Curated by Carol Squiers
International Center of Photography
1133 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036
Through March 18, 2001

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, scientists are racing to decode the human genome. Soon, each person's DNA will be digitized onto a microchip that will be as portable as a credit card. Scientists and doctors will use this knowledge to defeat disease and correct inherited defects. With the aid of genetics, mankind will strive to achieve something close to biological perfection.

This is not the first time that human perfection has been sought in the name of science. An earlier movement to improve the species was called eugenics, a term taken from a Greek root meaning "good in birth." Eugenics is the subject of the exhibition "Perfecting Mankind: Eugenics and Photography" at the International Center of Photography in New York.

Eugenics got its start in the mid-1860s with the work of an English gentleman scientist named Francis Galton, who was a cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton began to publish his theories on the way that human "stock" could be improved by borrowing the techniques of plant and animal breeders. "Could not the race of men be similarly improved?" Galton asked. "Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?" He concluded that it would be possible to produce "a highly gifted race of men" by the process of selective breeding, which he later termed "positive" eugenics. At the same time, he also thought that "undesirable" citizens should be discouraged from reproducing, a theory that was subsequently termed "negative" eugenics.

Photo:

Eugenic Culture by Weegee: Sherry Britton Reading Apes, Men and Morons,
ca. 1944
International Center of Photography

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