Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery by Deborah Willis, Barbara Krauthamer (review)

Envisioning Emancipation is a fascinating interdisciplinary study of the multiple meanings and uses of photography in the nineteenth-century African American freedom struggle. Authors Deborah Willis, professor of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts, and Barbara Krauthamer, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, collect and interpret 150 photographic images from the ante-bellum era through the Great Depression. These include not only famous and familiar images from the Library of Congress but also dozens of lesser-known and previously unpublished photographs from local archives across the United States. Together, the images in this beautiful volume present an intimate portrait of the lives and labors of millions of black Americans who survived slavery.

The authors begin in the antebellum era, situating new photographic technologies in the context of burgeoning plantation slavery and the emerging abolitionist movement. The earliest photographic relics of slavery—a disturbing series of plantation portraits taken under the direction of Louis Agassiz—treated people of African descent as anthropological curiosities whose bodies became emblematic racial “types” to support scientific racism. Meanwhile, southern slaveholders who crafted portraits of enslaved nurses posing with white children attempted to reinforce the idea that slavery was a benign, paternal, and familial institution.

Moving north, the authors analyze how free people of color seized upon the new medium of photography to combat racial prejudice. They expand upon the insights of John Stauffer and Michael Bieze, who have argued that photography played a central role in the self-representation of black activists from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington. They examine the ways in which black activists deliberately crafted their public images by choosing attire, facial expressions, poses, and props that conveyed their dignity and bodily autonomy. The authors also pay particular attention to the photographic self-representation of female activists, such as Charlotte Forten and Sojourner Truth, and how these women used the medium to assert their educational attainment and respectability.

The Civil War and emancipation saw both white and black Americans putting photography to new uses. For white missionaries and military officers from the North, photographs of newly freed slaves served to educate white northern audiences about the conditions in the conquered South. In their view, a photograph of dozens of freed-people congregated around their former master’s house showed continuity between African Americans’ pre- and postwar positions as plantation laborers. For the freedpeople themselves, however, the same photograph reflected different identities and meanings. It showed them as members of families and communities who survived the slave trade and as autonomous individuals who could dress and pose as they pleased.

The book concludes by exploring the photographic legacies of slavery and emancipation into the middle of the twentieth century. Photographs of emancipation day parades and reunions of elderly former slaves reflect the persistent memory of emancipation in black communities and the dignity of slavery’s survivors in the face of (often unspoken) horrors and hardships. Images of lynching victims and prison workers demonstrate the persistence of white supremacist violence and forced labor beyond Reconstruction. Portraits of multigenerational families and the descendants of former slaves show both the transmission of knowledge to future generations and the increasingly distant memory of slavery for younger people.

Across the volume, the authors successfully bring together methods of analysis from both history and the visual arts to show how new styles of visual interpretation can enhance well-worn paths of historical research. Too often, historians treat photographs merely as illustrations for their arguments. Willis and Krauthamer provide a valuable primer in visual literacy that models how photographs themselves can be read for fresh insights into the lives of people who are often mute in the documentary record. In their hands, a photograph of an anonymous black laundress with a US flag pinned to her dress can be read as a testament to freedwomen’s new bodily, labor, and political autonomy. An African American...