited by burning oils, time that it served as complex social commentary. that made lamp black an essential component of How, then, are we to understand the persistent photographic retouching inks, the carbon printing preoccupation with photography’s blacks process, and (most immediately) the color and whites as a source of laughter long after photography technique (Autochrome) patented photography was eclipsed by newer and stranger by the Lumière brothers and first commercially technologies and abolition had become a reality marketed in the USA in 1907; it was also what on both sides of the Atlantic? made the pigment a theatrical makeup used to Paving the way for future investigation of blacken the performers in minstrel shows. Building this question, a cartoon that appeared in the upon the groundwork laid by Bede and Dickens, American humor magazine Puck in 1909 can Ehrhart therefore treats us to a recognizable show us how and why the “old” jokes examined set of relations: black skin/subject doubles as an here were given new life at the turn of the inanimate photographic material which, in turn, twentieth century (Figure 5). Set in a commercial evokes the “negro stage.”14 To this he adds the portrait studio, the image rendered by illustrator metaphorical possibilities of a novel technology: Samuel D. Ehrhart (1909) presents us with a flash photography. Although magnesium light was respectably dressed white photographer standing first marketed to photographers in Britain and beside the muzzle of a canopied camera whose the USA in the 1860s, it was not until the later lens is directed at a group of exceedingly dark- nineteenth century that this exceedingly bright, skinned African Americans posed before a white transportable, yet highly explosive method of backdrop; two men stand, two women sit, and illumination was employed widely in photographic four young children fill in the spaces around them, expeditions and surveys – at night, underground, all in bourgeois attire. The photographer places a in poor weather, or in poor social conditions hand to his head in what is described as a gesture (Martin 1982; Howes 1989; Bron and Condax of “despair” as he informs the patriarch of the 1998; Hales 2005[1984]). family, “I can’t possibly get sufficient light in my Ehrhart’s “Darkness and Dawn” would studio to-day to do justice to your family-group, have evoked more than these “photographic” Mr. Lamblack.” To this the latter figure responds, connotations, given that the dialectic inspired Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 “Can’t? Why, your contemp’ries always uses a number of popular Christian interpretations flashlights when we sits fo’ photos!”13 at the turn of the century.15 The best known The caption framing this dialogue, “Darkness of these was an attraction by that name and Dawn,” invokes familiar associations between operated by Frederic Thompson and Skip racial blackness and the absence of light at the Bundy at Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition of same time that it describes the thought process 1901 (Figure 6). Situated on the Midway, the of the photographer. It has “dawned” upon entertainment center of the fair, “Darkness him that no degree or duration of exposure and Dawn” simulated a journey through the under his skylight could make these sitters as underworld, replete with coffins, skeletons, devils “white” as he imagines they aspire to be, let in costume, and “apartments” for the damned. alone visible on a photographic surface tailored Although some considered its combination to the luminosity of light complexions; for their of pagan and Christian elements a “humorous complexions are not merely dark but “lamp contrivance for cartooning the stale possibilities black,” suggesting that they reflect almost no of hell,” these were designed to terrify “sensitive

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Fig 5 Ehrhart (1909: 6). Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

and timorous” persons, especially young ladies, The spectacular lighting effects employed by playing on their conceptions of the dark as a in Bundy and Thompson’s concession were mysterious and forbidden place. Relief came to recapitulated in the landscape of the exposition the “unnerved” only at the end of their journey, itself, which adopted the transition from dark when they were ushered into light-filled “halls to light as one of its central themes. At dusk, of jasper” with “sweet fountains,” “filmy clouds,” for example, organizers simulated the coming and “pendant angels” that symbolized “the peace of a new day by extinguishing the hundreds of and angelic harmony of heaven” (Barry 1901: thousands of electric bulbs across the fairground 50–2).16 and then illuminating them in stages, beginning

