"Focusing on the photographs W.E.B. Du Bois contributed to the American Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, Shawn Michelle Smith argues that Du Bois was 'an early visual theorist of race and racism' whose photographic oeuvre teases out 'the conceptual meaning of the color line as a nexus of competing gazes.' Over the following century, photographs of Jim Crow signs constituted an unusually explicit and expansive version of this nexus. Through the interplay of marked positions and perspectives, these photographs translated the dream of a transparent nation into a national conversation about race conducted in the language of the image."

Recommended by Elizabeth Abel, Professor of English and author of Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow.