But while we often think of the silhouette as a purely visual form, it struck me that the silhouette also worked as an ideological tool, shaping perspectives and creating meaning. The photographer Erwin E. Smith, for example, spent years documenting the open range in the early 20th century. His photographs shaped the mythos of the cowboy in popular culture by documenting the figure’s iconic silhouette astride a horse, capped with a wide-brimmed cowboy hat and surveying the unfolding plains. His repeated depiction of the cowboy—often cast in shadow and positioned in profile against the sun-blasted expanse of the open range—constructed the image of the cowboy as a rugged, independent, and industrious figure. As if in answer to the decline of the open-range lifestyle in the early 20th century, Smith’s dark, solid silhouettes reassert the western figure as resilient and enduring.

At the same moment Smith was working, another photographer was also using the silhouette to craft a narrative of presence and absence in the American West. Edward Curtis was a photographer and ethnologist known for his extensive work documenting Native American cultures in projects like The North American Indian in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His photographs contributed to the harmful and racist “vanishing race” ideology, a belief prevalent during the period that the extinction of Indigenous peoples was inevitable. Through soft-focus, dramatic lighting, and sepia tones, his photographs evoke a feeling of nostalgia. It was also his use of the silhouette that created a sense of withdrawal in the face of European-American expansion. Out-of-focus silhouettes, and diminutive silhouettes dwarfed by the landscape, worked to craft a generalized view of Native Americans with little agency. Placing Smith’s and Curtis’s contemporaneous photographs in conversation—with Smith’s affirmation of the cowboy and Curtis’s diminishment of the Native American—exposes the power of visual language to generate meaning through something as simple as a silhouette.

With this Re/Framed, I was also excited to bring together the Carter’s collection of more traditional silhouette portraits that spans over 200 years. It was especially exciting to juxtapose historical and contemporary silhouettes, including Winslow Homer’s heliotype illustrations for James Russell Lowell’s book, The Courtin’ (1874), and Kara Walker’s artist book Freedom, A Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times (1997). The two works are striking in their visual similarity and material use of the silhouette as book illustration. Yet Walker, working more than a century later, appropriates the earlier Victorian art tradition to address the brutal histories and ongoing legacies of racial violence. Her silhouettes are not confined to the two-dimensional page, as are Homer’s, but emerge three-dimensionally through laser-cut forms, directly confronting the viewer with a painful narrative of misplaced hope for Black freedom in the land of Liberia.

Another installation also brings into relief the historical and contemporary. Cutting silhouette portraits out of paper was a popular art form in the early 19th century. Before the advent of photography in 1839, the silhouette democratized portraiture because it was more affordable than having one’s portrait painted in oil and could be produced quickly and in multiples. Moses Williams was a preeminent “cutter of profiles” who made thousands of silhouettes as souvenirs for visitors to the Peale Museum in Philadelphia in the early 19th century. To make these portraits, including the Carter’s recent acquisition of several hollow-cut silhouettes pictured here, Williams used a physiognotrace, a machine that traced a reduced outline of the sitter’s profile that the artist could then cut out with scissors. The resulting portrait was at once individualized, traced directly from the sitter’s face, but also generalized for there were no internal details beyond the shape of the profile. Profile portraits, especially those made with a physiognotrace, reflected the period’s interest in physiognomy, the practice of judging a person’s internal character based on their exterior appearance. While physiognomy was disproved by the late 19th century as pseudoscience, the visual legacies of the practice are inextricable from the silhouette.

Contemporary photographer Jason Salavon engages with this history through his presentation of two blurry portraits of a man and woman in the diptych The Class of 1988. While we can see few details, the positioning of the bodies and the cropping just below the shoulders is familiar, its format recognizable as that of a yearbook. The portraits, however, are not individualized likenesses. Salavon uses computer software to overlay multiple images of high school seniors, averaging the results to create a visual amalgamation of the entire graduating class. The artist transforms the individual class photo into a general silhouette of what a high school senior in Fort Worth, Texas, looked like in 1988. The practice of making such “composite portraits” emerged over a hundred years prior with physiognomy’s effort to theorize visual “types” of humanity. Anthropologist and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, for example, layered mug shots of different categories of criminals—arsonists, thieves, bootleggers—in order to identify universal facial features that corresponded with certain deviant behavior. The result is a blurry and unsettling view of what an “average” criminal looked like.

While Salavon and Williams worked more than two centuries apart, their use of the silhouette reveals a shared tension between the individual and the general. Salavon’s contemporary practice engages with a long visual history of physiognomy that Williams directly participated in with his use of the physiognotrace to make souvenir portraits at the Peale Museum. Bringing these silhouettes together across time and medium offers us a new way to think about the silhouette, portraiture, and its legacies today. I hope you’ll come see for yourself the multifaceted spectrum of the silhouette across visual art in this iteration of Re/Framed, on view through April 30, 2025.