Photography and Race

In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy by Anna Pegler-Gordon

I wanted to draw out some thought-provoking quotes from this book. I just relied on this book and Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and Visual Culture to write a lecture on visual culture, immigration, and race science.

“Not only was Chinese exclusion central to the development of general immigration policy, it was the foundation of visual immigration policy.  The immigration Bureau used the early photographic identification of the Chinese as a model for their expansion of photographic identification of the Chinese as a model for their expansion of photographic documentation to other immigrant groups and, by the 1920s, all immigrants.  At the same time, however, the Chinese experience remained distinct; they were more strictly regulated than any other group and resisted their photographic regulation both forcefully and effectively.” (p. 9)

“This study focuses on the ways that immigration photography produced race not only by representing it visually but also by regulating which immigrant groups would require representation. In immigration photography, racial hierarchies and the differential privilege of vision operated together to ensure that some immigrants (in particular, the Chinese) were marked and others (especially Europeans) remained unmarked. Chinese immigrants were photographed because they were viewed as different, but they were also viewed as different because they were photographed.” (p. 10) 

 “Chinese honorific identity portraits were both a conscious counter-representation to popular stereotypes and a succinct visual argument in support of their application to enter the United States.  By presenting themselves as conventionally respectable, Chinese immigrants opposed exclusion through seeking acceptance” (p. 48).

These ideas juxtapose well with the ideas in Photography on the color line regarding the work on race science and then the response of the “othered” using the medium of photography to talk back to the racism.

References

Pegler-Gordon, A. (2009). In sight of America: Photography and the development of U.S. Immigration         policy.  Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Smith, S. M. (2004). Photography on the color line: W.E.B. DuBois, race, and visual culture. Durham &         London: Duke University Press.