Visual Data: Factual Error

• In Event: Dissenting from Diagnosis: Embodiment and Visual Culture

Abstract

In 1949 the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research added a new member to its staff, former Kodak photographer William Dellenback, whose official title was “Research Assistant” and whose sole responsibility was to take photographs. Dellenback photographed sex acts, artifacts, and researchers; he took portraits, snapshots, and staged photographs of the scene of science; he was sent to take photographs on location, in laboratories, and among the daily operations of the Institute in Bloomington, Indiana. Dellenback consolidated the house-style of the Kinsey Institute’s photographic self-representation, staging numerous photos of Kinsey and his research team interviewing supposed research subjects, who were in fact typically other members of the Institute’s staff, also officially "Research Assistants." Dellenback’s visual style became an essential feature of the Institute’s operations, uniting its knowledge production protocols with its protocols for the production of knowledge about itself. Those protocols were notoriously stringent, as Kinsey and company worked prodigiously to temper the scandal they rightly predicted the female volume would incite by rigorously vetting all press about the research. Release forms included the proviso that Kinsey himself would assess all reportage for “factual error” before it went to press. This proviso took on strange dimensions when applied to photojournalism, as it routinely was. What would it mean to check  a staged photograph of a simulated sexual history interview for “factual error”? Drawing on archival research at the Kinsey Institute, this paper reads the record of relations between Kinsey and photojournalists, including Dellenback but extending to Ebony photographer Griff Davis and Life photographer Vories Fisher, in conjunction with their photography of Kinsey at work. This paper considers the role of photography in the production and reception of the Kinsey Reports, situating Alfred Kinsey as prodigious collector of art images and objects, which he referred to as "visual data," among a network of photojournalist "research assistants" to develop an account of the visual in the quantitative science of sex.

Author

• Joan Lubin, University of Pennsylvania