I do not recall how I first came to find her image, but I knew instantly that it was rare and important. It was stored in a box all by itself, and I would probably never have found it had I not worked in the museum ¹ that owned it. She was extraordinary -- a young black woman in France almost 140 years ago, naked and displayed and open and touching herself and reclining and smiling. The lace coverlet on which she is posed reminds me fondly, sweetly of my own grandmother's linens, while her frankness and sexuality remind me of everything that is not my grandmother. Through all of my research I have never seen another piece of 19th century photo erotica quite like this. The daguerreotype plate is of an impressive size, and I wonder what was so extraordinary about this model to merit such special treatment, since by the mid 1850s, when this was made, the popularity of daguerreotypes in France was waning in favor of simpler positive/negative processes. Moreover, I am intrigued by what could possibly be the connection between this photographer's model, perhaps a prostitute, a continent and a culture and a century and a half away, and me.

She is completely bare except for her head wrapped in the fashion of West Indian women. Ironically, despite her complete exposure, this small cultural marker is the only real clue as to who she might have been. She is positioned awkwardly, expressly for the act of being viewed, and we seem to see every inch of her except for her lower legs and feet. The focal point of the image, her open crotch, is coyly out of focus, yet with the explicit placement of her fingers she invites us to look, simultaneously avoiding the viewer with her gaze. Either in modesty or carnal complicity, the medium obscures her sex in murkiness.

French artists of the mid-to-late 19th century often used prostitutes as models, and frequently made nude photographic studies of them. Whether or not this woman was actually a prostitute, her compliantly amiable expression implies her active involvement in the making of this image. As a frankly, publicly, sexual explicit black woman, however, she exemplifies deviance, libidinous and otherwise, as defined by 19th century medical and social sciences, and her image is inevitably allied with the business of pleasure.² Because there are so few photographic images that survive of black women from the 1850s or before this daguerreotype is significant in its representative role. By virtue of the size and explicitness of the image, if nothing else, this daguerreotype is not just a "dirty" pornographic secret, but rather it signifies a crucial development in the visual depiction of African women.

According to Sander Gilman, medical scientists in the first decades of the 19th century, in particular J.J. Virey and Georges Cuvier in France, were reaching "scientific" conclusions relating the physical appearance of the black woman's genitalia to her so-called deviant sexual practices and proclivities. In a similar vein, character evaluations based upon the particularized studies of phrenology and physiognomy were highly popular during this period and are helpful comparisons from which to consider the photographic image of the black person and to examine how it defines character and communicates meaning. The basic principle behind both phrenology and physiognomy is that the character of a person can be determined by the configuration of his or her facial features or the shape of his or her head, an idea that dates back to the writings of Aristotle. The science of physiognomy, which focuses on the facial features, was first given visual realization in the drawings of Giovanni Battista della Porta in his De Humana Physiognomia in 1586, and the first racial anatomical studies were made in 1784. All of these pseudoscientific investigations informed the development of the anthropological "mugshot" aesthetic, successfully employed in photography as a means of categorizing racial types. Behavioral classifications, sexual and otherwise, based upon physical difference have continued to define how we evaluate character through every aspect of appearance and to determine how Africans are viewed within the larger society and, more importantly, how they perceive themselves.

As further example of the proliferation of the representations of black bodies and the popular attention they captured, in the first decades of the 19th century at least two different South African women, both referred to as "the Hottentot Venus," were widely exhibited throughout Europe as sexual curiosities, stripped naked and in cages, ostensibly as representatives of what their own culture prized as physical beauty. Europeans, while regarding them as freaks, nevertheless mimicked the exaggerated shape of their buttocks with the invention of the bustle which simulated their highly desireable silhouette. By the time this daguerreotype was made in the 1850s, the dissected genitalia and buttocks of the most famous of them, Saartjie Baartman, had been on exhibit in the Musee de l'Homme in Paris for nearly 40 years, where they remained on view until the mid 1980s.³ In fact, because of the extremely grotesque exploitation and mockery of her sexual difference, Baartman has become a contemporary matryr, a turning point of reference in the representation of African women.

Visual representations of blacks can be found throughout Western art, especially during periods of colonial expansion into Africa and the Orient, when the local color became the exotic subject of many a painter's brush. The popularity of erotica and the invention of photography in the mid-l9th century coincided with just such a period, and this convergence developed broadly to include in the various media all imaginable permutations strange to the notion of personal intimacy.

Someone recently described this model to me as "the black woman making sex with herself," which seemed to me at the time to be pretty accurate yet rather lonely and pathetic. I had spent months thinking about the picture and regarding her only as a nude; until I heard that comment I never thought of her masturbating. Yet the act of masturbation, simulated or real, suggests a power to please one's self that is not unlike the act of self-portraiture, which is similarly self-sufficient, highly personal and exploratory. When either of these activities is engaged in by a black woman for an audience, it becomes an empowering act for her because we are unaccustomed to black women defining their own sexual pleasure or their own images; the viewer relinquishes control.

