Free Black North (review)

Free Black Northexhibited tintype, ambrotype, and cabinet-card portraiture of Black individuals in southwestern Ontario between 1860 and 1890, showcasing the role that photography played in the articulation of identity among these communities and complicating the narrative of Canada as a sanctuary for fugitives escaping slavery via the Underground Railroad. The 30 photographic objects on display were pulled from two archival collections: the Alvin McCurdy Fonds at the Archives of Ontario, Toronto, and the Richard Bell Family Fonds at the Brock University Archives in St. Catharines. McCurdy and Bell – descendants of freemen and formerly enslaved individuals, respectively – collected and preserved photographic materials related to their family’s genealogy and the larger Black community of southwestern Ontario. In her first exhibition as Assistant Curator of Photography with the Art Gallery of Ontario, Julie Crooks used the archival sourcing of these photographs to critically engage with the historiography of Afro-diasporic communities in Canada.

Rather symbolically, in order to get to the Robert and Cheryl McEwan Gallery, where Free Black Northwas shown, visitors had to walk through the Edmond G. Odette Family Gallery. Here, ethnographic portraits by French photographer Jacques-Philippe Potteau are featured prominently in a display of 19th-century photographic objects from Europe’s colonial projects in India, Myanmar, and Egypt. Potteau’s portraits typify anthropological photography of the time, in their mug shot–like front and profile views of sitters from North Africa and Asia. The original captions are reprinted alongside each portrait, listing the name, nationality, gender, and brief physical description of each sitter. Potteau’s taxonomical series reminds viewers of the pervasiveness of visual representation as a tool that anthropologists and eugenicists use to construct narratives of criminality, exoticism, and inferiority among racialized peoples in order to justify colonial rule. Free Black Northoffered a corrective to these ethnographic portraits: in the intimate exhibit, each sitter deflected the reifying gaze with an interiority not granted to racialized individuals within photography’s racist past. Put in conversation with one another, these exhibits offer a critical inroad, reminding the viewer that photography did not emerge from a social or political vacuum, but was governed by prevailing attitudes toward race, gender, and nation.

Viewed within this context, Free Black Northcountered colonial objectification by positioning the studio portrait as a site of articulation of personal and social aspirations among racialized communities. This was reiterated in a caption for one of the photographs, which described how, for formerly enslaved individuals and their descendants, portraiture and the control of composition, pose, and backdrop are “critical acts of self-presentation.” The displayed portraits adhered to the genre conventions of the era, the sitters positioned around parlour furniture, classical columns, and textured drapery, with backdrops depicting Victorian domesticity or idyllic forested landscapes. Repeated use of props, dress, and poses were codified signifiers of middle-class gentility and self- reliance – instrumental in reflecting interiority through external appearance. For instance, in a tintype titled “Man with Newspaper,” the sitter poses cross-legged in front of a monotone-drapery backdrop, his only prop a folded newspaper held on his lap – a badge of his literacy and intellect. Similarly, in the tintype “Two Women with Niagara Falls Backdrop” (figure 1), a pair of meticulously dressed sitters, accessorized with hats, a parasol, and fans, and bearing a familial likeness, casually pose in front of a painted backdrop. Contesting the gendered stereotype of Black women as labourers or domestic workers, this photograph depicts sophisticated and genteel women, their elaborately layered costumes reflecting their social status and individuation. This portrait is a striking counter to the positioning of enslaved Black women as possessions in antebellum-era portraits of prominent white slave-owning families, where they are visual signifiers of their owner’s rank within the propertied class. Within the context of delimiting and derogatory representations of Blackness – as a slave caricature, ethnographic object, savage, or criminal type – portraits like those displayed in Free Black Northhelp to construct new racial epistemologies with carefully cultivated self-representations. Through the photographic archive, Free Black...