Mechanical Reproduction: The Photograph and the Child inThe Crisisand theBrownies’ Book

Abstract

This article considers the photographic portraits of children reprinted in The Crisis’s “Children's Numbers” and the Brownies’ Book. While the magazines use these images to further their uplift agenda, they also present a sophisticated commentary on the photographic form. The publications present an understanding of the camera as an instrument for interpreting and shaping reality rather than as a truth-telling device. By suggesting parallels between the photographic image and the idea of the child, and exposing the conventions and distortions that produce both, the magazines challenge claims of authenticity and transparency which had helped to naturalize the oppression of black people.

“Children of the Mantled-Birth”: Georgia Douglas Johnson, Photography in The Crisis, and the Politics of Black Childhood

“…3 Taylor (2020) asserts that the Children's Numbers preferred the studio portrait style because "the vulnerability and innocence of black children could be articulated more effectively through recourse to the visual language of (white, middle-class) sentimentalism than through more direct or documentary portrayals of black suffering," particularly because minstrel imagery relied so often on the pain (or, more accurately, bodily harm) of Black children for humorous ends (pp. 760, 755).…”

“…And, indeed, the photographs and pictures of children presented by the Children's Numbers reinforce the many political ideals of racial uplift ideology at the turn of the twentieth century. Julie Taylor (2020) argues that the photographs of children in these issues "conform to middle-class images of idealized childhood" and "provide a visual representation of the important ideological and symbolic work performed by the child" in the discourses of the New Negro and Harlem Renaissances; in particular, the magazine features "formal studio portraits" of well-dressed "babies and small children" with few candid shots, outdoor settings, or older children and teenagers appearing (Figure 1). Echoing critical attitudes regarding the poetry published in The Crisis in its first decades as a magazine, Taylor also asserts that these portraits of children recreate and rely upon conventions "established during the nineteenth century" (pp.…”