When the camera lies.

Recent years have witnessed a growing awareness of the crucial role photography plays in shaping cultural definitions of race and gender. Deborah Willis and Carla Williams's groundbreaking study The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Temple University Press, February 2002) treated the depiction of black women in 19tn-century photography as a metaphor for European colonial expansion and the subjugation of the world's darker skinned peoples.

More recently, the traveling exhibition "White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art" explored the artistic depiction of racial identities as "constructed, performed and malleable" definitions of the self and others. Several of the artists in that show, which included photographers Wendy Ewald, Nikki S. Lee and Cindy Sherman, exploited the conventions of photographic representation to point up the essentially arbitrary character of racial classifications.

Now, in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, the exhibition catalogue for a show that opened in December at the International Center of Photography in New York and runs through February 29, editors Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis again raise the question of "how photographs make us see race."

One might quibble at first with the editors' assertion that "most people understand that race is a social construction and not a biological truth." In fact, "most people" still probably do not. That is because ideas about "racial" differences, however they are defined, have by now become so ingrained in the minds of Americans abetted by a long history of negative stereotypes and a constant barrage of mass media imagery. It almost re quires a conscious effort of will to imagine that race isn't some sort of immutable biological destiny.

The editors acknowledge, however, that "race remains with us as a compelling myth," and that "it is part of our American heritage." The photographs of the exhibition and catalogue offer ample evidence that the national obsession with race, however illusory the concept may be, will remain with us for a long time to come.

In tracing the evolution of photographic representations of race, the catalogue notes photography's early alliance with the 19th-century pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology, which attempted to classify people on the basis of such external traits as facial features or skull shape, as well as with the more respectable but no less politically fraught disciplines of ethnography, criminology and abnormal psychology.

Because photographs were assumed to be "objective" records, photographic classifications of so called "racial" differences and types played a critical role in all these fields as a way of providing "scientific" support for the ideology of white supremacy that justified European colonial conquest and America's enslavement of blacks and genocidal Indian wars.

Another thread running through the exhibition deals with the portrayal of race in popular culture. The editors argue that "photographs have been a primary means for conveying ideas about race since the invention of medium" so much so that the notion of American identity is almost impossible to imagine outside the context of racial privilege and status.

Only Skin Deep presents many famous images, from Dorothea Lange's iconic Depression era tableau Migrant Mother to Gordon Parks's bitingly ironic American Gothic, a portrait of a downtrodden government charwoman with her mop and broom, to Charles Moore's harrowing shots of civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, being pummeled by water canons.

In addition, the book offers many works by contemporary artists--the list includes Fred Wilson, Gary Winogrand, Coreen Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems among others--who have employed the camera as a means to investigate the continuing legacy of America's tragic racial history. This is a thought-provoking and in some ways deeply disturbing exploration of photography's complici'N in structuring how we view race and the consequences that stem from our persistent belief in an essentially fictive reality--a reality, moreover, from which it seems we can neither entirely escape nor ever truly transform.

Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self

Edited by Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis Harry N. Abrams, December 2003 $40.00, ISBN 0-810-94635-1

Glenn McNatt has been the art critic for The Baltimore Sun since 1999. Before then, he was The Sun's arts columnist, and from 1985 to 1995 he served as an editorial writer and columnist He's also reported for Time magazine.