Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity
edited by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith
Duke University Press, 2012 Cloth: 978-0-8223-5067-5 | Paper: 978-0-8223-5085-9 | eISBN: 978-0-8223-9456-3 Library of Congress Classification TR23.P53 2012 Dewey Decimal Classification 770.8996073
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Pictures and Progress explores how, during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, prominent African American intellectuals and activists understood photography's power to shape perceptions about race and employed the new medium in their quest for social and political justice. They sought both to counter widely circulating racist imagery and to use self-representation as a means of empowerment. In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines consider figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois as important and innovative theorists and practitioners of photography. In addition, brief interpretive essays, or "snapshots," highlight and analyze the work of four early African American photographers. Featuring more than seventy images, Pictures and Progress brings to light the wide-ranging practices of early African American photography, as well as the effects of photography on racialized thinking.
Contributors. Michael A. Chaney, Cheryl Finley, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Ginger Hill, Leigh Raiford, Augusta Rohrbach, Ray Sapirstein, Suzanne N. Schneider, Shawn Michelle Smith, Laura Wexler, Maurice O. Wallace
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Maurice O. Wallace is Associate Professor of English and African & African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775–1995, also published by Duke University Press.
Shawn Michelle Smith is Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture, also published by Duke University Press, and American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture. Smith is coauthor (with Dora Apel) of Lynching Photographs.
REVIEWS
“I recommend Pictures and Progress for anyone who enjoys reading about the history of photography, African American history, or those who like to consider new ideas about photography as an art form. . . . [O]riginality, fresh ideas and a good pace of content make Pictures and Progress an excellent read.” - Mary Desjarlais, The Photogram
“Pictures and Progress is an edited volume of essays that underscores the role of photography in the production of African American identity during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.... Its contributors are skillful scholars from diverse fields who employ a variety of critical practices to call attention to the cultural, social, and political aspects of early African American photography. These authors seek to disrupt the familiarity of photographs – more a means of persuasion than of proof – and emphasize the plurality of photographic practice during the ante- and postbellum periods.... Pictures and Progress is certainly recommended for art libraries that specialize in the history of photography or visual and material culture studies.” - Molly E. Dotson, Art Library Society of North America
“With its emphasis on the often radical roles that black sitters and makers assumed in the history of photography, Pictures and Progress offers a bold approach to the study of American visual culture, one that places black agency at its center. Its intriguing and persuasive essays elucidate the importance of photography to the creation of free, black personhood in the 19th and early-20th centuries and reveal the myriad and sometimes surprising ways that such hands sought to wield “the pencil of nature” in an effort to assert self-possessed, and therefore revolutionary, subjectivities during an era in which the dominant culture preferred to represent them as otherwise.”—Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, author of Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century
“Pictures and Progress offers a new understanding of visual representations of black Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through its compelling essays, this work reframes the archive of images of death, beauty, and suffering of black subjects in photography.”—Deborah Willis, New York University
“I recommend Pictures and Progress for anyone who enjoys reading about the history of photography, African American history, or those who like to consider new ideas about photography as an art form. . . . [O]riginality, fresh ideas and a good pace of content make Pictures and Progress an excellent read.”
-- Mary Desjarlais Photogram
“Pictures and Progress is an edited volume of essays that underscores the role of photography in the production of African American identity during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.... Its contributors are skillful scholars from diverse fields who employ a variety of critical practices to call attention to the cultural, social, and political aspects of early African American photography. These authors seek to disrupt the familiarity of photographs – more a means of persuasion than of proof – and emphasize the plurality of photographic practice during the ante- and postbellum periods.... Pictures and Progress is certainly recommended for art libraries that specialize in the history of photography or visual and material culture studies.”
-- Molly E. Dotson ARLIS/NA Reviews
“[A] nuanced collection of essays. . . . that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of African Americans’ uses of photography in public dialogue by and about African Americans in the postemancipation era.”
-- Tammy S. Gordon History: Reviews of New Books
“Pictures and Progress is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on African American photography. The contributors have painstakingly revisited a moment in time when African Americans considered still-photography liberating.”
-- Christopher P. Lehman Biography
“[T]his volume… will appeal equally to historians of photography and of the United States. Together, the essays in this book emphasize the act of thoughtful, visual scrutiny coupled with the desire to use photographs to make sense of a past that has often been overlooked.”
