"Photographs like this can teach us about the fundamental ambiguity of race: it is conventional, not a natural category, but once convention gives race a social reality, race can make a terrible difference."

True Pictures
Gregory Fried

Part I | II | III | IV | V
Early Photographic Techniques

As F. James Davis has explained so well in Who Is Black?, the American categorization of race is unique in the world. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in reaction to the threat of abolition and to the fact of interbreeding between whites and blacks, the United States had developed the so-called "one drop rule," stipulating that even a single African ancestor was enough to make a person black, not white--and legally a slave if born to a slave mother--no matter how distant that ancestor or how white-looking the subject.

The Octoroon offers a challenge to the one drop rule by asking white Americans, Can't you see that this person, whom the law and social convention treats as a slave and nearly another species from us, is in fact just like us? This same visual argument is made in a Civil War era photograph, "White and Black Slaves" (fig. 11).

Fig. 11. Kimball: subjects unknown ("White and Black Slaves"), carte de visite, 1863. Collection of Greg French.

The subjects here are liberated slaves from New Orleans--of very different skin color. The force of the title is the notion that the visual marker of skin color makes no sense as an indicator of race--and that, by extension, race itself makes no sense as a concept by which to organize society. "Slaves from New Orleans," in which a very dark-skinned adult man reads with three lighter-skinned children, makes the same argument again: race and skin tone make no difference to the essential and universal dignity of human beings, all of whom deserve and are capable of education and uplift. Photographs like this can teach us about the fundamental ambiguity of race: it is conventional, not a natural category, but once convention gives race a social reality, race can make a terrible difference (fig. 12).

Fig. 12. Photographer unknown: Wilson [Chinn], Charley, Rebecca, and Rosa ("Learning Is Wealth"), carte de visite, c. 1863. Collection of Greg French.

Some images present difficulties for Douglass's hope that photography would serve as an unambiguous language of freedom. For example, consider this portrait of a slave from Missouri (fig. 13).

Fig. 13. Photographer unknown: subject unknown but identified as Richard's Family slave, Monticello (Lewis County), Missouri, quarter plate daguerreotype, c. 1850. Collection of Greg French.

The elderly man has been posed with a hoe, a symbol of his servitude, and a basket of produce at his side. We have to wonder: why did his owner make this portrait? As a mark of affection for this aging slave? As a token of the master's wealth and success? Other portraits of servants, whether slave or free, also bear witness to a muted strength that speaks at the edges, as it were, of the subject matter of the photograph. The intended subject of this photograph (fig. 14) is obviously the wealthy white woman at the center; she or her family has paid for this portrait, and she has come with her dog and her servant to demonstrate her genteel status. The woman's attention is focused on the dog, not the person directly beside her, and yet it is the servant who meets our eye and makes human contact, a connection that her mistress refuses to her.

Fig. 14. Photographer unknown: subjects unknown, quarter plate ambrotype, c. 1857-61. Collection of Greg French.

Something similar takes place in this antebellum "nanny portrait," in which the intended subject is the white child, and the client includes the family's black slave or servant to indicate a class status: we are rich enough to afford this nanny (fig. 15).

Fig. 15. Photographer unknown: subjects unknown, quarter plate ambrotype, c. 1857-61. Collection of Greg French.

Here, the young nanny (possibly a slave, possibly a servant) meets our gaze. Her demeanor, with her hands folded protectively across the squirming toddler in her lap, is not one of defiance but rather of reserved supportiveness. But what do we make of the extraordinary element of the human hair sealed under the glass, between the brass mat and the image, arranged as a kind of halo around the two figures? Perhaps it is the child's, but it has the texture of an adult's hair rather than the wisps of a toddler. If the hair is the nanny's, then, that surely indicates the important place she held in the family, however subordinate.