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Pictures and Progress explores how, during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, prominent African American intellectuals and activists understood photography's power to shape perceptions about race and employed the new medium in their quest for social and political justice. They sought both to counter widely circulating racist imagery and to use self-representation as a means of empowerment. In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines consider figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois as important and innovative theorists and practitioners of photography. In addition, brief interpretive essays, or "snapshots," highlight and analyze the work of four early African American photographers. Featuring more than seventy images, Pictures and Progress brings to light the wide-ranging practices of early African American photography, as well as the effects of photography on racialized thinking.
Contributors. Michael A. Chaney, Cheryl Finley, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Ginger Hill, Leigh Raiford, Augusta Rohrbach, Ray Sapirstein, Suzanne N. Schneider, Shawn Michelle Smith, Laura Wexler, Maurice O. Wallace
"With its emphasis on the often radical roles that black sitters and makers assumed in the history of photography, Pictures and Progress offers a bold approach to the study of American visual culture, one that places black agency at its center. Its intriguing and persuasive essays elucidate the importance of photography to the creation of free, black personhood in the 19th and early-20th centuries and reveal the myriad and sometimes surprising ways that such hands sought to wield "the pencil of nature" in an effort to assert self-possessed, and therefore revolutionary, subjectivities during an era in which the dominant culture preferred to represent them as otherwise." Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, author of Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century "Pictures and Progress offers a new understanding of visual representations of black Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through its compelling essays, this work reframes the archive of images of death, beauty, and suffering of black subjects in photography." Deborah Willis, New York University
| Acknowledgments | p. vii |
| Introduction Pictures and Progress | p. 1 |
| "A More Perfect Likeness": Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation | p. 18 |
| "Rightly Viewed": Theorizations of Self in Frederick Douglass's Lectures on Pictures | p. 41 |
| Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White | p. 83 |
| Unredeemed Realities: Augustus Washington | p. 101 |
| Mulatta Obscura: Camera Tactics and Linda Brent | p. 109 |
| Who's Your Mama? "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom | p. 132 |
| Out from Behind the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Photographic Performance of Identity | p. 167 |
| Reproducing Black Masculinity: Thomas Askew | p. 204 |
| Louis Agassiz and the American School of Ethnoeroticism: Polygenesis, Pornography, and Other "Perfidious Influences" | p. 211 |
| Framing the Black Soldier: Image, Uplift, and the Duplicity of Pictures | p. 244 |
| Unfixing the Frame(-up): A. P. Bedou | p. 267 |
| "Looking at One's Self through the Eyes of Others": W. E. B. Du Bois's Photographs for the Paris Exposition of 1900 | p. 274 |
| Ida B. "Wells and the Shadow Archive | p. 299 |
| The Photographer's Touch: J. P. Ball | p. 321 |
| No More Auction Block for Me! | p. 329 |
| Bibliography | p. 349 |
| Contributors | p. 369 |
| Index | p. 373 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
ISBN: 9780822350859
ISBN-10: 0822350858
Audience:
Professional
Format:
Paperback
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 408
Published: 19th June 2012
Dimensions (cm): 23.4 x 15.5
x 2.8
Weight (kg): 0.703
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