Photography, in the form of the daguerreotype, arrived in the United States from France in 1839. Americans instantly fell in love with it. By 1860, there were more than 3,000 photographers in the country; studios sprouted in cities and towns, and itinerant practitioners tramped the back country. As the cost of image-making plummeted, more and more Americans posed for portraits—including African-Americans, both free and enslaved.
Sometimes masters had pictures made of favored slaves, often nurses with the children they tended, but a surprising number of slaves sat for the camera by choice. They prized mementos of their family members, just as white Americans did, but there was a difference. Slaves could be torn from their loved ones at any time, never to see them again except in a daguerreotype.
In “Exposing Slavery” (Oxford, 343 pages, $39.95), Matthew Fox-Amato, a historian at the University of Idaho, persuasively argues that photography changed Americans' perception of both slavery and the humanity of blacks. As early as 1861, Frederick Douglass declared photography to be a “powerful, though silent influence, upon . . . future generations.” Even images made at the behest of masters tacitly showed slaves to be distinct and dignified human beings. At the same time, Mr. Fox-Amato rightly cautions, “slave photographs erased as much as they made visible: the sexual coercion enslaved women faced, the slave trade they feared, the physical violence used by masters and mistresses.”
No one who reads “Exposing Slavery” will ever see antebellum and Civil War-era photographs of black Americans in the same way again. Quite apart from the author's thorough research and tight prose, the many accompanying photographs are superlatively reproduced on high-quality paper, making them seem as crisp and striking as the day they were made.
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