ABSTRACT
In 1869 the great Darwinian biologist, Thomas Henry Huxley, initiated a project to produce a photographic record of the races of the British Empire. In this chapter, the author is concerned with what the project reveals of the visual rhetorics emerging within anthropology, especially the production and consumption of anthropometric photographs, and their entanglement in the micro-politics of colonial power. She focuses on the various scientific procedures in the production of anthropological information assumed or naturalised within this process. The photograph is not peripheral but central to these discursive forms. The author follows Thomas's call for ethnographies of specific colonial encounters in which projects are an 'endeavour that is localised, politicised and partial, yet also engendered by longer historical developments and ways of narrating them'. These, in this case, are ideas of racial science and hierarchy and colonial power structures that made Huxley's 'well-considered plan' imaginable in the first place.
