These "national, racial, and historical hallucinations"² that writer Maya Angelou described have been the ingrained perceptions of black women in the collective conscience of the United States since slavery. 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. Consequently, the history of the photographic image of the black female is defined primarily by the display of her body. Virtually always when she is depicted she is either a sexualized mythology or a neutered anomaly, defined by her sexuality or lack of it, but never innocent regarding it. The black female was the embodiment of sexuality, determined not by real customs but by the exoticism of her physical appearance, in other words, by her black body. Almost exclusively, black women were depicted either naked, generally in an ethnographic context; or as laborers, usually domestic, their social status playing a crucial role in the development of visual identity.

The "naked" black female incorporates both the ethnographic "National Geographic" and sexualized "Jezebel," or "bad-black-girl,"³ aesthetics, while the "neutered" black female includes representations of the "mammy" domestic servant rendered devoid of her sexuality. The latter also encompasses the "noble" black female, a descendant of the "noble savage" also represented as a non-sexual being. The Mammy and Aunt Jemima images are pervasive romanticizations of servitude in the South created of blacks for a predominantly white audience. A "hated figure in black history and perhaps with good reason,"⁴ the mammy figure was translated early into photographic representation. The relatively large physical size of the mammy, though not an imperative, is an important element in the representation that recalls the silhouette of the Hottentot,⁵ though with an aggressively desexualized component achieved, in part through costume and the particular Puritanism of American culture.⁶

In the nineteenth century, the "Jezebel" was an image aggressively denied visualization in the U.S. The black female image was neutralized or made nearly invisible within the dominant American culture. However, in the twentieth century the representation of the sexual black female was resurrected, both as an exotic "Other" and as a manifestation of racial pride. As such, there are particular instances where black women participated in or were in control of their images being rendered, as in the instance of dancer Maudelle Bass discussed below. The images of Bass raise the question of the subjects' participation in the image-making process.

Countless photographers, both famous and anonymous, have photographed black women. Open any monograph publication of an American twentieth century portrait photographer, or any fairly broad history of photography, and you will discover that, like televisions, nearly everybody's got one. The black skin was often a visual challenge, juxtaposed against a white background or a white body for maximum visual contrast and nothing more, or so it was often claimed. In the history of photography only a handful of books are devoted exclusively to the image of the black female: Eve Noire by Hans Leuenberger; Black Woman by Chester Higgins; Jungle Fever by Jean-Paul Goude; Black Ladies by Uwe Ommer; and I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America by Brian Lanker.⁷ These few books, marginal within the canon of photographic history, are nevertheless essential to understanding the photographic image of the black female body and how certain images are perpetuated. Although the fact of publication is an inherently problematic measure of validation given that black photographers and subjects are so rarely, if ever, published, it is especially indicative of the kinds of images that are perpetuated to evaluate what has been sanctioned, often repeatedly, to go into print.

African American photographers in the early part of the twentieth century including James VanDerZee (1886-1983) in Harlem, Addison Scurlock (1883 - 1964) in Washington, D.C., and Prentice Hall Polk (1898-1984) in Tuskeegee, Alabama, photographed black women frequently, as commercial customers as well as artistic subjects, and these images have been reproduced in several monographic publications.⁸ Roy DeCarava's 1955 publication The Sweet Flypaper of Life with text by Langston Hughes was the first best-selling book of images published of black people by black people that gained widespread recognition.⁹ Additionally, a few other Euro-American photographers published lengthy studies that feature a considerable number of images of black women, including Bruce Davidson's East 100^th Street, Aaron Siskind's Harlem Document, and Irving Penn's Worlds in a Small Room.¹⁰

Primarily but not exclusively using published images as a frame of reference, this discussion will give a general overview of photographs from the 1850s to the present that have attempted to define the black female body. Any theoretical discussion that arises from issues of representation is better left to theorists to advance.

The history of the photographic image of the black female body in the United States begins in the 1850s, with a model derived from European precedents. During this period, a number of significant developments in Western culture coincided with the invention of photography and further contributed to the way in which black females were regarded and ultimately 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 practically simultaneous, and each served to compartmentalize, objectify, and categorize any manifestations of difference from the European ideal.

The decades including and following the abolition of slavery in England (1807), France (1848), and the United States (1865) also saw the rapid colonial/imperial expansion of these nations into Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and South America. These aggressions and the drive to dominate the indigenous populations subsequently fostered the births of anthropology and ethnology and the study of the natural sciences, including physiognomy and phrenology, all of which existed only through the element of comparison to an "Other," which the colonies provided. The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland was founded in 1843; the naturalist Charles Darwin 's theory of evolution, The Origin of Species, was published in 1859; the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris was founded that same year; and the National Geographic Society debuted in the United States in 1888. The decades at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century saw a lucrative international market for ethnographic postcards and prints as colonial expansion and exploration increased in Africa, South America, and Asia. In this climate, "scientific" evaluations based on observable distinctions in skin color, facial structure and particularly genitalia contributed to difference inevitably being assigned a moral rank and consequently the association of blacks with moral deficiency, sexual deviance, and overall inferiority. The concentration of a stereotype of exaggerated sexuality in the female corresponded with the prevailing attitudes toward all women at that time, which would align them, and particularly their sexuality, with the weak and/or negative attributes of human character, traits which could be readily assessed through popular phrenological charts.