-- Jasmine Alinder Journal of Southern History
"[A] novel and often revelatory study of photography and black agency that will quickly become a foundational volume for scholars of U.S. photographic history."
-- Martin A. Berger Journal of American History
“All the contributions leave readers with ideas worth mulling over and researching further…. Highly recommended.”
-- C. Chiarenza Choice
"Pictures and Progress offers an important interdisciplinary analysis of the closely linked histories of photography and African American subjecthood."
-- Megan Driscoll CAA Reviews
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Pictures and Progress / Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith 1
1. "A More Perfect Likeness": Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation / Laura Wexler 18
2. "Rightly Viewed": Theorizations of the Self in Frederick Douglass's Lecture on Pictures / Ginger Hill 41
3. Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White / Augusta Rohrbach 83
Snapshot 1. Unredeemed Realities: Augustus Washington / Shawn Michelle Smith 101
4. Mulatta Obscura: Camera Tactics and Linda Brent / Michael Chaney 109
5. Who's Your Mama?: "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom / P. Gabrielle Foreman 132
6. Out from Behind the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Photographic Performance of Identity / Ray Sapirstein 167
Snapshot 2. Reproducing Black Masculinity: Thomas Askew / Shawn Michelle Smith 204
7. Louis Agassiz and the American School of Ethnoeroticism: Polygenesis, Pornography, and Other "Perfidious Influences" / Suzanne Schneider 211
8. Framing the Black Soldier: Image, Uplift, and the Duplicity of Pictures / Maurice O. Wallace 244
Snapshot 3. Unfixing the Frame(-up): A. P. Bedou / Shawn Michelle Smith 267
9. "Looking at One's Self through the Eyes of Others": W. E. B. Du Bois's Photographs for the Paris Exposition of 1900 / Shawn Michelle Smith 274
10. Ida B. Wells and the Shadow Archive / Leigh Raiford 299
Snapshot 4. The Photographer's Touch: J. P. Ball / Shawn Michelle Smith 321
11. No More Auction Block for Me! / Cheryl Finley 329
Bibliography 349
Contributors 369
Index 373
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity
edited by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith
Duke University Press, 2012 Cloth: 978-0-8223-5067-5 Paper: 978-0-8223-5085-9 eISBN: 978-0-8223-9456-3
Pictures and Progress explores how, during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, prominent African American intellectuals and activists understood photography's power to shape perceptions about race and employed the new medium in their quest for social and political justice. They sought both to counter widely circulating racist imagery and to use self-representation as a means of empowerment. In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines consider figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois as important and innovative theorists and practitioners of photography. In addition, brief interpretive essays, or "snapshots," highlight and analyze the work of four early African American photographers. Featuring more than seventy images, Pictures and Progress brings to light the wide-ranging practices of early African American photography, as well as the effects of photography on racialized thinking.
Contributors. Michael A. Chaney, Cheryl Finley, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Ginger Hill, Leigh Raiford, Augusta Rohrbach, Ray Sapirstein, Suzanne N. Schneider, Shawn Michelle Smith, Laura Wexler, Maurice O. Wallace
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Maurice O. Wallace is Associate Professor of English and African & African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775–1995, also published by Duke University Press.
Shawn Michelle Smith is Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture, also published by Duke University Press, and American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture. Smith is coauthor (with Dora Apel) of Lynching Photographs.
