On the Subject of Tests:
Rhetoric of a Box
On the Subject of Tests: Rhetoric of a Box is a collection of over 800 photographs of intelligence tests developed in the United States. Part of an expansive ongoing project, this archive explores the aesthetic dimensions of commonly used twentieth-century intelligence tests in relationship to their entanglement in the history of eugenics, military and prison regimes and the neoliberalisation of workplaces and schools. The photographs explore the tests’ visual cultures by training a careful eye to each and every object within each kit, looking to see what messages and morals leak through consciously and unconsciously in their designs.