Around 1850, Dr. Robert W. Gibbes, a nationally recognized paleontologist, hired local daguerreotypist Joseph T. Zealy (1812 - 1893) to make photographic records of first and second generation slaves on plantations near Columbia, South Carolina, for Swiss-born Louis Agassiz (1807 - 1873), the natural scientist and zoologist from Harvard University. Agassiz had visited Gibbes's plantation for a month to observe the slaves and asked Gibbes to arrange for the photographs; he believed that photographic evidence could validate his theories on the plural origins of man and the racial inferiority of blacks.¹¹

Fifteen Zealy daguerreotypes survive of five men: Alfred, Fassena, Renty, Jem and Jack; and two women, Delia and Drana. Utilizing the frontal/profile, "mug shot" aesthetic that was favored in ethnographic photography, the photographer documented Gibbes's human property, in half- and full-length views, stripped to the waist or, in some of the men's cases, totally naked. The men were all African-born; Delia and Drana, the daughters of Renty and Jack, respectively, were "country-born"¹² in the United States. The mothers are nowhere in evidence and were probably, as was often the case under slavery, no longer with their families.

Both Delia and Drana are shown from the waist up in frontal and profile views showing their right sides. Their printed cotton dresses are not entirely removed for the "scientific" documentation, but pulled down around their waists to expose their breasts, which at most reveal them to be of different ages. The sight of their clothing unceremoniously pulled down to reveal these secondary sexual characteristics is more revealing and ultimately more exploitative of their bodies than their nudity. It is an unnatural, forced state emphasized by the inclusion of the clothing as a signifier of undress rather than of nudity. Unlike African tribal women photographed as ethnographic nudes whose daily wardrobes might consist of little clothing, these American slaves have had their clothing removed expressly for the photographs; the taking of the photograph reinforces the act of physically stripping them of their clothes. Consequently the display of flesh is neither sexual nor sensual, but there is a pornographic element to it: the pornography of their forced labor and of their inability to determine the display of their bodies. In the disavowal of the women's humanity and the refusal to allow them to control the representation of their bodies, their sexuality and sensuality becomes neutralized through the photographic act, and they are consequently represented as naked¹³ specimens lacking either identity or power.

The National Geographic Society was founded in Washington, D.C. in 1888, "for the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge."¹⁴ The first issue of the society's magazine was published in October 1888; however, it was not until the November 1896 issue that the first photograph of a bare-breasted native woman would appear, in an image titled Zulu Bride and Bridegroom. Made in the South African Republic, or Transvaal, it showed an African man and woman standing side by side, facing the camera, his right hand crossed in front of him, holding her left hand. They both look directly at the camera, without expression. In the accompanying article, the American author describes all the tribes of the Bantu or Kaffir race, alluding eventually to sexual practice: "These people are of a dark bronze hue, and have good athletic figures. They possess some excellent traits, but are horribly cruel when once they have smelled blood….Nothing but the phenomenal fecundity of the race has kept up its numbers."¹⁵ This identification of the subjects reinforces the notion that they are no more than the sum of their physical attributes and sexual proclivities, which the uncensored display of their bodies within the magazine, before an American, largely white audience,¹⁶ emphasizes. Standards of decency do not apply, especially to the woman's body whose nudity was more potentially shocking, because they have been reduced in the text to feral, fecund creatures, no different from wild animals, and the photograph is thus employed to reinforce this characterization.

This photograph established the "National Geographic" aesthetic that would introduce generations of American males and females to nudity, primitive style, an endorsement in the name of "truth" and science to casually display the female body, in this case the black female. Countless examples of bare-breasted or totally nude women of color have appeared in National Geographic. The more removed from mainstream American life the subject was, the more acceptable the nudity became. Thus, presenting unclothed African bodies to a Victorian audience in the United States could be condoned. As Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins' research indicates:

The 'nude' woman sits, stands, or lounges at the salient center of National Geographic photography of the non-Western world. Until the phenomenal growth of mass circulation pornography in the 1960s, the magazine was known as the only mass culture venue where Americans could see women's breasts. Part of the folklore of Euramerican men, stories about secret perusals of the magazine emerged time after time in our conversations with male National Geographic readers.…When white men tell these stories about covertly viewing black women's bodies, they are clearly not recounting a story about a simple encounter with the facts of human anatomy or customs; they are (perhaps unsuspectingly) confessing a highly charged-but socially approved-experience in this dangerous territory of projected, forbidden desire and guilt."¹⁷

