Sarah Lewis’s New Book Shows How Photography Taught Americans to “See” Race

In the epilogue to The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America,Sarah Lewis describes the foundations of racial hierarchy as “a photograph with no true negative.” It is an image without an index. She gives a clarifying example earlier in the book, while describing a ca. 1890 photograph showing the white painter Frank Duveneck and his class at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Duveneck is flanked by an idiosyncratic group of mostly white men and women, few of whom are gazing at the c