Stauffer John - Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Centurys Most Photographed American

PICTURING

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

For

Nettie Washington Douglass
Alan Trachtenberg
Donna Wells

Contents

F rederick Douglass was in love with photography. During the four years of civil war, he wrote more extensively on photography than any other American, even while recognizing that his audiences were riveted to the war and wanted a speech only on this mighty struggle. He frequented photographers studios and sat for his portrait whenever he could. As a result of this passion, he also became the most photographed American of the nineteenth century.

It may seem strange, if not implausible, to assert that a black man and former slave wrote more extensively on photography, and sat for his portrait more frequently, than any of his American peers. But he did. Douglass gave four separate talks on photography (Lecture on Pictures, Life Pictures, Age of Pictures, and Pictures and Progress), whereas Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Boston physician and writer who is generally considered the most prolific Civil Warera photo critic, penned only three.

Douglasss passion for photography, however, has been largely ignored. Yet, because his photographic passion has been almost completely forgotten, historians have missed an important question: why was a man who devoted his life to ending slavery and racism and championing civil rights so in love with photography?

The first part of the answer is that Douglass embraced photography as a great democratic art. More than once he praised Louis Daguerre, the founder of the first popular form of photography, the daguerreotype, and hailed him as the great discoverer of modern times, to whom coming generations will award special homage.... What was once the special and exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now the privilege of all. The humblest servant girl may now possess a picture of herself such as the wealth of kings could not purchase fifty years ago.

He wrote this after he and photography had come of age together. Born in February 1818, Douglass escaped from slavery on September 3, 1838, a year before Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot created the first forms of photography. For the rest of his life, he would mark his new birth of freedom by celebrating it in place of his unknown birthday. He began his career as an abolitionist orator in 1841, just as technical improvements reduced exposure times, enabling the proliferation of daguerreotype portraits. Portraits fueled the demand for photography and constituted over 90 percent of all images in the mediums first five decades.

He first sat for a photograph, a daguerreotype, around 1841 (see plate 1). After publishing his best-selling autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , in 1845, he lectured throughout the British Isles for two years. There he received his legal freedom and was introduced to the Illustrated London News , the worlds first (and hugely successful) pictorial weekly. The Illustrated disseminated photographs and sketches by cutting engravings from them, enabling readers to receive the news visually for the first time. In 1846, Douglass was twice featured in the paper (see plates 2.3 & 2.4), and when he returned to the United States in 1847 to launch his own newspaper, The North Star , it was increasingly common for books to be illustrated with frontispiece engravings cut from photographs. Four years later, the American illustrated press was launched in Boston with Gleasons Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion , followed by the wildly popular Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper in 1855 and Harpers Weekly in 1857. By then, there were photographic studios in every city, county, and territory in the free states, and new forms of photography to choose from, notably the tintype and ambrotype. Virtually every Northerner could afford to have his or her portrait taken.

From the 1850s on, the free states enjoyed a love affair with photography that surpassed every other nation on earth. The American South, however, lacked the cities, roads, entrepreneurship, and other aspects of a capitalist infrastructure that enabled photography to flourish in the North. Moreover, in their efforts to defend slavery, Southerners suppressed freedoms of speech, debate, and the press, including photography and visual images.

Douglass quickly recognized this close connection between photography and freedom. He defined himself as a free man and citizen as much through his portraits as his words. The democratic art of photography echoed the freedom articulated in the nations founding document. His own freedom had coincided with the birth of photography, and he became one of its greatest boosters.

The second reason for Douglasss love of photography is that he believed in its truth value, or objectivity. Much as his Bible referred to an unseen but living God, a photograph accurately captured a moment in time and space. Even more than truth-telling, the truthful image represented abolitionists greatest weapon, for it gave the lie to slavery as a benevolent institution and exposed it as a dehumanizing horror. Like slave narratives (Douglass was a master of the genre), photographic portraits bore witness to African Americans essential humanity, while also countering the racist caricatures that proliferated throughout the North.

Douglass paid close attention to such caricatures. He noted with scorn in 1872: I was once advertised in a very respectable newspaper under a little figure, bent over and apparently in a hurry, with a pack on his shoulder, going North. And he was all too familiar with the wider tendency toward racist depictions of African Americans: We colored men so often see ourselves described and painted as monkeys, that we think it a great piece of good fortune to find an exception to this general rule, he wrote in 1870.

Photographers recognized that their medium liedmany self-consciously manipulated the image, solarizing it, airbrushing out unwanted subjects, or distorting it in other ways. But Douglass and most patrons of the art believed that the camera told the truth. Even in the hands of a racist white, it simultaneously created an authentic portrait and a work of art. Neither Douglass nor his peers recognized any contradiction between photography as an art and as a technology.

Thirdly, Douglass believed that photography highlighted the essential humanity of its subjects. This was because of the mediums ability to produce portraits for the millions. Influenced by Aristotles Poetics and the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, Douglass argued that humans proclivity for pictures is what distinguished them from animals: Man is the only picture-making animal in the world. He alone of all the inhabitants of earth has the capacity and passion for pictures.

Emphasizing the humanity of all people was central to Douglasss reform vision, since most white Americans believed that blacks were innately inferior, lacking in reason and rational thought. Furthering that view were the ethnologists (precursors of anthropologists), who argued that blacks had smaller craniums, and brains, than whites, and thus lacked whites cognitive abilities. In an 1854 speech, Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered, Douglass engaged ethnologists methods of comparing craniums and blacks and whites comparative capacities for reason, but with limited success. After his awakening to the philosophical power of photography, however, he dismissed the ethnologists methods out of hand. Dogs and elephants are said to possess reason, he says. But they lack imagination, the realm of thought enabling humans to create pictures of themselves and their world. Douglass exposed the ethnologists faulty method of analysis: they profess some difficulty in finding a fixed, unvarying, and definite line separating... the lowest variety of our species, always meaning the Negrofrom the highest animal. The line separating humans from other animals was quite clear, Douglass emphasized, as philosophers from Aristotle forward had acknowledged: man is everywhere a picture-making animal and the only picture-making animal in the world. The rudest and remotest tribes of men manifest this great human power and thus vindicate the brotherhood of man. The picture-making power was a sublime, prophetic, and all-creative power.