"This is the tragic and enduring contradiction of race as represented in antebellum photographs: the same image can arouse at once pity and righteous indignation or contempt and arrogant dismissal."

True Pictures
Gregory Fried

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

Three images from the Civil War era illustrate the national debate over the line between black and white (figs. 16, 17, 18).

Fig. 16. Kimball: Wilson Chinn, carte de visite, 1863. Collection of Greg French.

Fig. 17. Kimball: Isaac and Rosa, carte de visite, 1863. Collection of Greg French.

Fig. 18. Photographer unknown: subjects unknown, carte de visite, c. 1861-65. Collection of Greg French.

All are cartes de visite, the products of a photographic process that allowed for mass reproduction, whether for sale at a profit or for raising charitable funds. Printed text on the reverse of the first two cards--of the branded slave, Wilson Chinn, and of the emancipated children, Isaac and Rosa--reads: "The proceeds from the sale of these Photographs will be devoted exclusively to the education of colored people in the Department of the Gulf, now under the command of Major-General Banks." These two cards represent one contemporary interpretation of the goals of the war: on the one hand, to end the outrage of slavery perpetrated on men like Wilson Chinn (who is, by the way, the same Wilson as in Figure 12), and, on the other, to right an historical injustice by giving the liberated slaves a future as productive citizens of the nation.

The third image is more ambiguous. No maker takes credit for it, as the photographer Kimball does on the other two. The photograph depicts two youths in horrendously tattered rags. They are almost certainly contrabands--slaves who have taken the opportunity of war to escape from their masters to seek refuge with the advancing Union armies. Beneath the portrait someone has written in pencil, "All men are created equal." This direct quotation from the Declaration of Independence seems to support the abolitionist position on the war--until one turns the card over and reads further: "This is not exaggerated in the least -- : not one out of ten of the niggers here, who have run away from their masters (and there are thousands of them) can boast of such good clothes. Shove them into the army, I say, and let them do the fighting in this hot Department." This was probably written by a Union soldier who bought the card at the front from a camp merchant and sent it home in the mail. His caption about "all men" being created equal is at best darkly ironic; he clearly refuses to accept equality with these unfortunates, thereby repudiating the idealistic interpretation of the American founding as truly universalistic. While Frederick Douglass wanted former slaves to fight to affirm and confirm their dignity and equality as citizens, this anonymous writer wants them to fight purely because he sees them as expendable--and precisely because he deems them beneath human dignity.

This is the tragic and enduring contradiction of race as represented in antebellum photographs: the same image can arouse at once pity and righteous indignation or contempt and arrogant dismissal. Perhaps it is too much to ask for an image alone to conquer the prejudices that we bring to bear in our seeing. Consider this tintype produced around the end of the Civil War period: it depicts a grinning white man in blackface (fig. 19).

Fig. 19. Hathaway: subject unknown, gem tintype in paper mat, c. 1865. Collection of Gregory Fried.

Although the Jim Crow character as a feature of minstrel shows became popular in the generation before the Civil War, early photographic images of people in blackface are quite rare. Of course, minstrelsy "sees" the darkness of the African complexion. But by appropriating that complexion and superimposing it upon a white face--whose whiteness the viewer is never really meant to forget--all the participants in the performance of minstrelsy, both actors and viewers alike, attempt to make invisible the human dignity of the truly black faces who share their world and whose presence calls out for equality.

The Civil War ended slavery, as Douglass had hoped, but Reconstruction failed to give former slaves the civic equality that Douglass believed the Declaration of Independence required as due to all human beings. Instead, there descended the long night of Jim Crow segregation, enforced by the terror of lynching.

Was Frederick Douglass naive to hope for a revelation of human dignity from photography? Only if we believe that the failures of the past must be our failures, too. We can look carefully at these portraits. We can search in them for the echoes of human presence. We can affirm, celebrate, and restore the hidden, the neglected, and the anonymous. In this way, their past can be our present. And our future. Douglass said that we can "see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction," and surely it is not too late for idealism like that. We are still the picture-making animal that can envision a future by seeing the present clearly in reflection on the past.

The author wishes to thank his colleague and friend, Greg French, for permission to employ so many images from his collection in writing this essay.

Further Reading:

See F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation's Definition (University Park, Pa., 1991); Frederick Douglass, "Life Pictures," holograph dated 1861, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, microfilm accession no. 16377, reel 14, frames 394-412; Frederick Douglass, "Pictures and Progress," in John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1, vol. 3 (New Haven, 1979-92); Merry A. Forresta and John Wood, eds., Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype (Washington, D.C., 1995); O. Henry Mace, Collectors' Guide to Early Photographs, 2d ed. (Iola, Wis., 1999); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993); Beaumont Newhall, The Daguerreotype in America, 3d ed. (New York, 1976) and The History of Photography, 5th ed. (New York, 1994); John Stauffer, "Race and Contemporary Photography: Willie Robert Middlebrook and the Legacy of Frederick Douglass," in John Wood, ed., The Journal of Contemporary Photography: Culture and Criticism (Brewster, Mass., n.d.); Colin Westerbeck, "Frederick Douglass Chooses His Moment" in Susan F. Rossen, ed., African Americans in Art (Chicago, 1999).