REVIEWS
“I recommend Pictures and Progress for anyone who enjoys reading about the history of photography, African American history, or those who like to consider new ideas about photography as an art form. . . . [O]riginality, fresh ideas and a good pace of content make Pictures and Progress an excellent read.” - Mary Desjarlais, The Photogram
“Pictures and Progress is an edited volume of essays that underscores the role of photography in the production of African American identity during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.... Its contributors are skillful scholars from diverse fields who employ a variety of critical practices to call attention to the cultural, social, and political aspects of early African American photography. These authors seek to disrupt the familiarity of photographs – more a means of persuasion than of proof – and emphasize the plurality of photographic practice during the ante- and postbellum periods.... Pictures and Progress is certainly recommended for art libraries that specialize in the history of photography or visual and material culture studies.” - Molly E. Dotson, Art Library Society of North America
“With its emphasis on the often radical roles that black sitters and makers assumed in the history of photography, Pictures and Progress offers a bold approach to the study of American visual culture, one that places black agency at its center. Its intriguing and persuasive essays elucidate the importance of photography to the creation of free, black personhood in the 19th and early-20th centuries and reveal the myriad and sometimes surprising ways that such hands sought to wield “the pencil of nature” in an effort to assert self-possessed, and therefore revolutionary, subjectivities during an era in which the dominant culture preferred to represent them as otherwise.”—Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, author of Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century
“Pictures and Progress offers a new understanding of visual representations of black Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through its compelling essays, this work reframes the archive of images of death, beauty, and suffering of black subjects in photography.”—Deborah Willis, New York University
“I recommend Pictures and Progress for anyone who enjoys reading about the history of photography, African American history, or those who like to consider new ideas about photography as an art form. . . . [O]riginality, fresh ideas and a good pace of content make Pictures and Progress an excellent read.”
-- Mary Desjarlais Photogram
“Pictures and Progress is an edited volume of essays that underscores the role of photography in the production of African American identity during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.... Its contributors are skillful scholars from diverse fields who employ a variety of critical practices to call attention to the cultural, social, and political aspects of early African American photography. These authors seek to disrupt the familiarity of photographs – more a means of persuasion than of proof – and emphasize the plurality of photographic practice during the ante- and postbellum periods.... Pictures and Progress is certainly recommended for art libraries that specialize in the history of photography or visual and material culture studies.”
-- Molly E. Dotson ARLIS/NA Reviews
“[A] nuanced collection of essays. . . . that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of African Americans’ uses of photography in public dialogue by and about African Americans in the postemancipation era.”
-- Tammy S. Gordon History: Reviews of New Books
“Pictures and Progress is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on African American photography. The contributors have painstakingly revisited a moment in time when African Americans considered still-photography liberating.”
-- Christopher P. Lehman Biography
“[T]his volume… will appeal equally to historians of photography and of the United States. Together, the essays in this book emphasize the act of thoughtful, visual scrutiny coupled with the desire to use photographs to make sense of a past that has often been overlooked.”
-- Jasmine Alinder Journal of Southern History
"[A] novel and often revelatory study of photography and black agency that will quickly become a foundational volume for scholars of U.S. photographic history."
-- Martin A. Berger Journal of American History
“All the contributions leave readers with ideas worth mulling over and researching further…. Highly recommended.”
-- C. Chiarenza Choice
"Pictures and Progress offers an important interdisciplinary analysis of the closely linked histories of photography and African American subjecthood."
-- Megan Driscoll CAA Reviews
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Pictures and Progress / Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith 1
1. "A More Perfect Likeness": Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation / Laura Wexler 18
2. "Rightly Viewed": Theorizations of the Self in Frederick Douglass's Lecture on Pictures / Ginger Hill 41
3. Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White / Augusta Rohrbach 83
Snapshot 1. Unredeemed Realities: Augustus Washington / Shawn Michelle Smith 101
4. Mulatta Obscura: Camera Tactics and Linda Brent / Michael Chaney 109
5. Who's Your Mama?: "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom / P. Gabrielle Foreman 132
6. Out from Behind the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Photographic Performance of Identity / Ray Sapirstein 167
Snapshot 2. Reproducing Black Masculinity: Thomas Askew / Shawn Michelle Smith 204
7. Louis Agassiz and the American School of Ethnoeroticism: Polygenesis, Pornography, and Other "Perfidious Influences" / Suzanne Schneider 211
8. Framing the Black Soldier: Image, Uplift, and the Duplicity of Pictures / Maurice O. Wallace 244
Snapshot 3. Unfixing the Frame(-up): A. P. Bedou / Shawn Michelle Smith 267
9. "Looking at One's Self through the Eyes of Others": W. E. B. Du Bois's Photographs for the Paris Exposition of 1900 / Shawn Michelle Smith 274
10. Ida B. Wells and the Shadow Archive / Leigh Raiford 299
Snapshot 4. The Photographer's Touch: J. P. Ball / Shawn Michelle Smith 321
11. No More Auction Block for Me! / Cheryl Finley 329
Bibliography 349
Contributors 369
Index 373
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