The practice of printing photographs of unclothed native women in National Geographic did not occur, however, with any regularity until 1903, when a photograph of two bare-breasted Filipino women was published. Only then, seven years after a black woman was thus depicted, did the decision to publish such images generate a moral debate among the editors.¹⁸

Not all black women were photographed without their consent. The degree to which black women participated in the image-making process must also be evaluated. Maudelle Bass (1908 - 1989) was a Georgia-born dancer from the 1930s through the 1950s and a professional artist's model. She was the first black dancer to study modern dance with choreographer Lester Horton in Los Angeles and danced in Agnes DeMille's "Black Ritual" in 1940, choreographed for Ballet Theatre with an all-Negro cast, where she was photographed in publicity and performance shots by Carl Van Vechten (1880 - 1964). She also appeared with dancer and choreographer Pearl Primus in the 1950s. In 1939 Bass posed for painter Diego Rivera (1886 - 1957) and for photographers Johann Hagemeyer (1884 - 1962) and Edward Weston (1886 - 1958). In August of that year Rivera began a series of nude paintings of Bass, whom he is said to have considered "the embodiment of ideal beauty and sensuality."¹⁹ In his painting titled Dancer in Repose, Bass is depicted seated on a low stool, her broad hips anchoring the composition, with her arms upraised and tucked behind her head, in the standard pose that emphasizes the line of the breast.

In 1931, Weston wrote in his journal, "If I had a nude body to work with-a Negress, a black fat Negress, then I could have worked! This desire keeps popping into my mind."²⁰ Eight years later he found Bass, who did not exactly adhere to his corpulent ideal, yet she was the only black woman whom Weston would thus photograph. Bass posed for at least eighteen photographs with Weston in Carmel, California, during July and August 1939, where she had come to perform in a series of African dances.²¹ The sittings, which took place at Weston's father-in-law's home as well as on the sand dunes at Oceano, were the first nudes that Weston made in this setting, Carmel Highlands, where he had recently settled with his new wife Charis Wilson. Included were two conventional clothed portraits, one of which was published in U.S. Camera in 1941.²² Maudelle is shown seated on the grass against a flowered bush, her legs folded to the side, wearing a polka-dotted dress.

The nudes that Weston made of Bass took place in various settings.²³ Bass is photographed in the same setting as above against the flowers, unclothed, lying with her right arm upraised over her head. Both Bass and the setting are unidealized, her mottled and creased skin looking aged and tired against the tangle of foliage, although she was only thirty-one when the photographs were made. Her heavy breasts sag from their own weight. Bass was also photographed from numerous angles seated on the garden steps. In another view, Bass is photographed kneeling on the grass against a forest of ferns, her arms upraised as if in surrender, looking directly at the camera. Her direct engagement is disarming and does not occur with any other models in Weston's nude studies.

"The response to this photograph reveals how sensibilities and taste can change over time. Fifty years ago this image was exhibited without a murmur of protest apparently at the Museum of Modern Art and toured internationally in the World of Weston, an exhibition sponsored by the State Department," notes Weston scholar Amy Conger. "This photograph of a black woman as if in a jungle with hands raised, surrendering, is often found offensive today by people who are sensitive to exploitation."²⁴ An image of "Maudelle on Dunes" was also exhibited in World of Weston. Conger wrote: "Weston was primarily interested in the contrast between the background and her black and shiny skin."²⁵ The dunes images are the only ones that approximate such formal concerns of skin contrasted with sand or even hint at Bass' training as a dancer.

Shortly thereafter, Bass wrote to Weston from her home in San Francisco, stating that she was "wild with delight" when she saw some of the proofs, three of which she planned to use "for advertising."²⁶ It is not clear which three images she selected, nor if they were ever used, but it is significant to know that she was not only pleased with the results but also planned to use them to represent herself when promoting her dance. What these images also reveal, however, is Weston's discomfort with her black body and inability to idealize and "modernize" her as he had so successfully done with Charis, Tina Modotti, and a number of other white women who had modeled nude for him. Except for the photographs made on the dunes, Bass is not posed to highlight her dancer's form; she is not formalized into angles and curves, nor is she flattered by light and shadow. Interestingly, the nudes of Maudelle are among the only ones in Weston's oeuvre in which the model's head and face are visible and she engages the camera directly. Weston has portrayed her as tired and marked, unidealized and ultimately different from the natural ideal that he promoted in his other work.

Around the same time Hagemeyer, a Carmel-based portrait photographer originally from Amsterdam and a friend of Weston's, also photographed Bass. Hagemeyer, who made his living photographing celebrities and artists that passed through Carmel, produced a sensitive head-and-shoulders portrait study of the artist. Maudelle is photographed in close-up, her hand gently touching her cheek while her glassy eyes are fixed with a faraway gaze. Her lined face, furrowed brow, and hands cause her to look older than her years. Photographed from below with strong directional lighting, she is monumentalized, the gravity of her expression matching the serious consideration paid to her as a subject. As an expressive artist in another medium, she is treated as a portrait study; in short, Hagemeyer renders her as a peer.

