Deborah Willis and Carla Williams

The Black Female Body in Photographs from World’s Fairs and Expositions[1]

in "Race, Photography, and American Culture," exposure, volume 33, 1/2, Daytona Beach, Florida: Society for Photographic Education, 2000.

 

I.                    Introduction

 

In the nineteenth century, the body of the black female symbolized three themes—colonialism, scientific evolution, and sexuality—and her representation in art and photography followed along these prescribed lines. Almost exclusively, black women were depicted in two ways: as nudes, generally of an ethnographic nature, or (usually) clothed in the company of a nude or sexually suggestive white female. The black woman occupied, like a prop or piece of drapery, through her real status as servant/slave/colonized subject, the lowest rung in a socio-economic hierarchy, serving the ends of private pleasure or economic/imperial domination.

A number of significant developments in Western culture that coincided with the invention of photography contributed to the way in which black women were regarded and visualized. The births of “popular culture” and modern visual pornography, the development of the natural sciences and the related disciplines of ethnology and anthropology, and the abolition of slavery both in the colonies and at home were all practically simultaneous, and each served to compartmentalize, objectify, and categorize any manifestations of difference from the European ideal. In addition, with new industrial-based economies in Europe and the United States and the subsequent urbanization of their populations, a middle class was born and with it the modern notion of a “popular culture” specific to its interests.

The phenomenon of the spectacle, with its exploitation of human difference, was once only a privileged pastime of royalty and the aristocracy; it was broadened to entice this new audience. The spectacle reached its zenith in the expositions or world’s fairs that began on an international level in 1851 in London, flourished at the end of the century, and continued until 1965. "World’s fairs, " "expositions, " and "exhibitions" were terms that were interchangeably used to describe celebrations of industrial, colonial, and imperial achievements, opportunities for countries, territories, regions, and cities to represent themselves to the world. Most of the expositions were nationalistic and political in nature, frequently promoted by the host countries as educational events, though they also provided amusements for their audiences. The intent was manifest from the beginning to reinforce prevailing doctrines that supported nationalism and economic growth, the latter of which was largely dependent upon the products from the colonies.

As much as the proliferation of the printed press, the world’s fair or exposition opened up the exploitation of other peoples to the masses, initially under the guise of learning. The new field of anthropology and its sub-category of ethnography rose to the forefront of scientific and academic thought by the 1870s. These fields offered a supposedly scientific justification for the documentation and classification of peoples in light of which the naked body of the “Other” did not carry a moral restriction. This paved the way for the introduction of anthropology departments to the fairs, where white scientists and fair visitors were confronted with race and hegemony in the form of exhibits featured unclothed Africans. The expositions became the primary arena in which the average European would encounter the black African firsthand, and they consequently had a profound influence on the propagation of the image of “primitive” man. In at least some instances, the people on display were willing and paid participants, thus playing a significant role in the exchange and raising questions of agency and culpability.

In addition to the world’s fairs, the end of the nineteenth century saw an explosion of ethnographic photography as anthropological expeditions and tourism increased, opening up Africa and Africans to rampant—and literal—overexposure. The introduction of the Eastman Kodak box camera in 1888 and the proliferation of photographic “snapshot” images and postcards at the end of the century helped to widely disseminate the notion of ethnographic difference. The presumed veracity of the photographic image only reinforced certain categories based on appearance. This paper will draw a parallel between the act of photography and the classification inherent in racial anatomical studies by examining the photographic record of black women made during world’s fairs and expositions. The paper will conclude with a brief discussion of the work of contemporary artists who are responding to this legacy.

