Pictures and Progress

Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity

Autor: Wallace, Maurice O.; Smith, Shawn Michelle
Editor: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822350675
eISBN Pdf: 9780822394563
Lloc de publicació: Durham , United States
Any de publicació digital: 2012
Mes: Juny
Pàgines: 400
DDC: 770.89/96073
Idioma: Anglés

Descripció

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

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Pictures and Progress - Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith
One: “A More Perfect Likeness”: Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation - Laura Wexler
Two: “Rightly Viewed”: Theorizations of Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lectures on Pictures - Ginger Hill
Three: Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White - Augusta Rohrbach
Snapshot 1: Unredeemed Realities: Augustus Washington - Shawn Michelle Smith
Four: Mulatta Obscura: Camera Tactics and Linda Brent - Michael Chaney
Five: Who’s Your Mama? “White” Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom - P. Gabrielle Foreman
Six: Out from Behind the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Photographic Performance of Identity - Ray Sapirstein
Snapshot 2: Reproducing Black Masculinity: Thomas Askew - Shawn Michelle Smith
Seven: Louis Agassiz and the American Schoolof Ethnoeroticism: Polygenesis, Pornography, and Other “Perfidious Influences” - Suzanne Schneider
Eight: Framing the Black Soldier: Image, Uplift, and the Duplicity of Pictures - Maurice O. Wallace
Snapshot 3: Unfixing the Frame(-up): A. P. Bedou - Shawn Michelle Smith
Nine: “Looking at One’s Self through the Eyes of Others”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Photographs for the Paris Exposition of 1900 - Shawn Michelle Smith
Ten: Ida B. Wells and the Shadow Archive - Leigh Raiford
Snapshot 4: The Photographer’s Touch: J. P. Ball - Shawn Michelle Smith
Eleven: No More Auction Block for Me! - Cheryl Finley
Bibliography
Contributors
Index