In 1940 Cedric Gibbons, the Academy AwardÒ -winning head of art direction for the Metro Goldwyn Mayer film studio, inquired to Weston about obtaining prints of the Bass nudes, "having heard that he had photographed 'that black dancer friend of [Miguel] Covarrubias.'"²⁷ This suggests that the images of Bass were known and collected in artistic circles. Seven years later photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo (b. 1902) photographed Bass in Mexico, titling the image he made and published of her Espejo Negro, or "Black Mirror."²⁸ In the photograph, Bass sits on a crumpled cloth against a wall in bright sunlight. "…[I]nspired by the myth of Tezcatlipoca, Lord of the Smoking Mirror," this image of Bass' glistening, almost polished black skin is meant to reflect the world-"the symbol of the espejo humeante (Smoking mirror)"-just as her black body, like that of the Sable Venus, is meant to symbolize "a Black Eve, mother of humanity."²⁹

Bass was exceptional in that she is the only black female model that appears with some frequency in the work of so many Euro-American artists from this period. Not merely a model, she had a successful artistic career in her own right so would have surely been sympathetic to-and cognizant of-a fellow artist in another medium. Given her status as an artist and her response to the Weston images it is fair to say that Bass was at least an active contributor to those images that survive of her. Her legacy in photographs provides a glimpse into a period of this century in which one black female body came to represent an ideal, a fantasy, a stereotype, and ultimately, herself.

The Kamoinge³⁰ Workshop, an association of black photographers, was founded in 1963. Roy DeCarava was the group's mentor and first president.³¹ The often-echoed statement "I had never seen any positive images of black people" was the impetus behind their organization-they wanted to picture black people more fully and positively than they previously had been. In 1965 - 66, Kamoinge even mounted an exhibition at the Market Place Gallery in Harlem titled "The Negro Woman."³² Developing during a crucial moment within the black art movement almost ten years later, Joe Crawford, Beuford Smith (b. 1939), and Joe Walker founded The Black Photographer's Annual, which offered African American photographers an opportunity to combat media stereotypes in print.³³ Many of the published works focused on the black female body, particularly with regard to hairstyle and dress that during the 1960s had become signifiers of pride and identity. The Annual's legacy was its ability to make visible the multiple experiences of black peoples in the African Diaspora. It also encouraged black photographers to locate the black body in an art context.

Published in 1970, Chester Higgins' (b. 1946) publication Black Woman with text by Harold McDougall was the first book devoted exclusively to celebrating the black woman in all of her aspects. Taken as a whole, the book encompasses a range of representations with an emphasis on but not exclusively women wearing Afro hairstyles. Higgins' images ranged from candid street photography to a more contemplative nude study. "As Chester puts it, these women are of a new breed-a Black Breed," writes McDougall in the introduction. "A breed that has racial pride in being black, and human pride in being a woman. At the same time."³⁴ McDougall based his text, which accompanies each image as a first-person quotation, on conversations with women in Harlem. In section one, "Black Sisters into the Black Thing," a portrait of a young black woman sitting on the beach in a two-piece swimsuit was accompanied by the text: "Black women have to start doing things that are more daring as far as their bodies are concerned. Because we just happen to have much more beautiful bodies."³⁵ Sporting a short Afro, the woman appears at ease in her mostly exposed, slender body, soaking up the sun. The image and text are empowering, validating not only the black woman's beauty, but more importantly her awareness of it.

In the section titled "Old Souls," Higgins presents an older, heavier black woman as a smiling, warm presence, hand on hip. In the context of the other women in the book, her strength and bearing are at once formidable yet open, embracing her corporeality while subverting stereotypes associated with it. While this "paean of praise to the Black Woman," as McDougall described it, is a triumphant affirmation of black women as complex human beings, engaged in a myriad of activities, and represented in every shape, size, age, and skin tone, it also presents McDougall and Higgins' "positions as black men"³⁶ vis-à-vis black women. Nevertheless, the voice that McDougall attaches to Higgins' subjects has an authenticity that rings true, demanding a reassessment of the black woman's image in photographs.

