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Biography Information
Tanya Sheehan is an assistant professor in the Art History Department at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where she teaches courses on race and representation, art and science, and the history of photography. She is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), which explores the relationship between studio portrait photography, medical discourse, and social identity. Dr. Sheehan is currently writing a book that examines ideas about race in early photographic humor. She began this project while in residence at the Leslie Humanities Center at Dartmouth College and has since received research support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the New York Public Library.
Project Description
Following the announcement of its invention in 1839, photography was the subject of much humor on both sides of the Atlantic. Comic photographs, photographic literature, and graphic satire poked fun at the overwhelming number of people who flocked to portrait studios or took up amateur photography. Humorists also made readers laugh at the unnaturalness of the photographic pose and often absurd efforts to capture a “pleasing likeness.” My book project explores a popular variety of humor that drew ironic connections between the medium of photography and ideas about race in America. It asks how and why humorists used photographic processes to express evolving ideas about black emancipation and civil rights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Blacks and Whites is the first book to study humor about and within the photographic medium as more than a collectible curiosity and “mere” entertainment. As such, it contributes to recent efforts in cultural studies and art history to take visual humor seriously as complex social commentary. The book also relies on a trove of understudied materials to write a new history of photography, one that encompasses the rise of the commercial portrait studio in the 1840s and the popularization of amateur photography at the turn of the twentieth century. This history unpacks the racial politics that shaped what we take to be the most essential elements of the medium, from the negative-positive process to the convention of the photographic smile.
The argument of Blacks and Whites has important implications outside of photography studies, insofar as it understands the concept of “race in America” as continuously (re)constructed within and beyond the borders of the US. It does so first by tracing the transnational circulation of racial jokes. How did their American exportation shape racial discourses in Britain and parts of the British Empire? In what ways did these different geographic and social contexts redefine, in turn, the meanings of popular American images and ideas about race? Second, the book attends not only to whites’ consumption of racial humor but also to the genre’s appropriation and subversion by black image makers. The latter have attempted to creatively bridge the perceived divide between blacks and whites, for which photography has long served as an instrument and metaphor.