Seeing without Feeling: Muybridge’s Boxing Pictures and the Rise of the Bourgeois Film Spectator

The introduction reconsiders sporting images, particularly those of Black boxers, as integral to both the wider visual and cultural history of Blackness in the United States as well as the ecology of white violence that continues in our present moment. Although art historians tend to overlook images of athletes, along with other iconic and/or popular images, Heavyweight recognizes the ways in which Blackness is produced, rehearsed, and regulated through images of athletes that circulated in the Reconstruction period and after. These Black men were among the most reproduced in a thriving media culture, and as such should be considered as part of the visual record of Blackness. It is in these historical sporting images that we find the blueprint for our conceptions of the Black male body as existing somewhere between fear and fantasy, simultaneously an object of desire and an instrument of brutal violence.

Introduction

2024

The Bare-Knuckle Breed

2024

The first chapter provides an overview of the sport of boxing in the United States, its place within the critical project of white manhood in the nineteenth century, and its intersections with an increased focus on the physical body as the site of masculinity. A particular focus is the circulation of images in popular illustrated print media, including the sporting paper the National Police Gazette, which provided a model for the monetization of visual culture and the cult of celebrity that still operates today.

Boxing in the Frame

2024

The second chapter considers photographs taken by Eadweard Muybridge of the mixed-race boxer Ben Bailey in 1885 as a historically situated racial project. These pictures of Bailey are interpreted within the larger context of nineteenth-century photography, in which the bourgeois classes looked to the medium for evidence to support a general drive to regulate, even criminalize, the presence of an unwanted underclass in the new urban environment. The chapter focuses on the introduction of the anthropometric grid in these photographs, which uniquely pathologizes Bailey and rehearses an attempt to fix and constrain the Black body within the photographic frame. Looking both to fine art and vernacular photography for comparative treatments of the Black body as both a scientific and an aesthetic object, the chapter positions Muybridge’s photographs as instrumental in giving visual form to fantasies (and fears) about Black bodies in the public sphere.