A permutation of the celebration of black beauty is the work of French photographer and illustrator Jean Paul Goude (b. 1940).³⁷ His 1980 book Jungle Fever is a highly personal, obsessive journal about his feverish love of non-white people, from Vietnamese to American Indians but especially black American females. However personal, "the 'private' vision emerges via a public preconscious that is heavily invested with the historical accretions of representations,"³⁸ writes Francette Pacteau, referents that Goude fully acknowledges and exploits. Concluding his text by stating:

As a European, let me pause here to say, I have the advantage of being able to describe my romantic conception of blackness from a white point of view. My conception is free of all social connotations because I am European. Americans cannot dissociate themselves from the social implications of their artistic evaluation of black people….So, I really find myself in a strange situation, because on the one hand liberals are embarrassed by my attitude, while racists ironically misinterpret me as one of them. And the blacks? I'm not sure; I think my conception may appeal to some with a sensibility similar to mine. I'm not sure….I am just letting my emotions do the work…³⁹

Goude's statement that he relies on emotions to guide his work subverts the standard assumption that Europeans are intellectual while non-whites are instinctual. Half of the six chapters are dedicated to individual black women, while two of the other three contain photographs of nude black women worth displaying yet possibly not quite chapter-worthy. The text guides the reader chronologically through his boyhood and each of his many ethno-romantic fixations. Along the way there was Radiah, from Mobile, Alabama, whom Goude wanted to improve upon to create a "giant African beauty."⁴⁰ For her, Goude invented removable African tribal scarification marks.

His photograph of Radiah in the act of either removing or applying the marks made the newspapers and appeared in the December 1970 issue of the American men's magazine, Esquire. Goude described them by stating: "They emphasize the savage aesthetics of the face,"⁴¹ thus equating the American Radiah with at best an "uncivilized" person and at worst an animal. On the opposite page is a photograph of a nude Radiah lying on the floor of a studio wearing a headwrap made from a dishcloth. Goude conflates the nude, idle black female body with a symbol, enveloping her head, of domestic labor usually associated with the image of the mammy,⁴² thus conjuring up the image of the house servant, of the black woman in the kitchen. Here, however, she is visualized in the same body as the sexually available black female capitulating to a fantasy of the Jezebel.⁴³ The beaded ornamentation added to the dishcloth and the braids of hair barely visible underneath further emphasize her otherwise airbrushed ethnicity.

Next came Toukie Smith, a model whom Goude met through Radiah. He began to photograph her and draw her nude, focusing on her hips and buttocks, cutting up the pictures and reassembling them to exaggerate her already voluptuous features.⁴⁴ Literally dehumanizing her and reducing her to body parts, Goude made first a life-size and eventually a twelve-inch cast of her nude body. Of his cast model of Toukie he wrote, "I had always admired black women's backsides, the ones who look like racehorses. Toukie's backside was voluptuous enough, but nowhere near a racehorse's ass, so I gave her one. There she was, my dream come true, in living color…I saw her as this primitive voluptuous girl-horse."⁴⁵ Included are photographs of the artist and model in the studio during the casting, presumably to document the process but also to suggest her complicity in the spectacle that would transform her, like Radiah, into an animal-like creature. Goude transformed her black-bodied reality into his white-minded ideal, or, as Pacteau has observed: "Confronted with an excess of difference, the white male subject will excel at defensive ingenuity, making her blackness becoming to his light, brightening up his day with her night."⁴⁶ A two-page photograph of a white male hand with a smudge of black literally under its thumb, holding the miniature replica of the nude black female who "hated what [Goude] did…[s]he did not share [his] views"⁴⁷ is the most explicit visual representation of Goude's intentions.

Brian Lanker (b. 1947) was a Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist and contract photographer for Sports Illustrated magazine when he conceived of the project to photograph black women who had changed the course of history in the United States. I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America became a best-selling book, calendar, and a successful traveling exhibition. Its mission was to uplift, to celebrate women who had accomplished something noteworthy in their lives and to share their stories and images with the masses, which it accomplished. The seventy-five portraits range from headshots to full standing, from seamless studio backdrops to forest perches. They are extraordinary women to be sure, each deserving of her own book, but life accomplishments are difficult, if not impossible, to convey photographically.

Among the subjects there are award-winning performers and writers, a choral director, two MacArthur fellows, three Pulitzer Prize winners, an Emmy-winning journalist, politicians, grassroots civil rights activists, educators, an architect, a curator, newspaper publishers, a bishop, sports champions, a child care provider, a neurosurgeon, heads of non-profit organizations, a chef, a storyteller and one visual artist. The two least educated or celebrated subjects are midwives, one of whom, depicted in a perforated shower cap and fur collar, is revealed to be the childhood mammy of the photographer's white wife, seemingly included as a personal, posthumous tribute. ⁴⁸

As Maya Angelou points out in her foreword, the women literally share a "sameness of gaze"⁴⁹ that is ultimately problematic. Only ten of the women even smile; the rest are so possessed with the solemnity of their blackness it is oppressively palpable. Taken as a whole, they are noble savages gone to extreme, none of them, in the photographic space, possessed of either complexity or corporeality that would identify her as a woman, let alone a sexual being. Indeed, their bodies cease to exist altogether: only eleven of the women either wear short sleeves or go sleeveless, the facts of their flesh carefully and decorously hidden amidst the folds and shadows. They are aggressively covered up, their physicality and sexuality sublimated to and exclusive of their achievements, which are articulated in a page of text facing each image. Two fair-skinned women tentatively reveal their décolletage,⁵⁰ yet only dancer Katherine Dunham speaks directly about her publicly sexual image, and then refutes it, stating: "I never thought of myself as sexy. I didn't think of what we were doing onstage as sexy, because I could always feel and know that there was something solid, that authentic feeling under it.".⁵¹

