Every show that deals with race is immediately considered to be about racism. Or so says the introduction to the current traveling photo exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum, “Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self.” And so it is true with this show. This show is about our image of ourselves as Americans and what it means to be an American, in spite of and because of our racial identities.

The show is broken into five sections with varying degrees of success; each section details a different aspect of how we look at and interact with racial and cultural issues surrounding the idea of the American experience. The first section, “All for One/One for All,” is a commentary on how we “brand” people or use a single iconic image to represent an entire group. I found the archival photography from the ‘50s and ‘60s to be the most compelling. The photo of a billboard with a perfect “Leave it to Beaver”-style white kid with text about being an American and racial tolerance in a black neighborhood is a poignant example of how media imagery often handles sensitive racial issues with clay hands.

Another section, “Looking Up/Looking Down,” deals with photo techniques used to manipulate feelings about a group. Archival photography with blacks and American Indians as savages were routinely used around the turn of the century to legitimize our government’s and culture’s mistreatment of these groups and people. The images reproduced here paint a broad picture of the systematic use of these techniques to dehumanize various groups.

My favorite work here is “Evolution del Hombre” by Miguel Calderon. With tongue in cheek he co-opts the classic image of ape turning into man in five steps, but instead uses a Chicano man evolving with ever improving weapons. The comedy is fantastic and helps soften the message of how we often view all cholos as gun-toting hoods.

As the show progresses the categories begin to feel like more of the same. “Humanized/Fetishized” could easily be lumped in with “Looking Up/Looking Down” and feels more like an effort to come up with five groups than to introduce another way of looking at the central issue. There are some subtle thematic differences, but often images from one section could be placed in many others and be no more or less ambiguous. Erotica from the 1800s is on display, along with stock shots from the black civil rights movement and Japanese internment during WWII. The imagery continues to be compelling regardless of any thematic ambiguity.

The weakest point in the show is the section entitled “Progress/Regress.” The idea is to take the body out of racial and cultural identity and replace it with objects and/or places. While this is an interesting stretch, it largely doesn’t work. Many of the images could read as anywhere/anything put in another context, so the message is lost, at least to this viewer.

If you still have energy at the end of the five sections, the comment sheets at the end provide interesting reading. People’s reactions to the show are a good barometer of what messages were received by whom and how much baggage we all tend to carry around when racial issues are discussed. In the end, I walked away from this show not with a deeper understanding of the sources of our current self-image of “American” so much as with a better feeling about where we stand in this country with regards to racial and cultural tolerance. By seeing how far we’ve come in the last 100-odd years, I carry a little more hope about how far we have left to go. —Chris Cole

Only Skin Deep runs through June 13 at the Seattle Art Museum.