Circulating Selves: Pictures

as Cultures of ResistanceAfAm 40A, 2009, Week 4

Tuesday, Week 4: Westerbeck and Painter

Guiding Questions:

What were different strategies Truth and Douglass used to fight for social justice?

Why were issues of truth and credibility such significant preoccupations for Truth and Douglass?

How did norms of gender influence Truth’s and Douglass’s self-fashioning?

How/Why do Truth & Douglass continue to be such known and celebrated historical figures today?

Key Terms, Tuesday, Week 4: Westerbeck and Painter

• Fugitive Slave Act of 1850• daguerreotype, carte de visite, & cabinet card• scientific racism: polygenism, phrenology, physiognomy• “specimen photographs” (Painter, 486)• American School of Ethnology• Frederick Douglass• Louis Agassiz• Sojourner Truth• Harriet Beecher Stowe• “invented greats” (Painter, 480)

AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES: “broadly defined, the systematic study of the black experience…it is also the black intellectual tradition as it has challenged and interacted with Western civilization and cultures.”

--Marable, page 49

ART HISTORY: What does the art object look like, and why?

VISUAL STUDIES: How do ACTS OF LOOKING, seeing and being seen, create who we are?

Main theses:1.) Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth consciously tried to control their own public portrait images2.) These were acts of resistance3.) They focused on self creation & affirmation AND debunked racist myths

Main theses:4.) Struggles for freedom and social justice continue even after legal emancipation

WHY PORTRAITS?

George Washington

Thomas Jefferson

James Buchanan (president before Lincoln)

18th and 19th c. Prints from Type Specimen Books

WHY PORTRAITS?

VISUAL FORMATS USED BY DOUGLASS:

• frontispieces (engravings)

• daguerreotypes

• cartes de visite

• cabinet cards

• newspapers

WHY PORTRAITS?

Frontispiece Engraving and Title Page of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

Engraving of Frederick Douglass from book by Wilson Armistead:

A Tribute for the Negro: Being a Vindication of the Moral, Intellectual and Religious Capabilities of the Colored Portion of Mankind; with Particular Reference to the African Race (1848) In a review of the book:

“That of Frederick Douglass…has a much more kindly and amiable expression, than is generally thought to characterize the face of a fugitive slave.”

--Frederick Douglass, 1848

1845 1855

Beneath Image: “ENGRAVED BY J.C. BUTTRE FROM A DAGUERREOTYPE”

WHY PHOTOGRAPHY?

Matthew Brady’s Studio , 1861 (New York)

Printed in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper

Wood engraving

J. P. Ball’sStudio , 1854, Cincinnati OhioWood Engraving

Printed in Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion

Abraham Lincoln, By Matthew Brady1860 & 1863Cartes de visite

Frederick Douglass, Photographer unknownCirca 1855Daguerreotype

Portrait of an Unidentified Woman

ca. 1850 daguerreotype with applied color 7.0 x 5.5 cm.: 1/6 plate Josiah Henson & Wife

c. 1877

Unidentified Man

ca. 1860

WHY PHOTOGRAPHY?

Ad for runaway, By Louis Manigault1863, August, GA (Manigault was from SC)

Daguerreotype1861

“AN INTRODUCTION. By DR. JAMES M’CUNE SMITH”

“[T]he democratic and scientific ideals of the Enlightenment fostered both helpful egalitarianism and the hurtful science (‘scientific racism’) that decreed races as inherently superior and inferior.”

--Nell Painter, Chapter 4, page 64

SCIENTIFIC RACISM

Phrenology

Physiognomy

Polygenism/Polygenesis/Polygeny

Craniometry

Scientific Racism

Louis Agassiz, by Carleton Watkins (c. 1874) Albumen silver print cabinet card

LOUIS AGASSIZ:

“Father of racial science”

Specifically interested in POLYGENY

Peabody Museum of Harvard University

American School of Ethnology (Scientific Racism)Josiah Clark Notts, George Robert Gliddon, Samuel George Morton, and Louis Agassiz

Delia, country born of African parents, daughter of Renty, Congo

Renty, Congo, Plantation of BF Taylor, Esq.

Drana, country born, daughter of Jack, Guinea, plantation of BF Taylor, Esq.Fassena, (carpenter), Mandingo. Plantation of Col. Wade Hampton, near Columbia SC

Portraits taken in SC at request of Louis Agassiz (1850):

Jack (driver), Guinea, Plantation of B.F.Taylor, Esq. Columbia, SC

Louis Agassiz, by Carleton Watkins (c. 1874) Albumen silver print cabinet card

Jack (driver), Guinea, Pantation of B.F.Taylor, Esq. Columbia, SCDaguerreotypeMarch 1850Harvard Peabody Museum

“If the very best type of the European is always presented, I insist that justice, in all such works, demands that the very best type of Negro should also be taken. The importance of this criticism may not be apparent to all;--to the black man it is very apparent. He sees the injustice, and writhes under its sting.”

Frederick Douglass, 1854“The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered: An Address, Before the Literary Societies of Western Reserve College, at Commencement, July 12, 1854 “

The “passion for pictures” should be “safely [re]commended to the Notts and Gliddens who are just now puzzled with the question as to whether the African slave should be treated as a man or an ox…man cannot be measured.”

--Frederick Douglass, “Pictures & Progress,” 1861

THOUGHT PICTURES

“This picture making faculty is …subject to a wild scramble between contending interests and forces. It is a mighty power—and the side to which it goes has achieved a wondrous conquest. For the habits we adopt, the master we obey in making our subjective nature objective…is the all important thing to ourselves and our surroundings.”

--Frederick Douglass, from “Pictures and Progress (1861)”

THOUGHT PICTURES

Portraits substituted for a likeness of Harriet Jacobs

Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth. Org. taken in 1864 portrait session.

The original cabinet card (6 ½ x 4 ¼ inches) read:

“I Sell the Shadow to Support the

SubstanceSOJOURNER

TRUTH”

Also, on the back she had COPYRIGHT printed.

Sojourner Truth. Org. taken in 1864 portrait session.

Note: This is a later version. Truth did NOT have photo labels printed in dialect. The original cabinet card (6 ½ x 4 ¼ inches) read:

Harriet Beecher Stowe, c. 1850

Anna Douglass

Experts in the Field

• Stephen J. Gould, on racist sciences

• Nell Painter, on Sojourner Truth

• Suzanne Schneider, on Agassiz and Zealy

• John Stauffer, on Frederick Douglass & Photography

• Brian Wallis, on Agassiz and Zealy

• Deborah Willis, on African Americans and Photography

• Donna Wells, on Frederick Douglass & Photography

Main theses:• Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth consciously tried to control their own public photographic images• These were acts of resistance• They focused on self creation and affirmation AND debunked racist myths• Struggles for freedom and social justice continue even after legal emancipation

And as Davis, Vlach, and other scholars inform us, there were many other forms of resistance as well.