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Exposing Slavery - Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (Hardcover)
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Exposing Slavery - Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (Hardcover)
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Within a few years of the invention of the first commercially
successful photography process in 1839, American slaveholders had
already begun commissioning photographic portraits of their slaves.
Ex-slaves-turned-abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass also came
to see how sitting for a portrait could help them project humanity
and dignity amidst northern racism. In the first decade of the
medium, enslaved people had begun entering southern daguerreotype
saloons of their own volition, posing for cameras, and leaving with
visual treasures they could keep in their pockets. And, as the
Civil War raged, Union soldiers would orchestrate pictures with
fugitive slaves that envisioned racial hierarchy as slavery fell.
In these ways and others, from the earliest days of the medium to
the first moments of emancipation, photography powerfully
influenced how bondage and freedom were documented, imagined, and
contested. By 1865, it would be difficult for many Americans to
look back upon slavery and its fall without thinking of a
photograph. This book explores how photography altered, and was in
turn shaped by, conflicts over bondage. Drawing upon an original
source base that includes hundreds of unpublished and
little-studied photographs of slaves, ex-slaves, and abolitionists
as well as written archival materials, it puts visual culture at
the center of understanding the experience of late slavery. It
assesses how photography helped southerners to defend slavery,
slaves to shape their social ties, abolitionists to strengthen
their movement, and soldiers to imagine and pictorially enact an
interracial society during the Civil War. With diverse goals, these
peoples transformed photography from a scientific curiosity (in the
early 1840s) into a political tool (by the 1860s). While this
project sheds new light on conflicts over late American slavery, it
also reveals a key moment in the much broader historical
relationship between modern visual culture and racialized forms of
power and resistance.
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