Photographs do not merely reflect social hierarchies but actively produce them

Evidence

In her important book American Archives, Shawn Michelle Smith argues that visual practices such as photographs have long served as a kind of technology of belonging, expressing the collective will at the same time that they create it. When they were first invented, photos were quickly enlisted ‘to establish social hierarchies anchored in new visual truths.’ From depictions of the physical attributes of criminals to the middle-class family shot and photos of lynchings, photographs were called upon to tell us something about gender, race, and class hierarchies. In so doing, they not only reflected what was imagined but also actively produced what they declared to exist. Photos helped an emerging middle class to affirm their place in the nineteenth century by marking who was white and middle class and who was criminal and racially other. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 157

In her important book American Archives, Shawn Michelle Smith argues that visual practices such as photographs have long served as a kind of technology of belonging, expressing the collective will at the same time that they create it. When they were first invented, photos were quickly enlisted ‘to establish social hierarchies anchored in new visual truths.’ From depictions of the physical attributes of criminals to the middle-class family shot and photos of lynchings, photographs were called upon to tell us something about gender, race, and class hierarchies. In so doing, they not only reflected what was imagined but also actively produced what they declared to exist. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 157

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Barthes’s and Sontag’s writing on photography as productive of meaning rather than merely documentary, and to the broader literature on visual culture and colonial/racial ordering. — connects to: Photography itself actively alters the world it records, not just passively captures it. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 1395; Breastfeeding photos function as community badges of belonging, not mere records. — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 451; Decontextualized photographs charge us through the gap between others’ importance and our indifference (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Defines photographs as ‘technology of belonging’ and ‘visual codes of national belonging,’ a framing concept for the chapter.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 157