Details From the Fogg Museum: Boston, Massachusetts

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY/SMITHSONIAN

When I came home from the Fogg Museum and looked through the pictures I’d taken there, I found a close-up of Sojourner Truth’s face, her eyes magnified by her glasses. At the museum, I missed this distortion, but the face I didn’t know I was seeing must have been part of what convinced me that the photograph was one of rare dignity and power. The ghostliness of photographs is often written about, but in this case the subject herself has brought up the subject. // The photograph was made into a carte de visite, a visiting card, such as one might give to friends, or sell, which was what Sojourner Truth chose to do with the photo. To that end, she chose a sentence for the bottom of the card, which reads: “I sell the shadow to support the substance.” Apparently, this would have been a widely understood play on words: Photographers at the time used to encourage people to have their portraits taken by using the phrase “secure the shadow ’ere the substance fade.” Photography is one inversion after another. Put yourself into a photograph and that self will be preserved while your substantial self fades away. But then Truth inverts this again: The lasting shadow is primarily to be put to use for the changing, but real, substance—herself, Truth. Truth’s first language was Dutch. She dictated her autobiography because she could not read or write. But she named herself. She was a master of the English language and of the possible inversions of history. Nothing could be more formidable than what she said of the sale of these cards before a human-rights convention—as someone who was there remembered it and wrote it down—that she “used to be sold for other people’s benefit and now she sold herself for her own.”