In 1865, the French photographer Augusto Stahl made images of a naked Black woman in Rio de Janeiro. They show the unidentified woman – Stahl didn’t bother to record her name – facing the camera, in profile, and from behind, in a sequence that inevitably recalls police mugshots.
Stahl was working for the Swiss-American biologist Louis Agassiz, a professor of natural history at Harvard University, who had commissioned photos of “pure” Black people to support his racist theories, such as the idea that miscegenation would lead to inferior human beings.