II.                 The First Vènus Noire

 

A discussion of the image of the black woman on display hinges on the figure of Saartjie, or Sarah Baartman, a South African Khoi or San woman of “mixed stock” who was exhibited from 1810 to 1815 as a curiosity in Europe, first in London and then Paris, as the “HottentotVenus.” [2]  Like the fictional Sable Venus[3] who preceded her, the sobriquet given her draws an immediate parallel to an established Western icon of physical pulchritude and sexual desirability. Venus, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, was an ideal from which Baartman differed, by European standards, as night from day. The “show business partnership” of Alexander Dunlop, a British army surgeon on an African ship, and Henrick Caesar, a farmer and the brother of the man for whom Baartman worked as a servant in Cape Town, brought Baartman to England.[4] The men promised Baartman that she could earn a lot of money by exhibiting herself in England. Baartman was exhibited in England for only eight months, but remained for more than four years, purportedly of her free will as a free woman. How much she was given of the two shillings each that visitors paid to view her is unclear, though she had reportedly been promised half. This figure differs in the various reports and may reflect that admission prices to see her varied. Whether or not money had anything to do with her remaining in England for so long is equally unclear.[5]

It is not certain from the first-hand accounts that survive whether Baartman was ever fully unclothed in her “performances” in England, which in London took place in a room at Piccadilly Circus. Some state that she was fully clothed, while others state that there was a kind of striptease show as she shed an animal-skin covering in which she was initially presented. Still others suggest that, even as she did this, she wore a flesh-colored body stocking or form-fitting dress underneath.[6] Physically, Baartman was distinguished in two major ways. The first and most obvious was the shape of her buttocks. Baartman had steatopygia, an over-development of fatty tissue on the buttocks occurring usually in the female. It was a common trait in women of various South African tribes, especially Hottentots, and hence Baartman’s misidentification. The second was her extended labia minora, the so-called “Hottentot apron,”[7] which is believed not to be a genetic trait but rather a result of genital manipulation—a kind of beauty mark, like a piercing or tattoo—because it was perceived in her culture to be sexually desirable.[8]

The combination of sexuality and public display was possible only because of Baartman’s blackness. A European women of any class could never have been exhibited in this manner, but such a display of an African woman could be tolerated as science, if not outright entertainment. The mixture of repulsion and eroticism that Baartman must have provoked was a potent one. As an object of sexual delectation, she represented a curious dichotomy: her physical difference was denounced on scientific and intellectual grounds as repellent and disgusting, as was the immorality of her display, while the name given her and the concentration of interest on her genitalia and buttocks clearly sought to provoke a libidinous reaction in those who viewed her. Baartman seemed to exemplify the claim that “...the black woman was imagined without a head: The body is all that counts, a body offered to man’s pleasure, an extremely simplified idea in which beauty is exclusively seen as underlining the erogenous zone of breasts and buttocks,”[9] which in her case were literally larger than life. Baartman eventually made her way to Paris for eighteen months, where she died of tuberculosis (or possibly smallpox; it is unclear) at the early age of twenty-five or twenty-six. In 1829, another Hottentot woman, also billed as “Venus,” was exhibited nude at a ball in Paris given by the Duchess du Barry.[10] Once the world’s fairs and expositions commenced, countless women of African descent were displayed throughout Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With the invention of photography, they became frequent subjects for the photographer's lens.

III.               The Early Fairs in Europe

 

The first international fair was London’s Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, which opened in 1851 in the Crystal Palace.[11] While “Ethiopian serenaders”[12] and a Nubian Court[13] were part of this first international exhibition, it is unclear precisely of what this performance and display consisted. At the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris,[14] North Africans working in the various shops, installations and restaurants were an integral ingredient in the ethnic flavoring. [15] This exposition also included a photographic division, the largest display of photographs ever in France. The French photographs were divided into sections, including one for the French colonies, and a separate one for Algeria. An anthropological study of a seated figure is visible amidst other posed portraits in a stereograph view of the colonial installation distributed by the Paris firm Goupil et Compagnie.[16] From that point forward, every international fair or exposition featured either living or photographic displays, often both, of non-European peoples. These displays promoted racial theories, and introduced colonized people as a spectacle alongside technological and industrial advancements.

The Colonial Exhibition in Amsterdam in 1883,[17] though not a world’s fair per se, featured twenty-eight Surinamese natives on display in its West Indies section.[18] They were extensively photographed, and a book was published the following year in Paris by Prince Roland Napoleon Bonaparte (French, 1858-1924), titled Les Habitants de Suriname: Notes Recueillies a l’Exposition Coloniale d’Amsterdam en 1883.[19] Bonaparte, a trained ethnologist and the grandson of Emperor Napoleon I’s brother, made a career out of ethnographic photography, making photographic albums of North American Indians in 1887 and Lapons around 1890. The Amsterdam book featured installation views of the people on display in the exposition, as well as frontal and profile portraits of individual sitters accompanied by a page of anthropological information including their weight, measurements, and gender. In many of the installation views the European audiences, and the ropes separating them from the subjects, are clearly visible. There is no mistaking the context; the photographs do not attempt to deny the display, despite the fact that the fair itself had gone to great lengths to insure that the simulated village appeared “real.” Fig. 1.

