Anthropometric specimens and picturesque curiosities: the photographic orchestration of the “black” body (Brazil, circa 1865)

In Against Race Paul Gilroy writes that the “race producing” activity unleashed in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries “required a synthesis of logos with icon, of formal scientific rationality with something else, something visual and aesthetic” (1). During this period, scientific discourses that elaborate the concept of race adopt new technologies, especially photography. In this article, I am particularly interested in analyzing how the “black” body is arranged photographically. I probe some examples taken from the archives collected by the Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz and the photographer Christiano Júnior in mid-19th century Rio de Janeiro. Objective: to question how these visual artifacts contributed to the re-assemblage of racial discourses precisely at the moment when the black body was invested with legal subjectivity