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Comical associations between the science of photography and ideas about race were common on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades after the medium's invention. Some humorists observed that no bourgeois sitter would welcome the sight of his “negative” or blackened self; others illustrated the cosmetic character of race by depicting the effects of photographic chemicals on human skin. This essay takes these racial jokes seriously by reading them as historically specific social commentary. Beginning with an analysis of the first book of photographic humor, Cuthbert Bede's Photographic Pleasures (1855), it shows how this genre both reinforced and challenged popular conceptions of whiteness, blackness, and the photographic medium.
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Tanya Sheehan (2011) studied this question.
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