Sheehan lectures on photographic humor at University of Delaware
As part of the Art History Department’s Graduate Student Lecture Series at the University of Delaware, Tanya Sheehan (Associate Professor and Chair of Art) will give a talk titled, “Revival and Subversion: The Racial Politics of Amateur Photographic Humor,” on Thursday, March 24, 2016, 5:30pm.
In the decades following black emancipation, African Americans were the frequent subjects of humor in commercial photographs. These racial caricatures, which imagined black bodies as physically and socially deviant, set the stage for amateur photographic performances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only did white Americans appropriate racial humor with remarkable regularity in their family snaps, but African Americans attempted to revive and subvert such humor in their own vernacular photographs. Focusing on the images and handwritten captions in family photo albums, Sheehan’s talk examines the personal and political work performed by comic photographic tropes in the Progressive Era.