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Picture Imperfect : Photography and Eugenics, 1879-1940 by Anne Maxwell, Anne Maxwell is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Picture Imperfect : Photography and Eugenics, 1879-1940 about?

Documents and critically analyses the photographs that helped strengthen as well as bring down the Eugenics Movement. Using a large body of racial-type images and a variety of historical and archival sources, and concentrating mainly on developments in Britain, the USA and Nazi Germany, the author argues that photography, as the most powerful visual medium of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was vital to the Eugenics Movement's success -- not only did it allow eugenicists to identify the people with superior and inferior hereditary traits, but it helped publicise and lend scientific authority to eugenicists'racial theories. The author further argues for a strong connection between the racial-type photographs that eugenicists created and the photographic images produced by nineteenth-century anthropologists and prison authorities, and that the photographic works of contemporary liberal anthropologists played a significant role in the Eugenics Movement's downfall. Besides adding to our knowledge of photography's crucial role in helping to authorise and implement some of the most controversial social policies of modern times, this book makes a major contribution to o

Author

Anne Maxwell, Anne Maxwell

Publisher

Liverpool University Press

Published

2010

Language

EN

ISBN

9781837642083

Subjects

Science, Photography, History