Hello!
Welcome to the eugenics podcast. I'm
Patrick Merricks.
I'm Marius Turda. Morning Marius.
How are you?
Good morning, Patrick. I'm
very well, thank you.
Wonderful stuff. So this episode we're
talking about
images and visions specifically we're
looking at
how photography and imagery has been
used in
the eugenics movement sort of,
internationally. So
begin by talking about Darwin, Marius. 
What would you like to say about Darwin?
You know as they say 'an image is worth a
thousand words',
and scientists were very astute
and keen to capitalize on the
development of photography at the end of
the 19th century.
We have here Charles Darwin's very
important book
The Expression of Emotions in Man and
Animals,
published in 1872. He was one of the
first
to use photography to illustrate how he
could capture
human emotions and animal emotions, so
it's one of the first scientific
works we have that made use of the
emerging art of photography
and that's extremely important because
it illustrates very clearly
that, you know, 'seeing is believing', and
people would be
more convinced of the scientific
argument
if presented with something they could
identify with, read very
quickly and understand better. That's why we start with his work.
One aspect of this
history is focus on criminality.
So how would photographs be used to identify criminals?
Well the Italian scientist Cesare Lombroso,
who's considered to be the father of
criminal anthropology
and criminology. He was one of
the
the scientists who made a great use
of photography to explain
his arguments, to put forward theories
that
degeneration can be seen, is expressed
physically on the face of the individual. And he
adorned his work with numerous
images and
and photos; and he was very successful in
continuing
on this tradition: physiognomy explains
diversity, difference, explains
the 'abnormality'
and shows the 'normality' of certain
individuals.
So there's one direction that went and
became very important in anthropology;
the other one was
picked up by Francis Galton, who too
was interested in criminals and other
social groups, but his work was in a way
trying to create the 'average
type', so he would combine various
photos and images of individuals to
create
a composite image, 'composite photography'.
And we have one example here so from
early on.
By the 1870s, with the work of Charles Darwin
and then
through the work of people like Lombroso
and Galton,
photography infuses strongly with
arguments and is
being used and abused by scientists
in order to put forward certain
arguments. And it's a much powerful
medium than the written words;
it's a much powerful way of convincing
people of
allegedly objective reality by showing
it
to them, although of course many of these
images and photos
were completely fabricated and
'composed', as we have the case of Francis
Galton.
So now we moved to the theme of
race. So Eugen Fischer.
What was his aim here?
Lombroso started using and photography
to,
in a way, explain certain racial
typologies:
you know, the 'race of criminals', of
'prostitutes', and so on so forth. So
equating in a way the category of race
with the category of
the social, the biological and the
social, but other racial anthropologists
were very keen to use photography to put
forward
their theories of how race is being
transmitted
from generation to generation; how can we
find racial traits;
how can we identify racial groups and
separate them.
And here's a very clear example of a
very important racial anthropologist,
Fischer, who went to German South West
Africa, today's Namibia, in 1908 ,
and he produced, he worked on the
'Rehoboth bastards',
as they were called. And he looked
basically a racial crossing;
tried to explain what happens if, you know, a person of the black and
white race, respectively,
produce offspring. And he basically was
trying to demonstrate
that racial traits are transmitted in
Mendelian fashion.
The way he put it: 'race is heredity'.
Speaking of heredity, now we move to
Norway.
So this is an interesting example;
this is someone's upbringing here.
Yeah, that's very
interesting to see how
the entire argument about
Mendelism, heredity, race and with that
the entire genealogy of
scientific traditions that were used to
to substantiate these claims;
were being taught and then were being
disseminated to the general public. And I
think this is a very evocative image.
We have the famous and infamous
eugenicist and racial
anthropologist Jon Mjøen
from Norway. He is actually doing that to
his own children;
he's educating them in the laws of
heredity, in
racial hygiene and explaining how
pedigree works.
So i find this image
extremely powerful, in terms of
how much they took that and, of
course, it served to illustrate that
actually it is not mere propaganda for
the general public, but something that
eugenicists
are keen to apply to their own families
and keen to explain and educate
their own children.
So now we move to 'negative' eugenics.
This is quite a famous,
certainly a famous case and famous
picture here.
But for those who don't know about
this what's
this story?
Well this is a story,
the oft quoted story of Carrie Buck
who was sterilized under the 1924 Racial
Integrity Law
in Virginia and prompting, of
course, Justice Holmes to say 'three
generations of imbeciles
are enough'. You have here a picture
with a mum,
Emma, so Carrie was sterilized: there
will not be another offspring,
allegedly believing that she was
'feeble-minded'.
And it's interesting to see how
in the visual culture
of eugenics, photography was used to
not only show what is to be 'desired'
and 'admired', but also what needs to be
corrected what needs to be 'fixed up'.
So they spend a lot of time showing
pedigrees of 'defective' families, as
they were called,
of criminals, of 'social misfits',
people with disabilities, in order to put
their message across, in order to infuse
the public with the danger of
degeneration and 'racial peril'.
So we have a very interesting
interplay here:
on the one hand, scientists
explained - allegedly very objectively -
what race is all about, what heredity is
all about,
and then how that is being transmitted
and applied practically
to social realities. And this is the image that - I think many of
us
know - symbolizes,
epitomizes the
the effects of sterilization programs
in America.
But also in America and
elsewhere there was 'positive' eugenics -
positive in quotations -;
not really sure if it was a good thing
but
what's happening in this image? The
babies don't look too happy!
No! This is a 'baby
contest', as they were called at the
time, so
you have this simultaneous
work of eugenicists to promote
images of racial fitness of white
families,
as the epitome of superior cultures and
civilization and
racial heredity, so
on the one hand they would be very
keen to showcase
images of 'defectives', but there was
always compensated by
a great deal of effort they put into
showcasing
successful families with healthy
children,
white families, of course.
So I always find it's very
fascinating how
images were used in a
dialogue,
all the time. On the one hand, you have
what can be called 'negative'
aspects of heredity, with emphasis on
women, the feeble-minded, minorities,
'defectives', and so on so forth; at the
same time,
the camera moves and captures the
success
of those who are actually 'abiding' by the
laws of heredity.
They have healthy offspring
and, in a way, the discussion is here of
course: the future of the race
rests with these families; with these
wonderful
white babies. So it's been extremely
powerful and very widely used across
United States and across the world: this
dialogue between
'negative' and 'positive' visual cultures of
eugenics.
Moving into the present day, I mean,
is this the image that we connect with
sort of
modern eugenics?
That's
another way of seeing
how
when the conversation occurs
about whether or not eugenics is back, in
what form is it back?
The images they use are very powerful
again.
So this is from 2016, The Spectator, a very
very well known and influential British
magazine published this image and
it in a way reconfigures the entire
discussion about genetic fitness
and about how eugenics is,
is a way of of going back to
discussions that we highlighted here:
about
what is desired, what is undesired,
how the babies represent the future
and how, in a way, we can
easily explain this to the general
public with a very powerful image.
And you have this on the cover
of The Spectator and that's something
that
requires a certain hermeneutics on
on behalf of the scholars, to dig deeper
into
the visual cultures, to dig deeper into
the way eugenicists
are popularizing their messages, past and
present,
through the use of images,
photos and through the use of photography. So
images create visions;
you have images that create eugenic
visions
about the family, about the nation, about
the race, about society, about the future!
Well, thanks, Marius, for providing us with
this window into the visual history of
eugenics.
It's very interesting. And
thanks to everyone for viewing. 
And once again Marius, thanks and see
you next time.
Thank you, Patrick. Until next time
