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Picture Imperfect - Photography and Eugenics, 1879-1940 (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R3,535
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Picture Imperfect - Photography and Eugenics, 1879-1940 (Hardcover)
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Documents and critically analyses the photographs that helped
strengthen as well as bring down the Eugenics Movement. Using a
large body of racial-type images and a variety of historical and
archival sources, and concentrating mainly on developments in
Britain, the USA and Nazi Germany, the author argues that
photography, as the most powerful visual medium of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was vital to the Eugenics
Movement's success -- not only did it allow eugenicists to identify
the people with superior and inferior hereditary traits, but it
helped publicise and lend scientific authority to eugenicists'
racial theories. The author further argues for a strong connection
between the racial-type photographs that eugenicists created and
the photographic images produced by nineteenth-century
anthropologists and prison authorities, and that the photographic
works of contemporary liberal anthropologists played a significant
role in the Eugenics Movement's downfall. Besides adding to our
knowledge of photography's crucial role in helping to authorise and
implement some of the most controversial social policies of modern
times, this book makes a major contribution to our understanding of
the history of racism. Most accounts of eugenics have been written
by history of science scholars, with an emphasis on the history of
science and medicine. In contrast, "Picture Imperfect" looks at
eugenics from the standpoint of its most significant cultural data
-- racial-type photography, investigating the techniques, media
forms, and styles of photography used by eugenicists, and relating
these to their racial theories and their social policies and goals.
Indeed, the visual archive was crucially constitutive of eugenic
racial science because it helped make many of its concepts appear
both intuitive as well as scientifically legitimate. Discussion of
the history of the eugenics movement encompasses a wide narrative,
including Nazi history, US politics, criminology and prison
studies, and propaganda.
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