Only Skin Deep

by Fusco, Coco; Wallis, Brian

• ISBN13: 9780810991651
• ISBN10: 0810991659
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-12-01
• Publisher: Harry N Abrams Inc

Summary

Few issues are as controversial as race and nation, reveating that after years of debate we still understand very little about how these terms of self-definition and identity work. Perhaps their meaning finds its most powerful expression in the medium of photography. Photographs have been used to present America as a haven for immigrants and a paradise of pioneers and entrepreneurs; yet photographs have also shown us a society fraught by racial conflict and struggles to transform the social order. Throughout the history of American photography, artists have responded to these mixed signals in a variety of ways. By bringing together a provocative selection of essays and images. Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self addresses the issues of nation, race, and selfhood and how they are depicted in ways that are challenging and informative, prompting readers to consider the impact of photography on our everyday lives. If photographs are chiefly responsible for perpetuating myths of American identity, can a different reading of these representations break down distorting stereotypes? This is the central question posed by Only Skin Deep. The authors in this book forcefully argue that race and nation -- and, indeed, photography itself -- are fictions, cultural constructions that shape our social interactions. Even as symbols, these photographic depictions of ethnic difference and cultural superiority have very real consequences. This collection of works and essays addresses, for example, the lingering consequences of American colonial expansion; the conflict between public and private visualizations of individuals; the role of commercial imagery in shaping gender roles; the impact of fantasy in ethnic or ethnographic photography; and the uses of science to provide justification for politicized depictions of "race." Book jacket.

Table of Contents

Director's Foreword	p. 6
Curators' Acknowledgments	p. 8
Racial Time, Racial Marks, Racial Metaphors	p. 13
The Theoretical Status of the Concept of Race	p. 51
Looking Up/Looking Down	p. 62
The Traffic in Photographs	p. 79
The Shadow and the Substance: Race, Photography, and the Index	p. 111
Looking for Empire in the U.S. Colonial Archive	p. 129
Assimilate/Impersonate	p. 144
Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz's Slave Daguerreotypes	p. 163
Prairie Pinups: Reconsidering Historic Portraits of American Indian Women	p. 183
No-Movies: The Art of False Documents	p. 199
Humanize/Fetishize	p. 204
Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary	p. 237
The Consumption of Lynching Images	p. 267
Exposure	p. 275
All for One/One for All	p. 282
On the Matter of Whiteness	p. 301
Autonomy and the Archive in America: Reexamining the Intersection of Photography and Stereotype	p. 313
Toyo Miyatake and "Our World"	p. 335
Passing Likeness: Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" and the Paradox of Iconicity	p. 345
Progress/Regress	p. 356
Where Truth Ends and Fantasy Begins: Postcards from the South Pacific	p. 371
Morphologies: Race as a Visual Technology	p. 379
Checklist of the Exhibition	p. 394
Selected Bibliography	p. 404
Notes on the Contributors	p. 409
Lenders to the Exhibition	p. 410
Credits	p. 411
Index	p. 412
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