ABSTRACT
Much has been written about the early decades of the twentieth century and its dominating eugenics ideology (e.g., Black, 2003; Lombardo, 2011; O'Brien, 2013; Smith & Wehmeyer, 2012). Scholarship has generally relied on written rather than visual sources of data for interpreting this period. Little work has been completed that examines the photographs of the era as primary data, even though we know that journals and textbooks were profusely illustrated. For example, Talbot's text Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and Results, published in 1901, contained 120 illustrations (many of which were photographs) within its 362 pages. Photographs can provide new avenues of exploration and understanding, and often reveal points of view that are different from the written text (Dowdall & Golden, 1989). Thus, by examining photographs of “the feeble-minded” during the eugenics period, we may be able to increase our understanding of the period in ways that are not available to us through other sources.
