Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1879-1940

This book documents and critically analyses the photographs that helped to 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, this book explains how 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 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 how the photographic works of contemporary liberal anthropologists played a significant role in the eugenics movement's downfall. Besides adding