NE STUD 144 Study Guide - Final Guide: Eugenics, Daguerreotype, Kodak
15 Jan 2017
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Document Summary
In eugenics the family became central to the discursive production of race and racial hierarchies, as the family album became of the the social documents through which heredity was charted. Photographs of children became powerful familial records through which racial hierarchies could be reproduced and maintained. The writer poses questions to the reader, which they later address in organized categories. Daguerreotype enabled middle class to mimic the practices of the wealthy (painted portraits on their walls) Function of the photograph at this time=an heirloom. Mid-nineteenth century: postmortem pictures of babies; images of dead bodies could supposedly be preserved for posterity. Individual images of dead babies may have generated anxiety about white racial death, transforming private grief into a public mandate to reproduce. Documentation of the family and of individual members within the family grew as photographic technologies dramatically expanded the potential for photographic consumption. Negative/positive process enables unlimited copying of any given image: images are now reproducible.