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Fig 6 “Darkness and Dawn” (Barry 1901: 103). Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

with the pinkish lights on the 400-foot Electric to the “genuine” natives in the exposition’s Tower which slowly shifted to red and yellow. simulated African village was a concern shared Made possible by the first hydro-electric power by exposition organizers and critics alike; it was station at Niagara Falls, this display impressed in this “Darkest Africa” that they located the visitors on aesthetic and technical grounds; “ancestors” of American blacks, described as it simultaneously communicated a powerful “midnight-colored savages” who seemed to narrative of progress that asked the world to do nothing but dance “from morning to night,” marvel at the rapid evolution of the United eschewing respectability with their primitive ways Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 States from the darkness of “savagery” to the and nearly naked bodies (Figure 7; Barry 1901: dawn of “civilization” (Nye 1997: 122, 124). 72–3; Hart 1901b; Rydell 1984). That utopic vision stood in direct contrast Through the technology and metaphorics of to the exhibits of non-white peoples that light, the Pan-American Exposition constructed an accompanied “Darkness and Dawn” on the image of America as not only a progressive nation Midway. Among the most popular of these was but an imposing imperial power whose strength the “Old Plantation,” operated by the same pair rested on the subjugation of darkness/blackness. of showman-entrepreneurs, which treated genteel Taking cues from its namesake, Puck’s “Darkness audiences to “a picture of real Southern life” and Dawn” similarly assured its audience that before emancipation, one populated by singing neither civilization nor full citizenship could ever “pickaninnies,” a perpetually “Laughing Ben,” and a come to these blackest of blacks—that even a collection of other idle, happy “darkies” like those blinding “flash” would not be enough to bring envisaged by Thomas Carlyle (Barry 1901: 126). them into the light/white. Further, the illustration Seeing these “real” caricatured blacks in relation mocked the Lamblack family’s intended use of

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Fig 7 “A Group of Africans—Darkest Africa” (Barry 1901: 26). Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

flashlight photography as an instrument of their Lamblacks occupied very different historical own empowerment; for even if readers had moments, but they shared anxieties about how Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 never encountered the technology themselves, to fix the relationship between blacks and whites they were likely to have known about its much- in the face of evolving ideas about race, nation, publicized use on African expeditions to hunt and empire. These dovetailed with a growing faith “wild” and “exotic” creatures in the darkest of in photography’s ability to stabilize each of these night (Schillings 1905; Siras 1906; Dugmore 1910; terms in ways that privileged white bourgeois Ryan 1997; Dunaway 2000). Suggesting that the culture. That a vision of the photographic studio photographer “shoot” a black family with medium as instrumental to the dominant order his flashlight and camera therefore amounted could emerge from humorists’ efforts to poke fun to the Lamblacks inviting their own domination, at its relationship to social identity—efforts that and even death, at the hands of a white man—a didn’t require picking up a camera—was the most comic turn, indeed. intriguing incongruity of their work and arguably The British readers who laughed at Bede’s its greatest legacy. So why have our histories Photographic Pleasures and the Americans of photography afforded little to no place for who were entertained by Puck’s vision of the this legacy? More specifically, to what end have

