As Brown states, anthropometric grids were commonly used in 19th Century ethnographic photography to make objective studies of non-western bodies: highlighting physical differences which had grown to signify a lack of civilization to the western eye. Grids were particularly useful in this way as they gave photographic work the 'aesthetic of science - dispassionate, orderly, coherent' (Solnit, 2003, p195) which helped boost the truth-value of the photograph, and therefore helped inscribe racial.
