Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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PICTURES AND PROGRESS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.....................................................................................................................................................VIIINTRODUCTION Pictures and Progress Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith......................................................................................1ONE "A More Perfect Likeness": Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation Laura Wexler.........................................................................18TWO "Rightly Viewed": Theorizations of Self in Frederick Douglass's Lectures on Pictures Ginger Hill................................................................41THREE Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White Augusta Rohrbach.....................................................................................83Snapshot 1 Unredeemed Realities: Augustus Washington Shawn Michelle Smith...........................................................................................101FOUR Mulatta Obscura: Camera Tactics and Linda Brent Michael Chaney.................................................................................................109FIVE Who's Your Mama? "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom P. Gabrielle Foreman......................132SIX Out from Behind the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Photographic Performance of Identity Ray Sapirstein.....................167Snapshot 2 Reproducing Black Masculinity: Thomas Askew Shawn Michelle Smith.........................................................................................204SEVEN Louis Agassiz and the American School of Ethnoeroticism: Polygenesis, Pornography, and Other "Perfidious Influences" Suzanne Schneider........................211EIGHT Framing the Black Soldier: Image, Uplift, and the Duplicity of Pictures Maurice O. Wallace....................................................................244Snapshot 3 Unfixing the Frame(-up): A. P. Bedou Shawn Michelle Smith................................................................................................267NINE "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......................274TEN Ida B. Wells and the Shadow Archive Leigh Raiford...............................................................................................................299Snapshot 4 The Photographer's Touch: J. P. Ball Shawn Michelle Smith................................................................................................321ELEVEN No More Auction Block for Me! Cheryl Finley.................................................................................................................329BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................................................349CONTRIBUTORS........................................................................................................................................................369INDEX...............................................................................................................................................................373

Chapter One

Laura Wexler

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union ... —Preamble to the Constitution of the United States

Prologue

Born a slave, Frederick Douglass paid particular attention to photography. Throughout his life, he sat for numerous photographic portraits and circulated them as widely as possible. He also wrote a number of articles and lectures on the subject. His ideas about the uses of photography are different from those articulated by many of his contemporaries, who were chiefly engaged by how well the camera reflected and cemented existing social relations. Like others of his generation, Douglass was interested in pictures of family sentiment, but at his most intense he looked to photography for kindling rather than for kinship. During slavery, Douglass heard in the click of the shutter a promise of the shackle's release. If black people could appropriate by means of the camera the power of objectification that slavery wielded, Douglass perceived that photography would become an agent of radical social change. After emancipation, Douglass thought photography could be a tool for remaking the American imagination. Such photography was a visionary force, offering an important avenue for change.

Scholars of photography have only recently begun to attend seriously to Douglass's contributions to the theory of photography. Most of what Douglass wrote on photography has not been widely read; much has not yet been published but remains in manuscript form in the Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress. This current book is a crucial contribution to addressing that oversight. In the present chapter I trace some of what is to be discovered about Douglass's ideas of photography by comparing his published lecture of 1861, "Pictures and Progress," with his major revision of that lecture believed to have taken place circa 1865, which still exists only in manuscript form and is undated. In particular, I believe that by closely reading and comparing each piece of writing we can see how Douglass is in conversation with Lincoln over the image of the black man and the image of the American Union. Photography is central to that conversation. Each lecture contains a timely response to one of Lincoln's inaugural addresses. In the first, written at the outset of the American Civil War, Douglass is troubled by Lincoln's hesitation to arm black troops. He proposes that the new technology of photography humanizes the image of the enslaved so that black men might be more widely seen as suitable recruits to the Union forces. In Douglass's revision of the essay, he encourages Lincoln and the country to anticipate the successful end of the war and turn toward rebuilding the nation. There he tries to describe how photography could now disseminate a prophetic image of the nation. Photography could make a likeness of the "more perfect Union" the Constitution had originally failed to deliver.

This is a distinctly different approach to the potential of photography than the one currently most in vogue among photography scholars. In Camera Lucida (1980; translated into English in 1981), Roland Barthes famously defined the three positions from which many critics today analyze the institutions of photography: that of the Operator of the camera, the Spectator of the photograph, and the Spectrum (or target) of the image. But in effect, in his pre- and post-slavery engagement in the 1860s with Lincoln's inaugural addresses, Douglass excavated a fourth position: that of the Revenant, or one who returns from the dead.

The word revenant derives from the French revenir meaning "to come back," "to come again," "to return." Historically, it has been used to express the uncanny sense of déjà vu of something or someone previously thought to be absent or dead. It also contains within itself the French word reve, or "dream." All are implicated in Douglass's sense of the possibilities of...