Image: By Luke Christie, PhD Candidate, Department of Communication, University of Georgia Most often remembered for opening the eyes of thousands to the horrors of slavery with his passionate speeches and masterful prose, Frederick Douglass was also the most photographed American, Black or white, of the nineteenth century. He was a firm believer in photography’s power to reproduce objectively scenes that otherwise had to be witnessed firsthand. He saw photography as a powerful tool for making visible, to persons far outside the American South, the daily injustices of slavery. At the same time, Douglass touted photography as a means of Black self-empowerment, a medium through which Black people might imagine and project new identities as free persons with the same moral and intellectual endowments as white people. Portrait photography, Douglass said, provided all people a way of “making ourselves objective to ourselves.” It enabled us to gaze upon our own features, and the inner character nineteenth-century thinkers believed such features represented, “as though looking in a glass.” For Douglass, this self-reflexive practice of viewing ourselves from without initiated a process of personal betterment that, in turn, motivated social criticism. And criticism, believed Douglass, was at the root of all progress: “Where there is no criticism there is no progress, for the want of progress is not felt where such want is not made visible by criticism.” This, then, was the extraordinary power of photography: As a medium for both reflecting reality and projecting imagined alternatives, photography made visible society’s “defects” by revealing “what ought to be” through its “reflection of what is.” To date, scholars have discovered one hundred sixty-eight unique portraits of Douglass, spanning the duration of his fifty-year public career. The portrait above, one of several digitized by the Library of Congress, was taken in Philadelphia on April 26, 1870, by the photographer George Francis Schreiber. In it, the mid-career Douglass is featured wearing a suit and gazing toward the right side of the frame, a typical composition for nineteenth-century portraits. The quoted portions above are from Douglass’s lecture, “Pictures and Progress.” View the original manuscript here: https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.28009/ Suggestions for Further Reading Bernier, Celeste-Marie. “A ‘Typical Negro’ or a ‘Work of Art’? The ‘Inner’ via the ‘Outer Man’ in Frederick Douglass’s Manuscripts and Daguerreotypes.” Slavery & Abolition 33, no. 2 (2012): 287–303. Blackwood, Sarah. “Fugitive Obscura: Runaway Slave Portraiture and Early Photographic Technology.” American Literature 81, no. 1 (2009): 93–125. Lawson, Bill E., and Celeste-Marie Bernier, eds. Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass (1818-2018). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. Meehan, Sean Ross. Mediating American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. Stauffer, John, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, eds. Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015. Wallace, Maurice O., and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds. Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
