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Correcting Identities (TM)

Though this looks to be a sweet family moment, it is a staged scene. The photograph was used to spread racist visual humor so that the desired social perception of Black Americans continued to stay the same.

Correcting Identities.

Though this looks to be a sweet family moment, it is a staged scene. The photograph was used to spread racist visual humor so that the desired social perception of Black Americans continued to stay the same.

Description with this photograph: 1898 Photogravure by Knaffl & Bro., Knoxville, Tenn. featured in Leslie’s Weekly titled, “Weighing the Christmas Baby in Blackville.”
Authentic portrait of a family at home trying to weigh a baby with their makeshift scale. A woman at left pours some water from an old kettle which was heated in the stovepipe as a child has a bite to eat at center.

Photo taken by: the Knoxville Tennessee studio of Knaffl and Brother.

Published in the The Blackville Gallery, late 1890s.
These photographs were also enormously popular in the North. From 1897 to 1898, the nationally distributed,
New York–based illustrated magazine Leslie’s Weekly reproduced the photographs under the series title “The Blackville Gallery,” erroneously assuring its readership that they represented “characteristic scenes of negro life in the South.”
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More on Knaffl and Brother from the Google Cultural Institute:

“In the mid-1890s, capitalizing on the popularity of racist visual humor, the Knoxville, Tennessee, studio Knaffl and Brother published a series of approximately twenty photographs that functioned as a satirical inversion of the traditional genre scene.

Intended to deliver a moral or behavioral lesson, genre scenes depict scenes of everyday life, and those typically produced by the firm featured soft-focus cherubic white children engaged in virtuous acts.

In their new series, Knaffl and Brother played on white stereotypes of black Americans, populating these scenes of everyday life with ridiculous characters demonstrating not virtue but dishonesty, foolishness, savagery, hyper-sexuality, and laziness.

Several scenes, including the one shown here, reveal the photographers’ longing for the return of the Southern plantation. Wrapped in a swaddling cloth, the baby rests in a scale like those used for weighing cotton; perhaps Knaffl and Brother wished to communicate that the discipline of the cotton fields had served to impose beneficial order on people such as those surrounding the newborn.

Produced by a Tennessee studio in a racially segregated and violent South, these photographs were also enormously popular in the North. From 1897 to 1898, the nationally distributed,

New York–based illustrated magazine Leslie’s Weekly reproduced the photographs under the series title “The Blackville Gallery,” erroneously assuring its readership that they represented “characteristic scenes of negro life in the South.”

Although offensive to modern eyes, images such as this were not at all unusual in American popular culture—in both the Northern and Southern states—at the turn of the twentieth century.”

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