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narratives of the rich medium’s development this publication do not necessarily reflect those of written out the rich, and at times transgressive, the National Endowment for the Humanities. interplay of black and white that has permeated photographic humor and shaped popular ideas Notes about what photography makes possible? 1 “Country Scenes,” The Saturday Evening Post 32, Returning to the observations of Sir John no. 1667 (July 9, 1853), back page. This cartoon Herschel with which this essay began, we might was first published with the caption, “Portrait answer these questions by reminding ourselves of a Distinguished Photographer Who Has Just of the close relationship between photography Succeeded in Focussing a View to His Complete and racial mutability in Anglo-American culture. Satisfaction” in Punch 24 (1853): 208. As Susan Gubar observes in her study of the 2 Carlyle’s critics found a different reason to be latter, “if the concept of whiteness depends anxious about Brother Jonathan (the USA), fearing … on the appropriation of black beings, then that his argument for compelling blacks to work perhaps one of the predicaments of white would bolster pro-slavery sentiments in the culture has resided in its blindness about its American South. This fear was articulated by John Stuart Mill as well as by the many African American dependency on represented (and thus effaced) leaders who crossed the ocean to weigh in on the black bodies.” For Gubar, then, it is the job of “negro question.” See Mill (1850), Fisch (1993, 2000), the cultural critic to find ways of “appreciating and Wood (2002). the extent to which twentieth-century Western 3 A slightly different version of this illustration was first culture is indebted to African and African published with the caption “A Photographic Positive” American tropes, images, mimicries, and masks” in Punch 25 (July 30, 1853): 48. (Gubar 1997: 40). So, too, must the historian look with new eyes upon transatlantic photographic 4 The apparently true basis of Bede’s story is noted in Henisch and Henisch (2002) and Jay (1986). Bede culture and the shifting racial boundaries on identified the young lady as Miss Hussey Pache, the which it has been built. By taking seriously the niece of a photographer named J. M. Heathcote. work of humor and grappling with its ideas about blackness and whiteness, we can begin to 5 The stories in Hoffman’s The English Struwwelpeter see the social politics of the science, and indeed were published in the USA shortly after their English translation. “The Girl Who Inked Herself the very conception, of photography. and her Books” appeared, for instance, in Little Miss Consequence (c. 1859–62). Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 Acknowledgments The ideas in this article took shape in Fall 2007 6 Bill Jay notes in “The Black Art” (unpublished manuscript, 1985) that the earliest publication of this while I was participating in the Leslie Humanities poem was 1861. Center Institute, “No Laughing Matter,” at Dartmouth College. I am grateful to Angela 7 This view of female amateurs contrasts that of the Rosenthal, David Bindman, and the institute 1880s and 1890s, when photography became a “socially acceptable recreational activity for women” fellows for supporting and enriching my project. in Britain and the USA, offering them new social I also thank Geoffrey Batchen and Kate Flint for opportunities (Moeller 1992). On the gentlemanly their valuable contributions to my research and character of British amateur photography at mid- writing. Preparation of “Comical Conflations” century, see Seiberling (1986). was supported in part by a fellowship from the 8 Bede’s criticism of female amateurs and abolitionists National Endowment for the Humanities and the also came in the wake of the controversy American Antiquarian Society. Any views, findings, surrounding the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention conclusions, or recommendations expressed in held in London in 1840, when the American female