The nude black female body appears only once, as an out-of-focus sculpture in the foreground of artist Elizabeth Catlett's (b. 1915) portrait as her bespectacled head emerges from behind it. She states: "I was working always with the black theme. I did a whole series on black women.⁵² Nobody was doing black women. I am a black woman. That's what I know most about."⁵³ Catlett's own images of black women tend toward the full-bodied and sensuous; her sculptures celebrate the body. Ultimately, her statement highlights the missing element within the images. The photographs are inextricably examples of being looked at and interpreted by an outsider, not of picturing one's self. While the women's words are provided to carry the authenticity of narrative, their visual images are still the creation of someone else, a white man determined not to repeat any stereotypes in his depictions and in the process nevertheless reinforcing one of the neutered black female denied her sexuality. The prima ballerina-turned-painter Janet Collins states: "When you get to be an exceptional black, you don't belong to the white and you don't belong to the black. You are too good for the black and you will always be black to the white."⁵⁴ Likewise, if you are a black woman noted for her sexuality, you are unworthy of praise.

In American culture there is, ironically, a taboo for black people, especially women, against reveling in their bodies, in enjoying and expressing the sexuality that has traditionally defined them. Part of this is self-imposed, stemming from the inability, during slavery, for black women to control their bodies in any way, especially with regard to their sexuality. Often this persistent denial endures as a lesson passed down from mothers and grandmothers, an admonishment steeped in oral history -- though not always with a satisfying explanation -- to keep it covered and to keep them closed.

As K. Sue Jewell has pointed out, "one of the most damaging and adverse effects of these images is that they are portrayed with various qualities that are negatively defined by the privileged who have constructed them; yet many of the same attributes are defined positively by African American women."⁵⁵ Recent studies have shown that African American teenage girls have a more positive opinion of their bodies than their white counterparts,⁵⁶ a reality as significant as it is surprising. Clearly, positive reinforcement regarding self-image is being learned on some level. Yet the negative black female image in the collective consciousness persists.

When African American R&B/pop singer Toni Braxton appeared on the June/July 1997 cover of VIBE magazine completely naked, the image set off a spark within African American communities.⁵⁷ In the article Braxton stated, "I wear provocative clothes because they make me feel sexy…If an artist like Madonna is wearing her booty hanging out, she's considered a genius. But if a black person does it, we're considered skank whores or sluts….Black girls have to learn not to be afraid of fashion. As far as wearing revealing clothes, I gotta wear them now before my booty gets flat."⁵⁸ While the sexual black female is no surprise in mainstream culture, within the black community it can be perceived as unnecessary, dirty, and "acting white."⁵⁹ The controversy generated by Braxton's choice is a telling reminder of the topicality of this discussion.

The images discussed above are among the most accessible images of black women in photographic history, yet they are repeatedly reproduced without discussion of the subject's desire or role in the imagemaking process. The simple fact of the matter is that in most cases, that information is simply not known, and will forever be left up to conjecture. Contemporary historians and theorists such as Deborah Willis, Coco Fusco, Kellie Jones, Judith Williamson, and Lisa Collins have begun to address the image of the black female body in all of its complexity. Evaluating the history of the photographic image of black women is a crucial beginning for intelligent art and analysis.

Given the legacy of images created of black women, it is an especially complex task for contemporary black women to define their own image, one that necessarily both incorporates and subverts the stereotypes, myths, facts, and fantasies that have preceded them. Black female photographic artists including Clarissa Sligh, Renée Cox, Roshini Kempadoo, Carrie Mae Weems, Joy Gregory, Lorna Simpson, Maxine Walker, and Cynthia Wiggins have already begun to do so with a breathtaking range of imagemaking. Some write an autobiography of the body, using their own likenesses and those of other black women to explore shared experiences and perceptions, including both universal injustices against and celebrations of the black female body. It is to all of the aforementioned artists and writers that the task falls to incorporate visual legacies with contemporary realities in order to present images of real black women who are no longer acted upon, but who possess, in one body, both active voice and visual self-presentation.

1. Maya Angelou, "They Came to Stay," in Brian Lanker, I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America, New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang (1989), pp. 8-9.

2. Ibid., p. 9.

3. K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy, London: Routledge (1993), pp. 36 - 37.

4. Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, New York: The Dial Press (1978), p. 21.

5. Specifically it recalls Saartjie, or Sarah, Baartman, a South African Bush- or San woman who was exhibited in Europe, first in London and then Paris, from 1810 to 1815, as the so-called "Hottentot Venus."

