Race and Photography: Historical Representations and Bias

Photography as Historical Evidence and Tool of Discrimination

People have used photography as an objective source for the history of social groups, people, places, and events. Photographs provide a glimpse of what life was like in the past and allow us to see more fully what daily life entailed. However, it is nearly impossible to separate the history of photography from the history of race in America because racial history is shown in the photographs themselves. Beyond its use for historical documentation, photography was also used by scientists to create and confirm perceived differences within Western society and thought, particularly in comparing races.

The Role of Portraiture in Racial Representation

Beyond the obvious photographs of discrimination—such as images of signs separating African Americans and whites, or photographs of slaves and slave owners—it is important to examine portraiture. Many early depictions of African American people in photographic form have carried over to how we perceive them in real life today. Photographic portraits serve as a medium for understanding the relevance of categorizing "Black photography" and its role in showing and creating ideas about the status and characteristics of humankind.

Photography is a powerful medium that has been used as a tool of discrimination throughout history. Portraits reveal social realities, and as scholar Richard Brilliant notes, "their imagery combines the conventions of behaviour and appearance appropriate to the members of a society at a particular time. (…) The portrait is therefore a sign whose purpose is both the description of an individual and the inscription of social identity" (Brilliant, 2001, p. 11). This dual function—documenting individuals while simultaneously inscribing them into social hierarchies—made portraiture particularly effective as a mechanism for establishing and reinforcing racial categories.

Anthropological Photography and Racial Stereotyping

Photography taken outside Western culture also brought negative connotations to African American people. When Western photographers traveled to Africa to capture indigenous ways of living and brought their photographs back, the images aligned with prevailing ideologies of white dominance. These anthropological representations of African peoples were circulated globally and perpetuated harmful stereotypes. Significantly, the names of subjects in these portraits were often removed to create what appeared to be a generic model of African or African American people, effectively erasing individual identity in service of a dehumanizing categorical system.

Photography, Objectivity, and Racial Bias

The history of photography fundamentally contains the beginning of modern racial identities. In his 1997 book White, scholar Richard Dyer observed that "In the history of photography and film, getting the right image meant getting the one which conformed to prevalent ideas of humanity. This included ideas of whiteness, of what colour—what range of hue—white people wanted white people to be" (Dyer, 1997). Photography thus functions as a pattern revealing how technology presented as objective always carries embedded racial discrimination. Claims to photographic neutrality masked the ways technical, compositional, and archival choices encoded white preferences and racial hierarchies into the supposedly factual photographic record.