Frederick Douglass Black and White Pic 1863 Ladies Fashion

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"Truthful Pictures": Frederick Douglass on the Promise of Photography
Gregory Fried, Suffolk University

Human is the only moving picture-making brute in the world. He alone of all the inhabitants of the globe has the chapters and passion for pictures . . . Poets, prophets, and reformers are all motion picture-makers, and this ability is the surreptitious of their ability and achievements: they see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the
contradiction.  —Frederick Douglass

Figure 1: Unknown photographer, 2 boxers, ambrotype (circa 1860), collection of Greg French.

In the late summer of 1839, at an extraordinary articulation meeting of the Academy of Science and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre presented to the public and to the world the first truly successful photographic process: the daguerreotype. It is difficult for u.s.a. to grasp now, later more than than 170 years of photography, the astonishment and enthusiasm that greeted Daguerre's discovery. On a small plate of metal, Daguerre coaxed the sun'southward rays, guided by the lens of a camera, to produce an image whose detail was as minutely true-blue to reality every bit the reflection in a mirror—just in black and white. In an age of soaring expectations for science, the daguerreotype symbolized the possibility that human ingenuity might capture the very essence of nature.

The daguerreotype is truly a marvel: strictly speaking, it is impossible to reproduce one, since a daguerreotype image sits on a argent surface that reflects like a mirror; i therefore sees oneself in the image, too. The only fashion to appreciate a daguerreotype properly is to see it, equally information technology were, in person. This personal intimacy and immediacy lent much of the fervor to what Frederick Douglass called the new "passion for pictures." While the inventor of the daguerreotype was a Frenchman, nowhere did this passion catch on equally it did in the still young United states of america. For Douglass, the quondam slave and abolitionist orator, photography, as a mirror of reality, would serve as a new weapon in the fight for liberty and human dignity.

Samuel F. B. Morse, the American inventor and painter, happened to be in Paris in 1838–39 to promote his own invention, the electromagnetic telegraph. In that location he met and befriended Daguerre. Morse tried his hand at the process every bit presently as Daguerre made it public, and, on his return to the States, he successfully spread word of Daguerre's genius to his fellow Americans. Scores, then hundreds, and finally thousands of American practitioners took up the fine art, improving the technique so apace that by the early 1840s a proficient daguerreotypist could earn a respectable income as a portraitist. The American public hungered unrelentingly for portraits.

Douglass explains this passion well: "The great discoverer of modernistic times, to whom coming generations will award special homage, will exist Daguerre. Morse has brought the seeds of the world together, and Daguerre has made it a motion picture gallery. Nosotros have pictures, truthful pictures, of every object which can interest united states of america . . . What was in one case the special and exclusive luxury of the rich and keen is now the privilege of all. The humblest servant daughter may now possess a picture of herself such every bit the wealth of kings could not purchase 50 years ago."

Past the 1850s and 1860s, American ingenuity had led to an explosion of photographic techniques including the ambrotype, tintype, and carte-de-visite—all to feed the endless American appetite for portraits. Tens of millions of images were produced. Once, portraiture had been the "special and sectional luxury" of the rich or the noble in the form of paintings or sculptures that cost a small fortune to commission; at present Americans could assert their egalitarianism in self-representation. For less than a solar day'due south wages, even a humble housemaid could confirm her dignity and make her bid for immortality (fig. two).

Figure 2: Bearding photographer, three housemaids, tintype (circa 1870s), collection of Gregory Fried.

As Frederick Douglass saw it, Morse and Daguerre were two facets of the same democratizing revolution, a revolution that was fast uniting the world in communication (Morse) and in image (Daguerre). For Douglass, this universalizing and democratizing revolution involved more than a breaking down of class divisions; information technology also meant attacking what nosotros might telephone call the optics of racism, that is, how white Europeans had come to run across black Africans equally a nearly separate species, a view that corrupted painted portraits: "Negroes tin can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists. Information technology seems to u.s. side by side to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without nearly grossly exaggerating their distinctive features. And the reason is obvious. Artists, like all other white persons, have adopted a theory respecting the distinctive features of Negro physiognomy." When Douglass complained about how white artists "accept likenesses" of blacks, he meant painters, sculptors, and engravers—all artists except photographers, because in all other art forms, the creative person'due south preconceived way of seeing necessarily intrudes upon the representation of the subject matter. In voicing this complaint, Douglass echoed a widely held notion about photography, 1 that persists to this 24-hour interval: that unlike other techniques in art, photography is a true mirror of nature whose method, because it relies on the nonpartisan effectiveness of rays of light rather than the mitt of homo beings, tin can present us with what Douglass called "truthful pictures" of reality.

