W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America ed. by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert (review)

Deborah Willis, in Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present (Norton, 2002) and Shawn Michelle Smith, in Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Duke UP, 2004), are among those who have shown how the photo-graphs "intervene in turn-of-the-century 'race science' by offering competing visual evidence" (Smith 2). In another diagram, which combines elements of the bar chart and the spiral graph in order to show population distribution of black citizens across urban and rural areas, Du Bois demonstrates his skill as a visual innovator as much as a collector and analyzer of data. The second series of charts expands its focus from the state of Georgia to the entire United States in order to document "The Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now Resident in the United States of America," as the series is called.