A Senegalese village with inhabitants, which sought to recreate entire lifestyles and naturalistic settings of a particular ethnic group, was a feature of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889.[20] There the Senegalese, especially the women, experienced a profound dichotomy of identity that was determined, on the one hand, by their nudity while on display, and on the other by their clothing when they walked about the exposition or Paris in their off time.

It was the European context of their African nudity that made their display so problematic yet enticing. Photographs made in the main Pavilion of the Colonies show the nearly nude inhabitants alongside a standing white man in a Western suit, probably the Dutch ethnographer Goddefroy, who appears to be an overseer.[21] Goddefroy had brought these eighteen indigenous peoples to Paris from the Portuguese colony of Angola (South Guinea). Amidst the potted foliage and installation of weaponry and clothing visible on the wall in the background, men, women, and children from different tribes—Mondombe, Qangella, Lunda, and Ahico—cohabit under the single banner “Africans.”

That same year, Bonaparte photographed Bushmen and Hottentots in the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation at the Exposition.[22] Not only were these people photographed there, but they were also on exhibit in the zoological garden as specimens in reconstructed native villages. This zoo, located on Chaillot Hill, had opened in 1859 and was devoted to the studies of botany and zoology. In 1877 fourteen Africans were exhibited there (not as part of an exposition) and the success of their exhibition encouraged the subsequent displays of other people.[23] Bonaparte mounted the photographs in an album titled Boschimans et Hottentots. The unpublished volume of thirty-four prints includes fourteen head-and-shoulder, frontal and profile pairs of four identified men, one woman, a teenaged girl named April Much, and a nine-year old girl, Betty. The other twenty images are full-body ethnographic studies of women, mostly unidentified. Only one of the women, Bebye Rooi, is shown both in the head and shoulders views and in the full-body shots. Her facial features and her physiognomy are so strikingly different from those of the other women that it is possible she was not a member of either tribe.

An image of three women together is reminiscent of the classical “Three Graces” pose. Fig. 2. As in earlier ethnographic studies by Claude-Joseph Désiré Charnay (French, 1828 - 1915) made in Madagascar, Bonaparte used three women to show a frontal, rear and profile view in a single frame, ignoring the obvious physiological differences among the subjects. Bebye Rooi is at right; the other two women remain unidentified, meant to represent types rather than themselves. Bonaparte's crudely constructed tableau features these completely nude women standing in a greenhouse at the garden, the pseudo-tropical foliage meant to suggest their natural habitats. There was no attempt to make the setting appear more realistic; the potted plants on an étagère, ceramic-trimmed planters, and a bench upon which are heaped the various animal skins that are used as props in other images are plainly visible. Bonaparte’s is a clumsy, careless visual anthropology, without pretense to a concern with environmental determination or custom that was presumably present and significant in field imagery. In other photographs, Bonaparte placed the same subjects against simple white fabric backdrops in the same poses. He even photographed the child, Betty, naked in full-body frontal and profile views. The subjects are literally and figuratively stripped down, removed from any context that could give them an identity or history. They function purely as the sum of their parts, bodies displayed solely for the sake of exhibition.

It could be said that images such as Bonaparte’s are the photographic incarnation of Baartman herself, some seventy years later, images that utilize the very iconography associated with her life and the circumstances of her death. When Baartman arrived in England, Dunlop offered his share of her as a display property to the naturalist William Bullock at the Liverpool Museum as part of a package deal with a giraffe skin. Bullock declined the property of Baartman but eventually purchased the skin at a reduced price.[24] A giraffe skin is used as a backdrop in a photograph mounted in the Bonaparte album. The photograph can possibly be attributed to E. Flamant (French, dates unknown), who published a photograph of another woman in the same pose and location, using the same animal skin prop.[25] Flamant’s image was mounted as a carte-de-visite and was probably sold as a photographic souvenir. More than simple pictorial effect, props such as the giraffe skin are immediate visual referents, conjuring up the history of the display of African peoples in Europe, especially the most famous of them, Baartman.

