Racial Vision: Sensory Perception, Authenticity and Photographic Expertise

• In Event: Unpacking Expertise - II: Authority, Politics, & the State

Abstract

Photographic historians of racial and social types often base their research on photographs of vulnerable populations – criminals, the mentally ill, colonial subjects and those designated as racially inferior. Here, I decenter this established focus on oppressed groups and use as empirical foundation photographs of non-stigmatized Germans taken during the National Socialist dictatorship in order to show how discerning racial difference between white Europeans became perceptually accessible to early 20th century Germans. Much like their contemporary Gestalt theorist Wolfgang Metzer, National Socialist racial experts presumed that visual perception was subjective. Given that, how were they to accurately, objectively and authentically ascertain the race of non-Jewish Germans? The paper traces conceptual genealogies of seeing that emerge from the racial photographs of Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, H.F.K. Günther and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, as well as from formerly classified photographic instruction manuals written by NS racial experts, and from reflections by NS photographers on their practice. Expertise emerges in two ways in the paper: In the transformation of photographic practice that draws on cutting-edge technology to reveal the ‘racial soul’ and other invisible racial characteristics of Germans by training a new type of racial photographer; and in the training of the German population in ‘seeing’ race by structuring somatic perception.

Author

• Anna Katharina Mosha Skarpelis, Harvard University