Many contemporary theorists would now question that assumption. They would claim that photography is more fine art than science by pointing to how the discipline thing is arranged, how the lighting is manipulated, what type of lens or printing-out paper is employed, even to the way the scene is equanimous and framed. All these factors play as much of a subjective role in producing and seeing the work of art as does the manus of the artist with a paintbrush or a mallet and chisel. The photograph, and so, is no more a "true picture" of reality than a cubist painting by Picasso.

But, at least for now, let us give Douglass the benefit of the doubt. After all, there is for most of u.s., in our pre-theoretical experience of photography, something of that feel of immediacy and revelation of reality that and then astonished and inspired him, equally well every bit and so many other Americans, a century and a one-half ago. Douglass was photographed frequently. Ane of the very primeval known portraits of him was taken in the mid-1840s, probably just around the fourth dimension the 1845 publication ofThe Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Written by Himself made Douglass a national and then an international celebrity. This austere portrait (fig. 3) of the withal youthful Douglass, who meets our gaze then forcefully, epitomizes his hope and expectation that photography might bestow a public dignity upon African Americans that would provide a pictorial argument for their inclusion in the promise of the Declaration of Independence: that the simply legitimate government is 1 that gives support to the self-axiomatic truth that all men are created equal.

Figure three: Anonymous photographer, Frederick Douglass, sixth-plate daguerreotype (circa 1845), collection of Greg French.

Many other portraits make a like visual argument, such equally this 1 of an unnamed self-confident keyed bugle histrion (fig. 4).

Figure 4: Anonymous photographer, man with keyed bugle, daguerreotype (circa 1845), collection of Greg French.

The portrait of this man, with his sophisticated instrument and sail music, proclaims his capacity for refinement and cocky-cultivation. Or consider this portrait of an unidentified African American woman whose strength and resilience break through the stiff pose of conventional portraiture (fig. 5):

Figure five: Anonymous photographer, adult female in tinted wearing apparel, daguerreotype (late 1840s), collection of Greg French.

These portraits, and others such equally this one of a man holding a book, prove sitters who have attained something like centre-course respectability (fig. vi).

Fig. six. Hooke and Co. (Francis Hooke, proprietor):subject unknown, 6th-plate daguerreotype, 1850. Collection of Greg French. Other portraits, such as this 1849 daguerrotype of a man in his work clothes and an frock (fig. vii) or the portrait of a firewoman in his gear (fig. eight), illustrate that African American laborers and artisans could also afford to prove themselves for who they were, with pride in their merchandise or their work in public service.  Fig. 7. Photographer unknown: subject unknown, sixth-plate daguerreotype, c. 1849–55. Collection of Greg French.