 

The politically charged exhibits at the fairs examined the notion of human difference with the actual display of humans, presenting a practical living or documented lesson in evolution through the exhibition of the “Other,” establishing racial hegemonic structures in the displaying of Africans. According to Paul Greenhalgh, the early exhibitions aimed “to morally educate the working classes,”[26] and the ethnographic displays specifically were conceived of and installed to provide a kind of tableau vivant of evolution. Upon entering an exhibition space, races would be grouped from the darkest to the lightest, or “lowest” to the “highest” on the evolutionary scale. Thus, expositions played a key role in reifying the mythology that African, Asian, and Indian peoples were inferior to Europeans and white Americans. Central to this was the shared experiences of Africans from the Congo, Somalia, Senegal, Dahomey, and Ethiopia:

The peoples on display were the trophies of victory. After the battle was done with, the image of the native warrior, prior to that so threatening and repulsive that it had to be exorcised by means of horror stories and gruesome caricatures, became decorative…images of frightful African warriors, with spear and assegai, became ornamental once machine guns had done away with African resistance….Colonial exhibits catered to the voyeurism of the victors of civilization, they were ‘allegories of European hegemony’ and demonstrations of racial supremacy in which imperialism seemed to be transformed into ‘natural history.’[27]

 

Historian Fatimah Tobing Rony creates a compelling narrative suggesting an experience of a black woman on display in Paris:

 

You are a Wolof woman from Senegal. You have come to Paris in 1895 with your husband as a performer in the Exposition Ethnographique de l’Afrique Occidentale (Senegal and French Sudan) because of the promise of good pay. You have been positioned in front of the camera, and you are thinking about how cold it is: you can’t believe that you have to live here in this reconstruction of a West African village, crowded with these other West African people, some of whom don’t even speak Wolof. Every day the white people come to stare at you as you do your pottery. You make fun of some of them out loud in Wolof, which they don’t understand. You understand some of their French; after all, you are from the port where there have been French traders for as long as you can remember. Two men with cameras have been filming you and others making pottery, grinding grain, and walking. Right now, you have been told to walk straight ahead carrying a container on your head.[28]

 

Rony introduces the crucial question of the performers’ participation and complicity in their display due to their acceptance of monetary compensation. Blacks negotiated representations of themselves in performance and role playing for money. Many performers at world’s fairs were paid for their work, just as indigenous peoples sometimes received compensation for allowing themselves to be photographed by anthropologists and tourists. While it was common for exhibited people to be paid for the duration of their residencies, it is unknown whether any of the subjects discussed here were additionally compensated for being photographed. Although first person accounts do not survive, their complicity cannot be discounted.

IV.              Fairs in America

 

At American fairs, the Midway Plaisance was the major area for the display of non-Western cultures, “…a place where Americans regardless of class could ‘study ethnography practically,’ link[ing] equality to race. In blurring class lines and providing a quasi-scientific basis for the American image of the nonwhite world as barbaric and childlike, the Midway fed directly into the utopian vision of the White City.”[29] Most fairs produced midways where visitors encountered the authentic looking “villages” of the colonized. To maintain such “authenticity,” Eskimos wore heavy garments in the summer, and many Africans wore light clothing in the winter. These expositions were a great service to armchair ethnographers who could or would not travel to Africa or Asia or the other foreign locales to document their “specimens.” The fairs brought the spectacle of the ethnic exotic home, and the fairgrounds became a convenient surrogate field laboratory.

