Photographing Mixed-Raced Bodies: An Artistic and Scientific Visual Culture

Abstract

I read contemporary portraits of people identifying as multiracial through the filter of historical photographic representations of mixed-raced bodies. Each photograph is within an anthropometric style that developed within early physical anthropology, which measured the human body to understand what was considered the biology of racial difference. Dating from 1865 to 1937, the historical photographs were taken or commissioned by naturalists, anthropologists, and/or eugenicists representing public, scientific, and academic institutions. The contemporary archive dates from about 2009 to 2020 and includes only professional and artistic photographic projects that explicitly call upon narratives of multiraciality and that received considerable attention in the mainstream media.

I argue that the photographic portrait of a multiracial-identified subject within the race-type, anthropometric form racializes, teaching violent ways of seeing people. Even those projects that engage the historical form in an attempt to challenge the visual constructs of race, I find, still re/produce a racial sight that has been crafted specifically for mixed-raced subjects. Without attending to the ways that mixed-raced bodies have been theorized through scientific and visual discourses of race, contemporary photographic projects are not designed to allow the subversive potential people identifying as multiracial often want to see in them.

In analyzing the aesthetic logics of the historical portraits, I draw conclusions about how the photograph racializes. Through the biological logic of repronormativity, the mixed-racial type portrait re/produces racial subjects—both mixed and not—and hetero-gendered subjects. Through marking the anatomical/corporeal body in terms of repronormative temporalities (hybrid degeneracy or hybrid vigor), the mixed-racial type portrait functions as a mode of miscegenation regulation, either discouraging or encouraging particular racial-gender formations and relations. Through the visual production of the mixed-race subject, colonial (including settler and imperial) projects have been forwarded. Without addressing the colonial projects supported by the aesthetic logics of multiracial portraiture, the contemporary photographic projects—The Hapa Project, Changing Faces, and Mixed Blood—do not challenge the aesthetic logics of repronormativity. Rather, these portraits work through repronormativity to produce a mixed-race subject imbued with either an anatomical or corporeal essentialism.