Fig. 8. Photographer unknown: subject unknown,quarter-plate tintype, c. 1860–65. Collection of Greg French.  When the Civil War broke out, Douglass lobbied President Lincoln passionately for the correct of African Americans to conduct arms and fight for the Union cause: "I accept a right to ask when I . . . march to the boxing field" for "a state or the hope of a country under me, a regime that recognizes my manhood around me, and a flag of freedom waving over me!" By 1863, blackness regiments were forming and young African American men resolutely
met the call to artillery (fig. 9).  Fig. 9. Photographer unknown: subject area unknown, quarter-plate ambrotype, c. 1863–65.  Collection of Greg French.  The national struggle over the political significant of race constitute expression in all arenas of antebellum visual culture. In The Octoroon, a statue fabricated past John Bell, a naked and plain "white" woman, her arms in chains, her apparel on the pillar beside her, bows her head in a sorrowful yet dignified resignation to inspection earlier going to the auction block (fig. 10). Fig. x. Photographer unknown: The Octoroon (from a sculpture by John Bong), albumen print, i half of a stereograph, c. 1870. Collection of Gregory Fried.  As F. James Davis has explained so well in Who Is Black?, the American categorization of race is unique in the earth. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in reaction to the threat of abolition and to the fact of interbreeding between whites and blacks, the The states had developed the so-called "1-drop rule," stipulating that even a single African ancestor was plenty to make a person black, non white—and legally a slave if born to a slave mother—no matter how afar that ancestor or how white-looking the bailiwick. The Octoroon offers a challenge to the one-driblet rule by asking white Americans, Can't you come across that this person, whom the police and social convention care for as a slave and practically a different species, is in fact just like us? This same visual argument is made in a Ceremonious War–era photograph, "White and Black Slaves" (fig. 11).  Fig. eleven. Kimball: subjects unknown ("White and Black Slaves"),carte-de-visite, 1863. Drove of Greg French. The subjects here are liberated slaves from New Orleans—of varying shades of peel color. The forcefulness of the title is the notion that the visual marker of skin color makes no sense as an indicator of race—and that, by extension, race itself makes no sense equally a concept by which to organize gild. "Slaves from New Orleans," in which a very nighttime-skinned adult man reads with three lighter-skinned children, makes the aforementioned statement once again: race and skin tone make no difference to the essential and universal dignity of human being beings, all of whom deserve and are capable of instruction and uplift. Photographs like this tin teach us almost the fundamental ambiguity of race: race is an bogus, not a natural, category, but one time convention gives it a social reality, race tin brand a terrible divergence (fig.12).  Fig. 12. Lensman unknown:Wilson [Chinn], Charley, Rebecca, and Rosa ("Learning Is Wealth"), carte-de-visite, c. 1863. Collection of Greg French.Some images present difficulties for Douglass's hope that photography would serve equally an unambiguous language of freedom. For example, consider this portrait of a slave from Missouri (fig. 13).  Fig. thirteen. Photographer unknown: subject unknown but identified every bit Richard's Family unit slave, Monticello (Lewis Canton), Missouri, quarter-plate daguerreotype, c.  1850. Collection of Greg French.  The elderly man has been posed with a hoe, a symbol of his servitude, and a basket of  produce at his side. We take to wonder: why did his owner make this portrait? Because given the social conventions of the time, it would accept been most unheard of for a slave to commission and buy a portrait of himself. Was it a mark of the owner's affection for this aging slave? As a token of the principal'due south wealth and success? Other portraits of servants, whether slave or free, likewise bear witness to a muted strength that speaks at the edges, as it were, of the subject matter of the photograph. The intended subject of this photo (fig. xiv) is patently the wealthy white adult female at the center; she or her family has paid for this portrait, and she has come with her dog and her retainer to demonstrate her genteel status. The woman'south attention is focused on the canis familiaris, not the person directly abreast her, and yet information technology is the retainer who meets our eye and makes human being contact, a connection that her mistress refuses to her. Fig. fourteen. Photographer unknown: subjects unknown, quarter-plate ambrotype,c. 1857–61. Collection of Greg French. Something similar takes identify in this antebellum "nanny portrait," in which the intended subject area is the white kid, and the client includes the family's black slave or servant to indicate a class status: we are rich enough to beget this nanny (fig. 15).  Fig. 15. Photographer unknown: subjects unknown, quarter-plate ambrotype, c. 1857–61. Collection of Greg French. Here, the immature nanny (perchance a slave, possibly a servant) meets our gaze. Her demeanor, with her easily folded protectively beyond the squirming toddler in her lap, is not one of disobedience merely rather of reserved supportiveness. But what exercise we make of the extraordinary element of the human being hair sealed nether the glass, between the brass mat and the image, arranged equally a kind of halo around the two figures? Mayhap information technology is the child's, but it has the texture of an adult's hair rather than the wisps of a toddler. If the hair is the nanny's, and then that surely indicates the of import identify she held in the family, notwithstanding subordinate. Three images from the Civil War era illustrate the national argue over
the line betwixt black and white (figs. 16, 17, 18). Fig. 16. Kimball: Wilson Chinn, carte-de-visite, 1863. Collection of Greg French. Fig. 17. Kimball: Isaac and Rosa, carte-de-visite, 1863.Collection of Greg French. Fig. 18. Photographer unknown: subjects unknown, menu-de-visite, c. 1861–65.  Collection of Greg French. All are cartes-de-visite, the products of a photographic procedure that immune for mass reproduction, whether for sale at a profit or for raising charitable funds. Printed text on the reverse of the first two cards—of the branded slave, Wilson Chinn, and of the emancipated children, Isaac and Rosa—reads: "The proceeds from the sale of these Photographs will be devoted exclusively to the educational activity of colored people in the Department of the Gulf, now nether the command of Major-Full general Banks." These two cards represent one contemporary interpretation of the goals of the war: on the one hand, to stop the outrage of slavery perpetrated on men like Wilson Chinn (who is, past the way, the same Wilson as in Figure 12), and, on the other, to right a historical injustice past giving the liberated slaves a future as productive citizens of the nation. The third image is more than ambiguous. No maker takes credit for it, as the photographer Kimball does on the other 2. The photo depicts two youths in horrendously tattered rags. They are near certainly contrabands—slaves who accept taken the opportunity of war to escape from their masters to seek refuge with the advancing Union armies. Below the portrait someone has written in pencil, "All men are created equal." This direct quotation from the Declaration of Independence seems to support the abolitionist position on the war—until 1 turns the menu over and reads farther: "This is not exaggerated in the least—: non i out of ten of the niggers hither, who take run away from their masters (and there are thousands of them) tin can boast of such good clothes. Shove them into the regular army, I say, and allow them practise the fighting in this hot Department." This was probably written by a Union soldier who bought the card at the front end from a camp merchant and sent information technology habitation in the post. His caption about "all men" beingness created equal is at best darkly ironic; he clearly refuses to take equality with these unfortunates, thereby repudiating the idealistic interpretation of the American founding as truly universalistic. While Frederick Douglass wanted former slaves to fight to affirm and confirm their dignity and equality equally citizens, this anonymous writer wants them to fight purely because he sees them as expendable—and precisely because he deems them beneath human dignity. This is the tragic and enduring contradiction of race as represented in antebellum photographs: the same image can agitate at one time pity and righteous indignation or contempt and arrogant dismissal. Perhaps information technology is too much to inquire for an prototype alone to conquer the prejudices that nosotros bring to bear in our seeing. Consider this tintype produced effectually the finish of the Ceremonious War period: information technology depicts a grinning white homo in greasepaint (fig. nineteen).  Fig. 19. Hathaway:subject unknown, gem tintype in paper mat, c. 1865. Collection of Gregory Fried.  Although the Jim Crow graphic symbol as a feature of minstrel shows became popular in the generation before the Civil War, early on photographic images of people in blackface are quite rare. Of course, minstrelsy "sees" the darkness of the African complexion. But by appropriating that complexion and superimposing it upon a white face up—whose whiteness the viewer is never really meant to forget—all the participants in the operation of minstrelsy, both actors and viewers alike, attempt to make invisible the human dignity of the truly black faces who share their world and whose presence calls out for equality.The Ceremonious State of war concluded slavery, every bit Douglass had hoped, just Reconstruction failed to requite former slaves the civic equality that Douglass believed the Proclamation of Independence required as due to all human beings. Instead, at that place descended the long night of Jim Crow segregation, enforced by the terror of lynching.

