Location: Thompson Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (map)
Tanya Sheehan
Assistant Professor of Art History, Rutgers State University
As Happy As Can Be: Photography, Race, and the Politics of Emotion
How and why have ideas about racial difference framed one of American portrait photography’s most entrenched conventions: the toothy smile? Scholars have consistently equated the emergence of the photographic smile with the popularization of the snapshot at the turn of the twentieth century. This lecture complicates that assumption by uncovering a proliferation of toothy grins decades earlier, in commercial photographs of newly emancipated slaves and of African American children eating watermelon. These racial caricatures set the stage for white Americans to comically appropriate the “black smile” and for African Americans to reinvent the meanings of the expression within their own vernacular photographs.
Free and open to the public. A question and answer session will follow the lecture. Please feel free to bring a lunch.