Acknowledgments  vii

Introduction: Pictures and Progress / Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith  1

1. "A More Perfect Likeness": Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation / Laura Wexler  18

2. "Rightly Viewed": Theorizations of the Self in Frederick Douglass's Lecture on Pictures / Ginger Hill  41

3. Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White / Augusta Rohrbach  83

Snapshot 1. Unredeemed Realities: Augustus Washington / Shawn Michelle Smith  101

4. Mulatta Obscura: Camera Tactics and Linda Brent / Michael Chaney  109

5. Who's Your Mama?: "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom / P. Gabrielle Foreman  132

6. Out from Behind the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Photographic Performance of Identity / Ray Sapirstein  167

Snapshot 2. Reproducing Black Masculinity: Thomas Askew / Shawn Michelle Smith  204

7. Louis Agassiz and the American School of Ethnoeroticism: Polygenesis, Pornography, and Other "Perfidious Influences" / Suzanne Schneider  211

8. Framing the Black Soldier: Image, Uplift, and the Duplicity of Pictures / Maurice O. Wallace  244

Snapshot 3. Unfixing the Frame(-up): A. P. Bedou / Shawn Michelle Smith  267

9. "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  274

10. Ida B. Wells and the Shadow Archive / Leigh Raiford  299

Snapshot 4. The Photographer's Touch: J. P. Ball / Shawn Michelle Smith  321

11. No More Auction Block for Me! / Cheryl Finley  329

Bibliography  349

Contributors  369

Index  373

Maurice O. Wallace

Shawn Michelle Smith

Laura Wexler

Ginger Hill

Augusta Rohrbach

Michael Chaney

F. Gabrielle Foreman

Ray Sapirstein

Suzanne Schneider

Leigh Raiford

Cheryl Finley

“I recommend Pictures and Progress for anyone who enjoys reading about the history of photography, African American history, or those who like to consider new ideas about photography as an art form. . . . [O]riginality, fresh ideas and a good pace of content make Pictures and Progress an excellent read.”—Mary Desjarlais, The Photogram

“Pictures and Progress is an edited volume of essays that underscores the role of photography in the production of African American identity during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.... Its contributors are skillful scholars from diverse fields who employ a variety of critical practices to call attention to the cultural, social, and political aspects of early African American photography. These authors seek to disrupt the familiarity of photographs – more a means of persuasion than of proof – and emphasize the plurality of photographic practice during the ante- and postbellum periods.... Pictures and Progress is certainly recommended for art libraries that specialize in the history of photography or visual and material culture studies.”—Molly E. Dotson, Art Library Society of North America

“[A] nuanced collection of essays. . . . that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of African Americans’ uses of photography in public dialogue by and about African Americans in the postemancipation era.”—Tammy S. Gordon, History: Reviews of New Books

“I recommend Pictures and Progress for anyone who enjoys reading about the history of photography, African American history, or those who like to consider new ideas about photography as an art form. . . . [O]riginality, fresh ideas and a good pace of content make Pictures and Progress an excellent read.”—Mary Desjarlais, The Photogram

“Pictures and Progress is an edited volume of essays that underscores the role of photography in the production of African American identity during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.... Its contributors are skillful scholars from diverse fields who employ a variety of critical practices to call attention to the cultural, social, and political aspects of early African American photography. These authors seek to disrupt the familiarity of photographs – more a means of persuasion than of proof – and emphasize the plurality of photographic practice during the ante- and postbellum periods.... Pictures and Progress is certainly recommended for art libraries that specialize in the history of photography or visual and material culture studies.”—Molly E. Dotson, Art Library Society of North America

“[A] nuanced collection of essays. . . . that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of African Americans’ uses of photography in public dialogue by and about African Americans in the postemancipation era.”—Tammy S. Gordon, History: Reviews of New Books

“Pictures and Progress offers a new understanding of visual representations of black Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through its compelling essays, this work reframes the archive of images of death, beauty, and suffering of black subjects in photography.”—Deborah Willis, New York University

“With its emphasis on the often radical roles that black sitters and makers assumed in the history of photography, Pictures and Progress offers a bold approach to the study of American visual culture, one that places black agency at its center. Its intriguing and persuasive essays elucidate the importance of photography to the creation of free, black personhood in the 19th and early-20th centuries and reveal the myriad and sometimes surprising ways that such hands sought to wield “the pencil of nature” in an effort to assert self-possessed, and therefore revolutionary, subjectivities during an era in which the dominant culture preferred to represent them as otherwise.”—Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, author of Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century

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