Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity ed. by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith (review)

Editors Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith have assembled a provocative collection of essays for Pictures and Progress—Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. Readers familiar with nineteenth-century literary and visual culture will recognize the visages of Ellen Craft and Louisa Picquet from portraits printed in their narratives of escaping Euroamerican captivity. Seen again are cartes de visite that were “the shadow” Sojourner Truth sold to “support the substance” of an abolitionist career, and photographs with which Ida B. Wells waged her antilynching campaign fifty years later. Having emerged from a Harvard museum vault, previously unpublished daguerreotypes of slaves reveal an unsettling collaboration between photography and midcentury pseudoscience. An album of tintypes, emissary from an African American everyfamily of the 1870s, is rescued from anonymity into the protective care of an art historian.

Whether the images under consideration within Pictures and Progress were revered or barely noticed, influential or disregarded, the essayists are tasked to inquire how, as Wallace and Smith pose in their introduction, “The photograph became a key site through which a new identity could be produced and promulgated.” Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and others less famous “may not have been photographers,” they write; however, “it is fair to say that they practiced photography” (4). By sitting for portraits, mounting photographs of loved ones into parlor books, documenting events, or pursuing a livelihood behind the camera, African Americans embraced the new technology to conceive and sustain a self of their own making in myriad ways.

This compilation, state editors Wallace and Smith, “seeks to understand the many different meanings African Americans accorded photography and the variety of effects photography had on racialized thinking” (9). To this end, eleven scholars, gleaned from diverse disciplines, produced case studies based on representative photographs “to illuminate the historically understated influence of photography on African American cultural, political, and expressive productions” (9). The title Pictures and Progress comes from a lecture Frederick Douglass gave December 3, 1861, in which he analogized that the progressive advances of photography offered a “right vision” which might undermine slavery. Aptly, Douglass is the focus of the first chapter, as Laura Wexler elaborates on his term “picture makers,” a category in which he included “poets, prophets and reformers” whom he hoped would “see what ought to be by their reflections of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction” (29). Picture making was “the process by which man is able to invest his own subjective consciousness, into the objective form,” he said (24). Readers will recognize Douglass in the same pose over four decades as being conventional in a style Wexler calls the “canon of ‘Illustrious’ men,” referring to the lithographs of daguerreotypes in Mathew Brady’s 1850 “Gallery of Illustrious Americans” (36). Yet, with American society then viewing African-descended slaves as less than human, as property, and as the equivalent of only three-fifths of a white person, it is well to pause and recollect that for Douglass, more was at stake than appearing respectable. “His very manhood was the result of a picture-making imagination” (29).

Ginger Hill also writes about Douglass. By 1861, cartes de visite were popular for commercial portraits. The tiny copper-plate daguerreotypes that reigned since 1840 had required long exposures and immovable subjects, best suited for a bust portrait. Even with the more flexible carte technology, allowing for full-figure poses, seated or standing relaxed, Douglass continued to favor formal head-and-shoulders poses. For him, the “solitary portrait reinstates the myth of possessive individualism,” notes Hill (69). She returns to Douglass’s words from the 1861 speech: “The process by which man is able to posses[s] his own subjective nature outside of himself—giving it forms, color, space, and all the attributes of distinct personalities—so that it becomes the...