Description

According to Aristotle, “the soul never thinks without a picture.” Imagery plays a fundamental role in how humans process and engage with the world around them. This innate tendency for image creation is reflected in the early nineteenth-century invention of the daguerreotype, the forerunner of modern photography. In a world dominated by white supremacy, this emergent technology profoundly affected how black abolitionists advocated for themselves. My presentation argues that black abolitionists gained agency by utilizing emergent print and photographic technologies. They used this visual medium as a tool to further establish their identity and political goals. In doing so, they created the equivalent of early media campaigns that profoundly impacted how the viewer related to black abolitionism. Abolitionist portraiture constituted a visual rhetoric that targeted white America. The cultural impacts had transformative implications for the nineteenth century and beyond. Historians and academics have long favored the written text in analyzing the past, and photography's development provides a rich visual narrative worthy of exploring with the same tenacity. Abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, used imagery and often their own portraiture to advocate for their rightful place in the United States society. The portraits, images, and art they produced became a critical tool in achieving political goals, conveying their humanity, and in influencing social cognition. For African Americans living in the nineteenth century, in a country dominated by white supremacy, these were powerful images that they used to benefit themselves and their communities. Viewing a Carte de Visite of an admired abolitionist wasn’t just a welcome respite from the racist imagery that dominated the American nineteenth century, it was the start of representation and activism–a place where black individuals could control their own reflection.