SKELETON OF A NEGRO

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HENRI JACQUART AND

ÉMILIE DERAMOND

Genre: Scientific

Date: 1847

Location: Paris, France

Format: Daguerréotype

“Sometimes known as ‘the mirror with a memory’, the daguerreotype – invented in the late 1830s in Paris by Louis Daguerre – revolutionized the emerging photographic medium. Since it was not a process that could capture movement, it stimulated a drive towards formal portraiture of both the living and the dead. Funerary portraits – sometimes of bodies in coffins, but at other times depicting the recently deceased propped up in chairs or in other quotidian poses – rapidly became widespread. The new technique was also utilized for pseudoscientific studies conducted by self-styled ‘ ethnographers’ who were attempting to map human evolution to prove what they saw as distinction between races.

The photograph reproduced here, taken by Henri Jacquart (1809-73) and the young Émilie Deramond (1828-?), is a product of these times.

The two Frenchmen worked together to create several ‘daguerreotypes of racial types sometimes using human casts’. This is one of the earliest-known photographs of a skeleton, although there is not certainty about whatever the image is an original or a copy. The skeleton hangs by its neck.

The photograph is now housed in the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Mankind) in Paris.

The idea that people’s abilities and characters can be extrapolated from their bone structures fuelled notorious of ethnic superiority. However, it was not universally credited at the time and has since been thoroughly debunked. This image, however, remains an important document in the early history of photography.” (SY)

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