A photograph of Dahomey women made at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago,[30] “Amazons of King Béhanzin of Dahomey,” shows a grouping of eight bare-breasted women and girls against a blank backdrop, seated upon an arrangement of grass, holding weapons, including rifles.[31] The women in this image were photographed as part of the French Empire display at the exposition. A photograph mounted in cabinet card format, a likely souvenir for an exposition visitor, depicts one of these women seated on a haystack holding a sword. A Dahomeyan village, as well as sixteen others, had been constructed as an educational display at the fairground, and all of the people from the ethnic “villages” were paraded daily up and down the Midway Plaisance before being returned to their display areas.[32]

Two postcard views of the same young girl with very different inscriptions are indicative of the degree to which the inhabitants of the Fair were lumped together without regard for the specifics of their identities, demonstrating how little education was really taking place. In both images the girl stands, wearing only jewelry, headwrap, and a belt, with a crumpled garment on the table beside her. Fig. 3. In one view she is touching her breast; although she is in profile she turns to the camera to display herself. The intentionally “ironic” caption reads: “A Kroo Virgin in full dress from near Monrovia. She will be married when she & her mother consult and find a man who will make proper agass [sic].” In the companion view she is shown from behind, bent over the table to give the camera a better view. This time the caption reads: “A Pesseh Girl in Full Dress Same dress as the Kroo girl. This is usual dress, except the decoration,” which was clearly a prop. Fig. 4. It is indeed the same girl, turned around to obscure her face. The comparison of the two images suggests that even given photographic “evidence,” the identity of the sitter was of no real importance. The photograph validated the existence of a type, even if that type was constructed entirely by the photographer. A very visible chain around the girl’s ankle contrasts with her ankle bracelet on the other leg and raises disturbing questions regarding her circumstances and choice in being there.

 

American blacks voiced their disapproval in response to these displays and to such images and constructed what they considered to be representative images of their communities in order to combat racial stereotyping. Ida B. Wells-Barnett (American, 1862 – 1931), journalist and anti-lynching crusader, asserted her discontent with Chicago’s Columbian Exposition. During the Exposition, she and abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass (American, 1818 – 1895) published a pamphlet in several foreign languages titled “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition.”[33] It would inform the rest of the world of the travails of black Americans in both North and South.[34] Wells raised money for this publication by organizing lectures by herself and Douglass. With the help of women in Chicago, they raised more than five hundred dollars. Black women, including Wells-Barnett, had wanted full participation in the exposition’s planning and the subsequent event. Many tried to become members of the women’s committee, yet their requests were rejected. In response, the black-owned Harlem weekly newspaper, New York Age, stated: ‘We object. We carry our objection so far that if the matter was left to our determination we would advise the race to have nothing whatever to do with the Columbian Exposition or the management of it.…’”[35]

Not all blacks, however, supported the outright boycott of the Exposition, fearing it would increase white hostility toward them and reflect poorly on the race in the eyes of foreign visitors to the Fair. In 1899 Booker T. Washington (American, 1856 – 1915), then the house-master at thirty-one-year-old Hampton Institute in Virginia, invited Frances Benjamin Johnston (American, 1864 – 1952) to photograph the students there. It was Washington’s intent that Johnston should depict his assimilationist ideal of black progress. Johnston’s images were originally made for the Paris Exposition of 1900, “as part of an exhibition demonstrating contemporary life of the American Negro.”[36] (In 1966 the images were published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as The Hampton Album.) The first half dozen images in the book clearly set up its agenda through double-page pairings of the old way of life, as Washington saw it, and the present. For example, Johnston’s photographs contrast “The Old Folks at Home,” a sentimental view of an elderly couple seated at mealtime in their shack, walls covered in newspaper, with “A Hampton Graduate at home,” showing a well-dressed black family of five seated in the formal dining room of their two-story house. After the comparative lesson, black and Indian students are shown in the classroom or on field trips, always in crisp, orderly uniforms, going about the task of learning math, or English, or any number of more practical lessons. Washington later hired Johnston to create a similar visual record of Tuskegee Institute.

V.                 Conclusion

 

There is a need to reexamine the discourse on black representation through the phenomenon of the display. A more intimate consideration of the black people who worked in these fairs is also necessary. Little of the critical discourse on images of Africans and African Americans displayed in international expositions evaluates the effect that the exhibit had on them personally, or the effect that the “exhibitee” had on perpetuating the racist cultural stereotyping. However, it is certain that such images have had a massive impact upon European and American thought from the mid-nineteenth century well into the twentieth century, as the larger populace embraced racist theories based upon them.

