ABSTRACT
Denfield’s anthropometric estimates are on the one hand, a crude revelation of his racism. However, that conclusion alone closes off the implication of such statements when thinking about his career as a salon photographer. The vocabulary of physical anthropology, with its meticulous detail is strikingly similar to that of the salon exhibition experts with their thorough analyses of images and attention to technological detail. Such writers would pay close attention to lighting, shading, tonality, printing and composition, and would scrutinise the salon value of the image largely based on such technical detail. Denfield gazed at the native with a similarly microscopic lens, paying attention to the effect of light and shadows on various parts of the body. The result was not only an intensified objectification of the native body but suggests an entanglement of the salon space with debilitating racial discourse. In other words, the salon, with its emphasis on technical detail, lent itself to a further concretisation of identities by allowing the photographer who was well versed in colonial discourse, to observe with the eye of the physical anthropologists. Thus, the salon not only accommodated Denfield’s shift towards pictorial techniques but nurtured it. It is partly in this context that Denfield was able to intellectualise Native photography as a distinct paradigm.