The woman in this picture, as the object of our sexual delectation, represents a curious dichotomy; that is, her physical difference is denounced in the scientific and intellectual circles of the day as repellent and disgusting while the visual image of her clearly seeks to provoke a sensual and sexual reaction from its viewer. The now-you-see-it/now-you-don't, peep show-like quality of the daguerreotype process adds another element to the forbidden enjoyment. Although I doubt that her image was ever displayed or exhibited publicly, the daguerreotype is too large to be cradled in one's palm or slipped into the pocket of an overcoat. Like most erotica, she was probably made for an individual's private pleasure (maybe there was even mutual pleasure in the studio). Erotic pictures, as stimulants or icons of pleasure, tended to celebrate the participants and revel in mutually pleasurable activity. But this picture is unlike most 19th century erotica involving blacks because she is completing a sex act with herself; she does not engage with any partner other than the anonymous photographer and the viewer. Her aloneness may have been a result of the perceived "reality" of the photographic image; it is one thing to draw or paint a sex act, quite another to put two real persons together, in any sexual or racial combination, to make a photograph of it. Thus, the viewer can find her and the idea of her sexuality safely desireable without actually having to imagine touching her or what her response might be.

A woman photographer I know recently pointed out to me that women of color do not usually incorporate nudity in their self-portraiture, a fact that I had not realized. In a recent issue of Afterimage Lorraine O'Grady addresses this same issue, making the observation that, in her experience in public places, women of color are not inclined to bare their bodies, so that, for example, after swimming in a public pool the black women would be the only ones in the showers afterward keeping on their swimsuits.⁴ This was true of my own experience, yet it was so implicitly understood in my upbringing that I never thought about it extending beyond the puritanism of my family. She surmises, I think rightly, that this unspoken habit among black women suggests that, over the years (since emancipation), black women have been taught by mothers and grandmothers to protect the display of their bodies, a display which was for so long completely out of their control. Automatically, perhaps unconsciously, many of us still observe that lesson.

As the subject of an erotic photograph, the woman in the daguerreotype does not embarrass or titillate me in the personal way that an old photograph of an unidentified nude man that I once found in my mother's drawer did. At the same time, however, at the museum where I worked, I only felt comfortable talking about her as a subject of my interest in her ethnicity. Just once I opened one of the other boxes of 19th century erotica in that collection. The objects were stacked two layers deep and to sort through them casually would have revealed my true interest. An extraordinary thing about erotica is that virtually every serious amateur or professional photographer has created a piece of it, nearly every snapshot collection and many museum collections contain some, but, at least in the United States, it is illicit and forbidden and hidden away, and few people admit to looking at, let alone studying it. Moreover, unlike a photograph of a nude, which is thought to be classic and formal and idealized, the erotic image is naked and dark, animalistic and fleshly.

Yet I frequently take off my clothes for my photographs, and it was this simple affinity that compelled me to this daguerreotype. But when I do disrobe I am the photographer and the subject and I determine what is comfortable and what I want shown and what part of my body will communicate what part of my message. I can not recall specifically, but it seems to me that it was not very difficult to make my first nude photograph of myself. I knew that I would develop the film and make the prints, and if I were uncomfortable I would tuck it away and not show it. At the same time I felt terribly mature and far removed from what I had always been taught about such exposure. I believed that there was a fine artistic precedent for it; I was 17 or 18 years old and experimenting with the camera. It never occurred to me then that there was anything extraordinary about the fact that I was black and making such images. Yet when I think back on it, I realize that I had not seen a nude of another black woman when I began to photograph.

The woman in the daguerreotype does not look much older than I was then. Unlike her, I have never posed for another photographer--how uncomfortable it seemed, how false. I feared that I would feel manipulated and grotesque on a purely cosmetic level. Besides, and most importantly, I was suspicious of what anyone else could be endeavoring to say with my image. The interplay between the historical and the contemporary, between imposed representation and self- presentation, is fundamental to the difference between me and the anonymous woman in the daguerreotype. The discovery of this image provides me with a little more of my particular visual history, a base from which I can begin to define my likeness, as well as my sexuality, in the context of my humanity. In this way, I take control of my own representation, and revel in my own skin.

¹ The image discussed here, Unknown photographer, Nude Study of a Black Woman (84.XT.256), is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

² Gilman, Sander, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," in Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed., Race," Writing, and Difference, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1985, pp. 223 - 261. This essay gives a provocative discussion of the relationship between visual art and scientific theory in the nineteenth century, and elaborates on several of the related issues which I will discuss here.

³ Honour, Hugh, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV: From the American Revolution to World War I, Part 2: Black Models and White Myths, Houston, Menil Foundation (1989), pp.54-55.

⁴ O'Grady, Lorraine, "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity," Afterimage, Summer 1992, pp.14-15.