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Abstract
Early forms of photography play a unique role in establishing an Anthropocenean consciousness in the mid-nineteenth century that witnesses human relationships with nature as exclusively transactional, by centring its focus on the violent displacement of people from their contexts simultaneous to the violent displacement of objects from their contexts. Such practices of perception were co-constituted with other forms of excessive violence that eventually became unique to the geography of the American West. By photographing Native Americans as objects, white American male photographers were able to transform them into relics, and in so doing, cast the Indigenous cultures from which they were drawn as fundamentally dead, turning the enemy figuratively into the past, and practically into oblivion to the degree that it is possible for institutions to confine them to ‘natural’ history through the twinned force of taking both object and image from them. It was, therefore, not so much a case of designating colonised populations, as designing them aesthetically so that they fit in a material sense of belonging to an order greater than themselves. Violence in this sense becomes a relational project to how we understand mankind itself and its origins in a racial science that allowed for this living body of photography to enter in and make itself known as both a witness and a trace of the past generating whole environments through which such systems of knowledge could and did endure to our present moment.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 14.
2 Axelle Karera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,” Critical Philosophy of Race 7, no. 1 (January 2019): 46, https://doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.7.1.0032; and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement ‘Beyond the Human,’” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (June 2015): 217, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/582032.
3 Karera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,” 46.
4 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Whiteness of Birds,” liquid blackness 6, no. 1 (April 2022): 129, https://doi.org/10.1215/26923874-9546592.
5 Ibid., 129.
6 Ibid., 129.
7 Ibid., 129.
8 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” in Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: St Martins Press, 2003), 241.
9 Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 12.
10 Ibid., 12.
11 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes, 5.
12 Ibid., 7.
13 Ibid., 5.
14 Michael G. Moran, Inventing Virginia: Sir Walter Raleigh and the Rhetoric of Colonization, 1584–1590 (Austria: Peter Lang, 2007), 140.
15 Ibid., 140.
16 Ibid., 141.
17 Steven Conn, History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 73.
18 Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian (Germany: Taschen, 2005), quoted in Conn, History’s Shadow, 74.
19 Ibid., 74.
20 Ibid., 74.
21 Ibid., 74.
22 Ibid., 76.
23 Ibid., 76.
24 Ibid., 76.
25 Deborah Poole, “An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies,” The Annual Review Anthropology 34 (2005): 165, https://10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.144034.
26 Ibid., 165.
27 Ibid., 165.
28 Ibid., 172.
29 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes, 14.
30 Conn, History’s Shadow, 74.
31 Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven: Kingdom, Yale University Press, 2002), 172.
32 Sarah Moroz, “The Age of Gold and Daguerreotypes,” New York Times, January 23, 2018, https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/the-age-of-gold-rush-and-daguerreotypes/ (accessed March 7, 2021).
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Claire Voon, “Daguerreotypes of the California Gold Rush,” Hyperallergic, January 9, 2018, https://hyperallergic.com/417336/daguerreotypes-of-the-california-gold-rush/ (accessed March 7, 2021).
39 Ibid.
40 Jennifer Jeffers, “Remembering the Bloody Rush of the California Genocide,” The Raven Report, December 1, 2017, https://theravenreport.com/2017/12/01/remembering-the-bloody-rush-of-the-california-genocide/(acccessed March 8, 2021).
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Voon, “Daguerreotypes.”
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Amy K. DeFalco Lippert,Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 369.
48 Jennifer M. Black, “Review of Lippert, Amy DeFalco, Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco,” H-California, H-Net Reviews, July 2018, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52056 (accessed March 7, 2021).
49 Ibid., 256, quoted in Black, “Review of Lippert, Amy DeFalco, Consuming Identities.”
50 Alison Marie Weiss, “‘A Plumb Craving for the Other Color’: White Men, Non-White Women, and Sexual Crisis in Antebellum America” (Diss., UC Berkeley, 2013), 51.
51 Ibid., 51.
52 Jordy Rosenberg, “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present,” Theory & Event 17, no. 2 (2014), https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/546470.
53 Ibid.
54 Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), 95.
55 Ryan P. Smith, “How Daguerreotype Photography Reflected a Changing America,” Smithsonian Magazine, June 18, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-daguerreotype-photography-reflected-changing-america-180969389/ (accessed March 11, 2021).
56 Alexandria Herr, “Mercury in Our Waters: The 10,000-Year Legacy of California’s Gold Rush,” KCET, September 30, 2020, https://www.kcet.org/shows/earth-focus/mercury-in-our-waters-the-10-000-year-legacy-of-californias-gold-rush (accessed March 10, 2021).
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid.
60 Rob Coley, “Vector Portraits, or, Photography for the Anthropocene,” Philosophy of
Photography 6, nos. 1–2 (2015): 51, https://doi.org/10.1386/pop.6.1-2.51_1.
61 Ibid., 54.
62 Ibid., 55.
63 Ibid., 50.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stephanie Polsky
STEPHANIE POLSKY is an interdisciplinary writer and academic working in the Department of Art and Design at the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University. Her work explores the confluence of power around race and gender as technologies of governance. Her books include Walter Benjamin’s Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity (Academica Press, 2009); Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London (Zero Books, 2015); The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty (Academica Press, 2019); and the forthcoming books The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World (Punctum Books, Fall 2022) and The Photographic Invention of Whiteness: The Visual Cultures of White Atlantic Worlds (Routledge, 2023).