6. Jewell, p. 40: "The unusually large buttocks and embellished breasts place mammy outside the sphere of sexual desirability and into the realm of maternal nurturance."

7. Hans Leuenberger, Eve Noire, Munich: Hanns Reich Verlag, 1966; Chester Higgins, Black Woman, text by Harold McDougall, New York: The McCall Publishing Company, 1970; Jean Paul Goude, Jungle Fever, New York: Xavier Moreau, Inc., 1981; Uwe Ommer, Black Ladies, text and foreword by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Paris: Editions du Jaguar, 1986; volume 2 with text by Calixthe Beyala published by Taschen America in 1996; and Brian Lanker, I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America, New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1989. Chester Higgins is African American; all of the other photographers are either European or Euro-American. At least two forthcoming books will further the discussion: Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body in Photography, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999; from which portions of this essay are excerpted; and a forthcoming study by Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson.

8. There are numerous books on VanDerZee's photograph. See, for example, Deborah Willis and Rodger C. Birt, VanDerZee: Photographer 1886-1983, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, 1993; also The Historic Photographs of Addison N. Scurlock, Washington, D.C.: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1976; and P.H. Polk: Photographs.

9. Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995; and Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1988 (reprint). "The initial publication…three thousand clothbound and twenty-two thousand paperbound copies-was soon supplemented by a second printing of ten thousand copies." See Peter Galassi, Introduction, Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective, New York: The Museum of Modern Art (1996), p. 22.

10. Bruce Davidson (b. 1933) , East 100^th Street, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970. Davidson's book featured 121 photographs that he made over a two-year period of blacks and Latinos in an East Harlem neighborhood that was not his own. Thirty-four of the portraits are of black women or girls; of those, ten are shown on or in bed: three are naked and another three are in bed with men; Aaron Siskind (1903 - 1991), Harlem Document: Photographs 1932-1940, Providence, Rhode Island: Matrix Publications, Inc., 1981. Davidson's photographic project was undertaken more than thirty years after Aaron Siskind made the photographs included in this book, but Davidson's images were published eleven years earlier. Siskind's book included accompanying text from the Federal Writers Project, oral histories gathered by Ralph Ellison, Frank Byrd, Dorothy West, and Vivian Morris, and a foreword by black photographer Gordon Parks, who called the book "a mirror of [his] own past," (foreword, p. 5); Irving Penn, Worlds in a Small Room, New York: The Viking Press, 1974. The American Penn's publication included images of African women.

11. For more in-depth discussions of Agassiz and the commission of these images, see Brian Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science: The Slave Daguerreotypes of Louis Agassiz," American Art 9:2 (Summer 1995); Elinor Reichlin, "Faces of Slavery," American Heritage 28 (1977), pp. 4-5; and Melissa Banta and Curtis M. Hinsley, "Biological Anthropology: Evolution from Daguerreotype to Satellite," From Site to Sight: Anthropology, Photography, and the Power of Imagery, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press (1986), pp. 56-71. Lisa Gail Collins, "Historic Retrievals: Confronting Visual Evidence and the Documentation of Truth," Chicago Art Journal, vol. 8, no. 1 (Chicago: Department of Art and the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, Spring 1998).

12. Designation from label attached to the daguerreotype.

13. For standard art historical discussions of naked versus nude, see John Berger, Ways of Seeing: A Book, London: British Broadcasting Corporation; New York: Penguin, 1977, 1972; and Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1956.

14. C.D.B. Bryan, The National Geographic Society: 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery, New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. (1987), p. 24.

15. George F. Becker, "The Witwatersrand and the Revolt of the Uitlanders," National Geographic, Vol. VII, no. 11 (November 1896), p. 349.

16. Whites were not the only audience for the periodical. For some African Americans, the black female bodies in National Geographic served another purpose. As comedian Richard Pryor used to joke, National Geographic was the black man's Playboy, which makes clear that whites were not the only audience for these images. See Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press (1993), p. 172.

17. Ibid., p. 172.

18. Ibid., pp. 89, 169.

19. Laurance P. Hurlburt, "Diego Rivera (1886 - 1957): A Chronology of His Art, Life and Times," in Cynthia Newman Helms, ed., Diego Rivera: A Retrospective, New York and London: Founders Society Detroit Institute of Arts in Association with W.W. Norton & Company (1986), pp. 96, 98.

20. Nancy Newhall, ed., Edward Weston, The Daybooks of Edward Weston, volume II, New York: Horizon Press in collaboration with the George Eastman House, Rochester (1966), p. 206.

21. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Weston's Westons: Portraits and Nudes, Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, (1989), no page number.

22. U.S. Camera 1941, volume II, "This Year's Photography," edited by T.J. Maloney, pictures judged by Edward Steichen, New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce (1941), p. 157. She is wrongly identified as "Mandelle." No description of the image or comment by the photographer is given in the index.

