🎞️ In these compelling self-portraits, New Orleans-based photographer and curator Carla Williams challenges the myth of photographic neutrality. She does this by confronting how 19th-century visual culture shaped—and distorted—representations of the Black body. Williams’s photographs reference images from the 1800s that were made for so-called “scientific” studies: physiognomy and phrenology. These fields of study claimed that you could determine someone’s intelligence, character, and personality just by looking at their face or skull, respectively. These discriminatory ideas are now completely discredited. However, at the time, images from these studies were used to support and justify racist beliefs and harmful stereotypes. Williams notes that while these histories may seem “absurd or outdated,” they “still contain a great deal of resonance and power with respect to the way that we read and respond to contemporary images of African American women.” 📸 See these and more remarkab...