Was Frederick Douglass naive to hope for a revelation of human dignity from photography? Only if we believe that the failures of the past must exist our failures, also. We can look advisedly at these portraits. We can search in them for the echoes of man presence. We can affirm, gloat, and restore the subconscious, the neglected, and the bearding. In this style, their past can be our nowadays. And our time to come. Douglass said that we tin can "see what ought to exist by the reflection of what is, and endeavour to remove the contradiction," and surely it is non too tardily for idealism like that. We are still the picture-making animate being that can envision a future past seeing the present clearly in reflection on the past.

***

The author wishes to thank his colleague and friend, Greg French, for permission to employ so many images from his collection. This essay originally appeared in the online journal Common-place, vol. ii, no. two, January 2002, and is reprinted here with permission.

Farther Reading:

See F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation'due south Definition (Academy Park, Pennyslvania, 1991);  Frederick Douglass, "Life Pictures," holograph dated 1861, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, microfilm accretion no. 16377, reel 14, frames 394–412; Frederick Douglass, "Pictures and Progress," in John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. one, vol. 3 (New Oasis, 1979–92); Merry A. Forresta and John Woods, eds., Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype (Washington, DC, 1995); O. Henry Mace, Collectors' Guide to Early on Photographs, 2d ed. (Iola, Wisconsin, 1999); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993); Beaumont Newhall, The Daguerreotype in America, 3d ed. (New York, 1976), and The History of Photography, 5th ed. (New York, 1994); John Stauffer, "Race and Gimmicky Photography: Willie Robert Middlebrook and the Legacy of Frederick Douglass," in John Wood, ed., The Journal of Contemporary Photography: Civilisation and Criticism (Brewster, Massachusetts, n.d.); Colin Westerbeck, "Frederick Douglass Chooses His Moment" in Susan F. Rossen, ed., African Americans in Art (Chicago, 1999).

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