In an attempt to analyze the experience of displayed persons, performance artist and critic Coco Fusco (American, active 1980s to the present) and her collaborator Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Mexican, b. 1955) “performed” in cities in a cage for two years from 1992-1994, in the work titled “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit.…” They traveled throughout Europe and the United States, setting themselves up on display in a cage in public squares and natural history museums.[37] The fictional biography that they created for the performance had them hailing from a lost tribe of Indians, “Guatinauis,” from the island “Guatinau” in the Gulf of Mexico. The project began as a response to the planned quincentenary celebrations in 1992 to commemorate Columbus’s "discovery of the Americas." What the artists discovered was that in the late twentieth century, an astonishing number of visitors did not even question their display; more than half believed that they were “the real thing.” Their performance also provided a sense of what the men and women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must have had to endure: poking, assaults, forced-feeding, being offered urine as beer, Europeans making “stereotypical jungle animal sounds,” questioning about sexual habits, getting sick while on display, etc.[38]

 

Another contemporary artist, Roshini Kempadoo (British, b. 1959), uses computer-based technology to address the colonial period and performance spectacle, revisiting historical instances from the perspective of the colonized. “I see my work coming from a documentary photographic tradition. I rework the photograph to produce what I call photo-constructions, which are generated by using a computer. I make use of photography’s unique power to play with notions of reality and representations,” Kempadoo writes.[39] Utilizing image and text, she integrates memory, observation, and historical events. In doing so she creates a dialogical construct about the human condition, past and present. Much of Kempadoo’s work is based on what Roy Ascott calls “technoetic” theory, according to which the technology of consciousness provides the substrate from which a new art emerges. [40] Kempadoo’s Sweetness and Light, a web-based project broken down into three sections: “the Great House people,” “the ‘Head People’,” and “the field gangs,” offers a visualization of Ascott’s observation. Kempadoo writes:

Conceptualising a ‘development’ who, how and by whom can always be seen within a historical framework. As my inevitable exploration of media/cyberspace, information networks and the uses of new technologies take hold I begin to look at analogies and comparisons. My thoughts and experiences take me to that of colonialism and the European expansionist past. More specifically, I begin to look at the continuous replication of structures, hierarchies and power bases. I choose to make an analogy—the colonialist experience as characterised by the plantation—whether it is sugar, cotton or cocoa...The work…explores some of these thoughts from the position of someone whose ancestry were [sic] the subject of the colonial experience.[41]

 

In an image from “The Head People,” the fair-skinned artist, in a waiter’s uniform of white shirt and tie, carries a computer on a silver serving tray, superimposed over an image of a balustrade, landscape, and nineteenth-century photograph of partially nude African women standing in ethnographic poses. The dress and poses suggest that these images were taken from a world fair tableau or display. Rulers mark the spaces between the images as a reminder of the ethnographic catalog. On the computer monitor is a photograph of a white man standing amidst of group of Africans in matching uniforms. Fig. 5. Drawing from a store of slave narratives, historical texts, and impressions from the period, Kempadoo chose the following text from William A. Green’s 1976 British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830 – 1865 to delineate the hierarchy of color within colonial structure:

Occupation, in turn, was a function of colour…

Domestic servants, artisans and drivers…were sharply differentiated in wealth, status, and privilege from the mass of field slaves.

The coloured population occupied an insecure middle ground between the dominant whites and the servile blacks, scorned by the former and despised by the latter.

 

An image from “the Great House people” of two white men and a partially nude black woman seated on one man’s lap makes explicit the sexual liaisons that were an integral part of the colonial relationship. The image is overlaid on one of heavy wooden plantation gates. The text on the photograph reinforces the equation of the black female body with the products of the plantation: “which ever way the eye is turned, it is regaled with an endless variety of pleasing prospects.” Fig. 6.

Throughout her work, Kempadoo criticizes colonial phenomena, ranging from racial hierarchies, to ethnology, to the teachings of Christian missionaries that have resulted in mythologies of race and the loss of cultural identity for many blacks. Her ability to manipulate images creates new associations that posit new interpretations of the past. By employing symbolic references to interrogate oppressive behavior towards black women, she challenges the [in]visibility of black women and reorients images of women by mixing the past and the present.