23. The prints reproduced here are project prints from around 1950. They were part of a mock-up for an unpublished book by Nancy Newhall of Weston's nudes. Along with these, there were to be two other images of Bass in that collection. See Amy Conger, Edward Weston, Photographs from the Collection of the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, the University of Arizona (1992), figure 1480.

24. Ibid., figure 1476.

25. Ibid., figure 1481.

26. Letter from Maudelle Bass to Edward Weston, 1 September 1939, Edward Weston Archives, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. My thanks to Amy Rule for bringing the letter to my attention.

27. Covarrubias had designed sets for Baker's Le Revue Nègre. See Bryan Hammond et al., Josephine, London: Bulfinch Press (1988), p. 30. Conger, figure 1475.

28. Also published as La Negra, 1959.

29. Nissan N. Perez, "Visions of the Imaginary, Dreams of the Intangible," in Revelaciones: The Art of Manuel Alvarez Bravo, San Diego, Calif.: Museum of Photographic Arts (1990), p. 23.

30. Meaning "a group of people working together" in Kikuya (an East African language), from http://www.culturefront.org/culturefront/magazine/98/winter/article.14.html, cited on 3 July 1998.

31. While there is some dispute among former members regarding this attribution, every published source on Kamoinge credits DeCarava as its director. Shawn Walker remembered how his involvement came about: "It was Lou [Draper] that suggested Roy as a mentor in helping us form the workshop….The workshop adopted the name 'Kamoinge'…Roy DeCarava was the president." Shawn Walker, "Preserving our History: The Kamoinge Workshop and Beyond," Ten.8, no. 24 (circa 1984), p. 24.

32. Ibid.

33. The first edition was published in 1973; four volumes were published intermittently until 1980, when publication ceased.

34. Harold McDougall, Introduction, Higgins 1970, not paginated.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. Jean-Paul Goude declined to give permission for the use of his photographs.

38. Francette Pacteau, The Symptom of Beauty, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (1994) p. 143.

39. Goude, p. 107.

40. Ibid., p. 31.

41. Ibid., p. 32.

42. Jewell, p. 39.

43. Ibid., pp. 46 - 47.

44. Goude, p. 40.

45. Ibid., p. 41.

46. Pacteau, p. 126.

47. Goude, p. 41.

48. Lanker, preface, p. 10. Lanker describes subject Priscilla Williams as "a remarkable human being who had helped in my wife's upbringing," an interesting inclusion in light of subject and novelist Toni Morrison's text on page 32 that accompanies her photograph: "I hate ideological whiteness. I hate when people come into my presence and become white. I'd just been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a man whom I used to read in anthologies came up to me and said, 'Hello, welcome to the Academy.' Then his third sentence was about his splendid black housekeeper. This little code saying, 'I like black people or I know one,' is humiliating for me-and should have been for him."

49. Angelou, p. 9.

50. Former model and newspaper publisher Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell and businesswoman Jewell Jackson McCabe.

51. Lanker, p. 28.

52. Catlett was awarded a Julius Rosenwald fellowship in 1946 to create work honoring black women. The series, "The Black Woman in America," consisted of fourteen linoleum cuts. See The Black Woman in America Prints by Elizabeth Catlett, exhibition catalogue, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois: Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois (1993), not paginated.

53. Lanker, p. 122.

54. Lanker, p. 19.

55. Jewell, p. 46.

56. Gail Elizabeth Wyatt, Stolen Women: Reclaiming Our Sexuality, Taking Back Our Lives, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (1997), p. 95.

57. See, for example, Karen Grigsby Bates, "Let's Not Indulge Society's 'Chocolate' Fantasies Media: Black women posing nude feed an image of the wanton hussy that so many others have worked to disavow," Metro, Op Ed Desk, Los Angeles Times Home Edition (Los Angeles: The Times Mirror Company, September 3, 1997), p. B-7; Bill Maxwell, "Nude Toni Braxton Ignites A Debate Over Black Erotica," Lifestyles, New York Times Special Features, reprinted in Buffalo News, City (July 2, 1997), p. D1; Donna Britt, "Beauty-parlor sense shuns temptations," The Dallas Morning News, Home Final Today (June 18, 1997), p. 8C; Michel Marriott , "Black Erotica Defies Cultural Tradition," New York Times, Arts & Living, reprinted in The Plain Dealer Final (Cleveland, Ohio: The Plain Dealer, Inc., June 15, 1997), p. 2J.

58. Quoted in Michael A. Gonzales, "Toni's Secret," VIBE, volume 5, no. 5 (New York: VIBE Ventures, June/July 1997), p. 92.

59. This notion is reiterated in Jackie Goldsby, "Queen for 307 Days: Looking B(l)ack at Vanessa Williams and the Sex Wars," in McKinley, Catherine, and L. Joyce DeLaney, eds., Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing, New York: Anchor Books (1995), pp. 165 - 188.