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delegates were denied their seats. At the time “darkness” of “decadent Paganism” is driven out by only men could serve as officers and committee the “dawn of Christianity” and “civilisation” (Farrar members in the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery 1893). A collection of poems also titled Darkness Society, and few English women challenged this and Dawn (Woodward 1903) similarly equated convention (Sklar 1994). “light” with Christian virtue that prevails over 9 In 1997 the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, “dark” vices. The poet placed this dichotomy within DC, performed what director Jude Kelly called a contemporary context, such that the late President “photonegative” Othello, in which “white” actors McKinley embodied nobility and truth, while Cuba played “black” characters, and vice versa, while (then under partial political control by the USA) the dialogue remained unchanged. My reading of exemplified torture, wretchedness, and bondage. Bede’s racial humor in this article is conversant 16 Other descriptions of “Darkness and Dawn” at with criticism of that controversial performance the Pan-American Exposition can be found in Hart in observing the ways in which photography can (1901a) and Register (2001). Register recounts the operate as metaphor and thus engage “assumptions concession’s complex history; combining elements about identity, race relations, sexual politics, [and] from the Café de la Mort in Paris and an underground class mobility” (Iyengar 2002: 105; Albanese 2000). ride he designed to demonstrate the mining business, 10 Prichard’s Researches went through several editions Frederic Thompson debuted “Darkness and Dawn” between 1813 and the mid-nineteenth century, as “Heaven and Hell” at the 1898 Trans-Centennial ensuring that the idea of man’s black origins Exposition in Omaha, where it became his “first big- remained in transatlantic circulation. money success” (Register 2001: 57). 11 Although humor sections appeared in American almanacs as early as the seventeenth century, the Tanya Sheehan is Assistant Professor in the cheap publications known as “comic almanacs” did Art History Department at Rutgers, The not became popular in the USA until the 1830s. State University of New Jersey, where she Early examples of this genre include Charles Ellms’s teaches courses on art and science, race and American Comic Almanac, first published in Boston in representation, and the history of photography. 1831, and Frank Leslie’s Comic Almanac, which was She is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of published annually from the 1870s to the 1890s. Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (The 12 For period discussions of photographic lighting Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), which as tailored to complexion, see Chute (1874) explores the relationship between studio portrait and Williams (1868: 123). On the ways in which photographic technologies have privileged white photography, medical discourse, and social skin since their invention, see Winston (1985), Dyer identity. She is currently writing a second book Downloaded by [Colby College] at 08:02 04 October 2017 (1997), and Sheehan (2011). that examines ideas about race in transatlantic 13 The trade journal Photo-Era reprinted this comic photographic humor. exchange, omitting the illustration and the word “to-day” and identifying the family as a “colored References group.” See “Darkness and Dawn,” Photo-Era 23, no. 4 (October 1909): 199. Albanese, Denise. 2000. “Black and White, and Dread All Over: The Shakespeare Theater’s ‘Photonegative’ Othello 14 Puck published another cartoon that racializes a and the Body of Desdemona.” In Dympna Callaghan photographic material: carbon. In “Photographic,” (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare. Malden, MA: Puck 58, no. 1498 (November 15, 1905): 10, a Blackwell Publishers, pp. 226–47. group of bourgeois African Americans admires a black baby. One woman comments (in dialect) that Anderson, Elbert. 1873. Elbert Anderson’s Photo-Comic the child is the perfect image of his father; another Allmynack. Philadelphia, PA: Benerman and Wilson. agrees that “he’s a regular carbon copy.” Augstein, Hannah Franziska. 1999. James Cowles 15 F. W. Farrar wrote a fictional account, Darkness and Prichard’s Anthropology: Remaking the Science of Man in Dawn, or Scenes in the Days of Nero, in which the Early Nineteenth-Century Britain. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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Barry, Richard H. 1901. Snap Shots on the Midway of the Fisch, Audrey A. 1993. “‘Negrophilism’ and British Pan-Am Expo. Buffalo, NY: R. A. Reid. Nationalism: The Spectacle of the Black American Abolitionist.” Victorian Review (Winter), 19(2): 20–47. Bede, Cuthbert. 1855. Photographic Pleasures, Popularly Portrayed with Pen and Pencil. London: T. McLean. Fisch, Audrey A. 2000. American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Bratton, J. S. 1981. “English Ethiopians: British Audiences Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. and Black-Face Acts, 1835–1865.” The Yearbook of English Studies, 11: 127–42. Gossett, Thomas F. 1985. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and American Culture. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist Bron, Pierre, and Philip L. Condax. 1998. The University Press. Photographic Flash: A Concise Illustrated History. Allschwill: Bron Elektronik AG. Gubar, Susan. 1997. Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Carlyle, Thomas. 1849. “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country Hales, Peter Bacon. 2005[1984]. Silver Cities: (December), 40(240): 670–9. Photographing American Urbanization, 1839–1939, 2nd edn. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Chaney, Michael A. 2008. Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Press. Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hall, Kim F. 1995. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Chaney, Michael A. 2010. “Heartfelt Thanks to Punch for University Press. the Picture: Frederick Douglass and the Transnational Jokework of Slave Caricature.” American Literature Hart, Mary Bronson. 1901a. “The Play-Side of the Fair.” (March), 82(1): 57–90. World’s Work, 2: 1097–101. Cholmondeley-Pennell, H. 1868. Puck on Pegasus. Hart, Mary Bronson. 1901b. “How to See the Pan- London: John Camden Hotten. American Exposition.” Everybody’s Magazine (October), 5(26): 488–91. Chute, R. J. 1874. “Hints under the Skylight: The Light and the Subject.” The Philadelphia Photographer Henisch, Heinz K., and Bridget A. Henisch. 1998. Positive (October), 11(130): 313–14. Pleasures: Early Photography and Humor. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Collins, Kris. 1996. “White-Washing the Black-a-Moor: Othello, Negro Minstrelsy and Parodies of Blackness.” Henisch, Heinz K. and Bridget A. Henisch. 2002. The Journal of American Culture (Fall), 19(3): 87–101. Photographic World and Humour of Cuthbert Bede. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press.

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