Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor, by Tanya Sheehan

This book about humor is not funny. But its account of cruel, dehumanizing caricatures sheds light on the infiltration of racism into some of the most basic and mundane sectors of the history of—mainly—the United States. Moreover, the reproduction of these caricatures in the context of literature about photography or in photographs gives them an insidious power with consequences for the myth of photographic truth. Study in Black and White ranges widely over plays, books, and illustrations of photographic practices as well as photographs themselves, but it begins with humor that draws from the technology of the medium. Perhaps it was inevitable, in a race-conscious society, that photography’s positive-negative process, visible even in a daguerreotype but most prominent in glass-plate photography, would lead to derisive jokes about racial transformation. The book soon arrives, however, at its central theme. While the author cites a number of ancient and modern theories of humor, and of photographic humor in particular, most of the book’s underlying assumptions about racist humor in photography stem primarily from the work of Eric Lott and others on blackface minstrelsy, the explicit focus of the second chapter. Black photographic practices were subjected to a litany of pictorial mockery in such plays as The Octoroon (1859), a tragic love story complete with family ruin and a murder. In the play, the humor arises from the supposed ignorance of an enslaved boy trying to make a self-portrait with a camera that he has no notion how to operate, and the preposterous idea of a photographic plate that develops itself. Since photographic plates cannot develop themselves, the fact that the plot depends on this impossibility (the murderer is discovered by means of it) might suggest that the playwright was equally ignorant of photography, or expected his audience to be. In Tanya Sheehan’s telling, the professional photographic community accepted the ignorance of the enslaved boy as part of the humor, but thought that the absurd plot device of a self-developing plate insulted the intelligence of the (white) audience, which apparently projected its own technological confusion onto the minority characters on stage. Grotesque caricatures of Black photographers are a measure of the obstacles they must have faced in their work. Indeed, white professional photographers may have been anxious to protect their reputations and that of the new medium from association with minorities and the lower classes. An account of the historical development of the photographic studio might have been a helpful addition to Sheehan’s book. Black Americans, along with women and lower classes in general, tried to take advantage of the new medium as a source of social mobility. Studios could be established to produce likenesses of clients for relatively small outlays of money and time. One reaction to this social mobility was to mock those who were using it to rise above their station in life. Thus women were characterized as too weak to handle the equipment and Black people as too unintelligent to understand the technology. Moreover, the very fact that women and minorities were able to take up photography encouraged others to ridicule the artistic pretensions of the profession as a whole. Sheehan identifies the sets of the minstrel show The Darkey Photographer (1867) as modeled on, or at least recalling, J. P. Ball, a Black-owned-and-operated daguerreotype studio established in 1854 in Cincinnati. The studio emphasized its artistic pretensions, and its support came from white as well as Black families, a story told in fascinating detail by Debora Willis.1 The Darkey Photographer may have been intended to diminish such early efforts. This story of mockery is thus the dark underside of the often-told empowering history of photography as a profession. Certainly, the source of the cruel humor chronicled in these pages is often fear. The fascinating chapter concerning the origins of the photographic smile potentially transcends the issue of race and illuminates the history of early studio portraiture. The smile has deep roots in the photographic past. One probably does not need to be told that, for the professional studio photographer, it is imperative that most subjects be made to look happy even if they do not feel that way. Photographers recognized early that Reviews