Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics by Matthew Fox-Amato (review)

How can we "see" the experience of American slavery and the struggle to abolish it? Matthew Fox-Amato's Exposing Slavery presents a powerful argument: the sudden eruption of photography in 1839 allowed Americans of all walks of life to see themselves, and others, in quick constructions of self and situation. Almost instantly, daguerreotypes, tintypes, and photographs joined steam, cheap print and postage, and the telegraph in reconfiguring the relationship between self and society. Exploring a problem that has fallen "through the cracks between history, the history of photography, and art history," Fox-Amato argues that Americans North and South, free and enslaved, used the photograph to engage the contested place of slavery and race in late antebellum America (2).

The four chapters and epilogue in Exposing Slavery present Fox-Amato's argument in simple clarity, exploring how slaveholders, slaves, abolitionists, and soldiers all used photography to present their own interpretations of race, slavery, and freedom. Chapter 1, "Policing Personhood," describes how slaveholders, in part responding to the domestic critique in Uncle Tom's Cabin, made images that reinforced the argument that slavery was a domain of "interracial intimacy and harmony" (67). These images of well-dressed slave nurses and white infants rooted in a religious "Madonna" motif and of trusted slave artisans reinforced the case that a benevolent slavery was a positive good for the union. Means of constructing images of subordination, portraits of slaves were also means to recovering valuable fugitive property.

Slaves, too, were interested in photography. Chapter 2, "Enduring Images," offers a fascinating look at how slaves presented themselves in slaveholder portraits and how cheap photography was a vehicle for self-purchased presentation. Tintypes and daguerreotypes left behind, carried away, or mailed from a distance allowed slaves to see the faces of their kin lost in the slave trade, fundamentally "asserting the sociality and full humanity" in the face of their denial (102). So too, abolitionists black and white deployed photography for presentation of self. Chapter 3, "Realizing Abolition," stresses how photographic images served as talismans of membership in an embattled but virtuous minority cause, depicting both suffering white rebels and fugitives transformed.

The themes of these first chapters echo in different registers through Exposing Slavery's perhaps problematic chapter on Civil War photography, "Domesticating Freedom." Here Fox-Amato's major protagonists are white soldiers, North and South, constructing their visions of race as the end of slavery loomed. Confederate officers sat with household slaves who were serving them at the front, in a gender reversal of the nurse-and-infant images: in time of war, race relations under slavery were still intimate and harmonious. Given the resource differential, far more Union images were made, but these, too, present a form of domesticity. In another echoing reversal of the nurse-and-infant images, Union officers stood or sat in authoritarian poses before their tents, while "contraband" servants knelt or stood behind them in obedient postures. White Northern soldiers were the liberators, but African Americans were constructed as a subordinate and feminized caste. A Northern Jim Crow regime was being crafted and refined during the war for union and emancipation.

Fox-Amato offsets this white domestication of freedom with a brief discussion of the imagery of black manhood and bravery. The photography of black soldiers clearly echoes themes of chapters 2 and 3, as black soldiers visually testified against the institution. However, this offset is unbalanced, and these echoes are undeveloped: we get twenty pages (185–205) and at least eleven illustrations of the domesticating freedom theme and five pages and four illustrations of the black manhood theme. Given the massive volume of photography of black soldiers, perhaps "black bravery" might have been a theme of a separate chapter, despite important recent work. (See especially Ronald S. Coddington, African American Faces of the Civil War: An Album [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2012...