Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass 1818-2018

Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass 1818-2018 is the result of decades of collaborations and conversations among academics, artists, and activists living and working in the UK and the US. For the first time, contributors map Douglass’ eclectic and experimental visual archive across an array of aesthetic, social, political, cultural, historical, ideological, and philosophical contexts. While Douglass the activist, diplomat, statesman, politician, autobiographer, orator, essayist, historian, memoirist, correspondent, and philosopher have been the focus of a scholarly industry over the decades, Douglass the art historian and the subject of photographs, paintings, prints, and sculpture let alone mass visual culture has only begun to be explored. Across this volume, scholars share their groundbreaking research investigating Douglass’ significance as the subject of visual culture and as himself a self-reflexive image-maker and radical theorist. Pictures and Power has come to life from a conviction endorsed by Douglass himself: the battleground against slavery and the fight for equal rights had many staging grounds and was by no means restricted to the plantation, the antislavery podium,  the legal court, the stump circuit, the campaign trail, or even the educational institution but rather bled through every arena of imaginative, political and artistic life.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations xiAcknowledgements xiv ForewordDeborah Willis 1 PrefaceCeleste-Marie Bernier and Bill E. Lawson 7 Introduction: ‘Paint me as I am’: The Many Faces of Frederick DouglassCeleste-Marie Bernier and Bill E. Lawson 19 Part I Imaging Frederick Douglass 1 P ictures and Progress: Frederick Douglass and the Beginnings of an African American Aesthetic in PhotographyDonna M. Wells 432 The Abolitionist and the Camera: Frederick Douglass’ Photographic Half-CenturyZoe Trodd 573 Anna Murray Douglass, ‘The Mother of Cedar Hill’:Photography and the Representation of Nineteenth-Century Black Women’s ActivismEarnestine Jenkins 774 ‘A Faithful Representation of the Man?’ The Pre-Civil War ‘Sorrow Images’ of Frederick DouglassCeleste-Marie Bernier 1055 Last Objects: Death, Autobiography and the Final ImprintFionnghuala Sweeney 143 Part II Imagining Frederick Douglass 6 Transatlantic Portrayals of Frederick Douglass and his Liberating Sojourn in Music and Visual Arts 1845–2015Alan Rice 1677 Cedar Hill: Frederick Douglass’ Second SkinJeffrey C. Stewart 1898 Frederick Douglass in the Age of Moving PicturesHannah Durkin 2319 Looking Forward and Looking Back: Rashid Johnson and Frederick Douglass on PhotographyShawn Michelle Smith 25510 Viral Virtual Varicose Douglass Inside the World Wide Web: Or How to Make a Great Black Man InvisibleMarcus Wood 27511 Subverting the Racist Lens: Frederick Douglass, Humanity and the Power of the Photographic ImageBill E. Lawson and Maria Brincker 299 AfterwordJohn Stauffer 329 Notes on Contributors 333Index 339