Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture

by Shawn Michelle Smith

Through a rich interpretation of the remarkable photographs W. E. B. Du Bois compiled for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, Shawn Michelle Smith reveals the visual dimension of the color line that Du Bois famously called “the problem of the twentieth century.” Du Bois’s prize-winning exhibit consisted of three albums together containing 363 black-and-white photographs, mostly of middle-class African Americans from Atlanta and other parts of Georgia. Smith provides an extensive analysis of the images, the antiracist message Du Bois conveyed by collecting and displaying them, and their connection to his critical thought. She contends that Du Bois was an early visual theorist of race and racism and demonstrates how such an understanding makes the important concepts he developed—including double consciousness, the color line, the Veil, and second sight—available to visual culture and African American studies scholars in powerful new ways. Smith reads Du Bois’s photographs in relation to other turn-of-the-century images such as scientific typologies, criminal mugshots, racist caricatures, and lynching photographs. By juxtaposing these images with reproductions from Du Bois’s exhibition archive, Smith shows how Du Bois deliberately challenged racist representations of African Americans. Emphasizing the importance of comparing multiple visual archives, Photography on the Color Line reinvigorates understandings of the stakes of representation and the fundamental connections between race and visual culture in the United States.

Genres: Photography, Art, History, African American, Art History, Sociology, Academic

272 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2004

Reviews

[Cara Byrne · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Du Bois's particular counterarchive demands that one attend to the interanimation of race and visual culture, to the ways in which race has been circumscribed by images and racial identification has been figured and challenged through racialized gazes. Looking back over the previous century through the lens of Du Bois's 1900 Georgia Negro photographs, one can literally begin to see the conundrum of race and representation - 'the problem of the color-line' - anew" (160).

In her closing lines to _Photography on the Color Line_, Smith reaffirms what she carefully proves throughout her entire book. Smith's work is smart, novel, and so important in understanding the nuances of race and visual culture. Her work is inspirational to my own in tracing the lineage of African American picture books, especially when studying photographic picture books for children at the start of the twentieth century.

[Constance · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nuanced, theoretical take on the "color line." Smith makes a compelling, and convincing, argument for centering the visual negotiations, racializations, and representations at play when it comes to creating whiteness, strengthening white supremacy, and constructing Black identities. Smith makes a case for the importance of visual culture to "New Negro" identity and political articulations.

While Smith's argument is certainly helpful to me in adding a stronger theoretical basis to my work, Smith's analysis could've done more to interrogate gender, patriarchy, and Black womanhood. The restrictions imposed on Black women's sexuality through these early days of "racial uplift" politics are clear, but, how did Black women circumvent these norms? How can we methodologically analyze these photographs by looking more intentionally for "resistance"? I can't say that Smith didn't do this -- she actually did throughout--but, I just wanted more. Her strongest analyses tend to come through only in relation to colorism and biracial identities.

I also found myself wondering about the audience. In some ways, Smith does a really good job of showing the fragility and vulnerability of whiteness as inextricable from violence against Black bodies. At the same time, she shows that the anti-racist work of Black photographs was really about representation, self-presentation, and the display of middle-class status, especially through property. While I see this as a key point to consider within the context of the time, I'm left wondering about Black non-elite representations in Black intellectual culture. I can also see how this might've been beyond the scope of the project, but, what does it mean when Blackness becomes signified only through elite class status? What are the consequences of privileging, well, Black privilege?

Lastly, I always crave a larger diasporic context. How did Black intellectuals from the Caribbean and Latin America use photographs to resist white supremacy? What are the continuities and ruptures in the articulations and constructions of whiteness across the Americas?

[T.R. Ormond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shawn Michelle Smith defines and analyzes the visual agenda of W.E.B. Du Bois in his American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris International Exhibition. First, she looks at how Du Bois is a thinker who considered the visual aspects of racialization. His conceptions such as "double consciousness" and "the veil" rest upon literal and figurative visual foundations. Second, she reveals that The American Negro Exhibit acts as a counterarchive to undermine the scientifically racist archives that characterized the mid-late 19th century, as Social Darwinism took on overtly racist overtones reinforced with visual "evidence." Third, she examines how Du Bois's understanding of gender and the nuclear family informed a significant portion of his visual agenda. A black male patriarchy pervades his collection of images. Lastly, she presents how Du Bois understood lynching photography to be a revelation of white violence used to sustain the myth of white wholeness (in order to sustain the myth of a projected black incompleteness).

In all, Smith's book is an excellent presentation of how ideology and discourse pervade visual representation. Not an entirely new thesis, but she shows conclusively that Du Bois understood this and used it to his advantage. The American Negro Exhibit of 1900 was "propaganda" that subverted stereotypical and racist visual representations by positing new images of African Americans that defied the lies of white supremacy.

I read this book out of personal interest, but it seems like this has likely been used in a number of university courses.

[diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

i liked this book! it’s an archival study on w.e.b. du bois’s 1900 paris exhibition which showcases hundreds of images of various african american people from georgia. the author analyzes du bois’s archival photography’s role in racial classification. she reveals what photography on the color line can say about race in relation to gender, class, appearance. i liked it overall but definitely found the first chapter to be jarring because it went pretty heavy on the psychology of “double consciousness” and “mirror image” and it threw me off that we didn’t start with the main topic of the book.

[Tabitha · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's theoretically dense so I'm moving slowly, but ohhhh it's so niice so far- especially for a sociology dork like myself.
I'm also a photographer so its an interesting study of the power of images in America over centuries. All of the ideas I have read about in Photography on the Color Line are completely relevant to American media today!

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

The topic is interesting but the book is a bit repetitive and long-winded at times.