Boxing in the Frame

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.