Recent scholarship on the history of German anthropology has tended to describe its trajectory between 1900 and the Nazi period as characterized by a paradigmatic shift from the liberal to the anti-humanistic. This article reconstructs key moments in the history of anthropometric photography between 1900 and 1925, paying particular attention to the role of the influential liberal anthropologist Rudolf Martin in the standardization of anthropological method and technique. It is shown that Rudolf Martin's primary significance was social and institutional. The (...) article reconstructs key stages in Martin's writing on and uses of photography and analyses the peculiar form of scientific debate surrounding the development of anthropometric photography, which centred on local and practical questions. Against the political backdrop of German colonialism in Africa and studies of prisoners of war during the First World War, two key tensions in this history surface: between anthropological method and its politicization, and between the international scientific ethos and nationalist impulses. By adopting a practical–epistemic perspective, the article also destabilizes the conventional differentiation between the German liberal and anti-humanist anthropological traditions. Finally, the article suggests that there is a certain historical irony in the fact that the liberal Martin was central in the process that endowed physical anthropology with prestige precisely in the period when major parts of German society increasingly came to view ‘race’ as offering powerful, scientific answers to social and political questions. (shrink)

Photography – a novel medium of scientific representation in the XIXth century array of arts and sciences. To delve into various nineteenth century academic disciplines under the heading ‘photography in the arts and sciences’ as did last year's annual conference of the History of Science Society – the interest in such a topic only partly stems from the ‘iconic turn’ that has generally enlarged the scope of the social sciences in recent years. A more poignant feature in any such present (...) day study will probably be a basic scepticism facing the fact that in public use photographs have been manipulated in many respects.Yet, while shying away from any simple success story, a historically minded approach to changing ‘visual paradigms’ has begun to emerge. In this context, it has proved of considerable heuristic value to reconsider the role of early photography in an array of science, arts and technology: Since the reliance on the traditional ways of sketching reality persisted, in many an instance where photography was introduced, the thoughts the pioneer photographers had about their new, seemingly automated business, call for close attention. Thus scholarship sets up a parallel ‘discussion room’; the lively debate on the benefit of academic drawings as opposed to photographic portraits is a case in point.Some fairly specialised reports on photographically based analyses, such as electron microscopy, point to a borderline where the very idea of representation as a correspondence of reality and imagination gets blurred. Even though any ‘visual culture’ will have to shoulder the ‘burden of representation’, it is equally likely that it will offer a deeper sensibility for the intricacies entailed in the variegated ways of illustrating or mapping chosen subjects of scientific interest. Scholarship may thus somewhat control the disillusionment that by now has become the epitome of writing on photographic history. Provided with a renewed methodological awareness for the perception process and its photographic transition, historians may strike a better balance between the ever present tendencies of a realistic and an aesthetic way of picturing the world we live in. (shrink)

An Analytical Visualization Practice. The Pathological‐anatomical Illustrations of Jean Cruveilhier in Relation to Clinical Observations. The article examines the meaning and function of medical illustrations in the famous Atlas Anatomie pathologique, published by the French surgeon Jean Cruveilhier (1791–1874). By tracing the complex representation of pathological entities both back to the visual tradition of anatomy and the semiotic tradition of case descriptions and case histories, the article identifies the visualization technique of Cruveilhier as an analytical practice. The illustration of pathological (...) anatomy gains a functional diagnostic quality when bound to case descriptions and clinical histories. The Atlas serves thereby as a sample to trace the genealogies of a clinical visualization practice in characteristic images that is both engaged with an individual case and classificational tasks. (shrink)