The Photographic Invention of Whiteness

Focusing on the creation of the concept of whiteness, this study links early photographic imagery to the development and exploitation that was common in the colonial Atlantic World of the mid- to late-nineteenth century.

Stephanie Polsky is a Senior Academic Program Manager at the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University.

Introduction: The Invention of a Photographic Whiteness  1. Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, and the Invention of Western Typologies  2. Mathew Brady's Civil War, Daguerreotypes, and the Technological Redefinition of White Nationalism  3. Ain't I a Human: Louis Agassiz's Slave Daguerreotypes and White Scientific Voyeurism  4. How the West was Won: America at the Great Exhibition of 1851  5. The Founding of the Great White World: The Arctic Daguerreotypes  6. White Aesthetics: Daguerreotypes in the Consolidation of Colonial Empires in West Africa  7. Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood  8. Material Agency: The Eames Office, Race, and US Cold War Photographic Aesthetics  9. The Apple and the Anthropocene: The Whiteness of Silicon Valley's Digital Ecologies Conclusion: Entrepreneurs, Clients, and Images: How Photography Inserted Whiteness into a Global Visual Economy