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America and the Long 19th Century Series
Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century
In the decades leading up to the end of U.S. slavery, many free Blacks sat for daguerreotypes decorated in fine garments to document their self-possession. People pictured in these early photographs used portraiture to seize control over representation of the free Black body and reimagine Black visuality divorced from the cultural logics of slavery. In Picture Freedom, Jasmine Nichole Cobb analyzes the ways in which the circulation of various images prepared free Blacks and free Whites for the emancipation of formerly unfree people of African descent. She traces the emergence of Black freedom as both an idea and as an image during the early nineteenth century. Through an analysis of popular culture of the period—including amateur portraiture, racial caricatures, joke books, antislavery newspapers, abolitionist materials, runaway advertisements, ladies’ magazines, and scrapbooks, as well as scenic wallpaper—Cobb explores the earliest illustrations of free Blacks and reveals the complicated route through visual culture toward a vision of African American citizenship. Picture Freedom reveals how these depictions contributed to public understandings of nationhood, among both domestic eyes and the larger Atlantic world.
- GenresHistory
362 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 3, 2015
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February 24, 2021
In the decades before the end of U.S. slavery, Black daguerreotypist Robert Douglass Jr. began to photograph free Black people at his art studio in Philadelphia. Black families would come to the studio wearing fine garments as a way to document their self-possession. Dr. Jasmine Cobb argues that free Black people used portraiture as a means to seize control of their representation and reimagine Black visuality divorced from slavery. Her original research investigates the innovative visual cultures that Black people created as a way to resist dehumanization.
Many of these seated portraits took place with parlor backgrounds. The Victorian parlor was intended to convey beauty and respectability, it was the ultimate sign of domesticity for the white “lady” who didn’t leave the house. Black women – even while free – were “too closely associated with slavery to be considered fragile or worthy of protection” (15). Staging portraits in these settings alongside other resistant practices of Black visuality “helped to undermine slavery’s visual codes” (10).
Representation of the Black body in visual culture was long dominated by the white gaze. Formal print media was published in a way to readily enlist white audiences in assistant to locate Black people who had liberated themselves from captivity. As Dr. Cobb notes, the only time that Black bodies and distinctive appearances were described in print were for runaway advertisements. Even white abolitionist publications participated in the spectacularization of the Black body, publishing images of the atrocity of slavery as a way to solicit sympathy from white audiences by depicting Black people as unthreatening. The “Kneeling Slave” was the most reproduced symbol of the abolitionist movement.
Dr. Cobb argues that these efforts were ultimately more about white anxiety than Black freedom. She instead highlights how Black communities developed alternative, more compelling visual cultures. Black communities developed an alternative, resistant visual culture in response to routine hyper-visibility and surveillance. (For example, in mid-18th century New York City, white people enforced laws requiring enslaved people to be indoors after sundown or to carry candle lights after dark).
Before the emergence of the daguerreotype Black people rarely reproduced images of the Black body on page. Most Black publications like The Freedom’s Journal avoided images of Black people altogether. Instead, they printed images that connoted education and self-improvement.
Free Black women rarely depicted their bodies in their own friendship albums, and instead used “flowers to represent the free female body” (91). Dr. Cobb notes that the purpose of this was two-fold. Firstly, Black women’s “choice to remain opaque made sense” because they were in persistent danger of being kidnapped or assaulted (109). Secondly, in curating friendship albums (historically a white genteel woman’s leisure activity), Black women adopted a strategic “optic of respectability” which created alternative representations to the racist caricatures produced in the white press mocking Black women’s class mobility. Racist satire in the white press often targeted Black women specifically, ridiculing Black people’s inability to “integrate into the domestic space of a national home” (151).
Dr. Cobb’s work is a testament to the fact that art not only depicts reality, it creates it. Prior to emancipation many could not even imagine that Black people would be free. Representation of Black people had been completely structured by the white imagination. It was through the innovative work of Black creators that Black freedom became seen as possible.
Many of these seated portraits took place with parlor backgrounds. The Victorian parlor was intended to convey beauty and respectability, it was the ultimate sign of domesticity for the white “lady” who didn’t leave the house. Black women – even while free – were “too closely associated with slavery to be considered fragile or worthy of protection” (15). Staging portraits in these settings alongside other resistant practices of Black visuality “helped to undermine slavery’s visual codes” (10).
Representation of the Black body in visual culture was long dominated by the white gaze. Formal print media was published in a way to readily enlist white audiences in assistant to locate Black people who had liberated themselves from captivity. As Dr. Cobb notes, the only time that Black bodies and distinctive appearances were described in print were for runaway advertisements. Even white abolitionist publications participated in the spectacularization of the Black body, publishing images of the atrocity of slavery as a way to solicit sympathy from white audiences by depicting Black people as unthreatening. The “Kneeling Slave” was the most reproduced symbol of the abolitionist movement.
Dr. Cobb argues that these efforts were ultimately more about white anxiety than Black freedom. She instead highlights how Black communities developed alternative, more compelling visual cultures. Black communities developed an alternative, resistant visual culture in response to routine hyper-visibility and surveillance. (For example, in mid-18th century New York City, white people enforced laws requiring enslaved people to be indoors after sundown or to carry candle lights after dark).
Before the emergence of the daguerreotype Black people rarely reproduced images of the Black body on page. Most Black publications like The Freedom’s Journal avoided images of Black people altogether. Instead, they printed images that connoted education and self-improvement.
Free Black women rarely depicted their bodies in their own friendship albums, and instead used “flowers to represent the free female body” (91). Dr. Cobb notes that the purpose of this was two-fold. Firstly, Black women’s “choice to remain opaque made sense” because they were in persistent danger of being kidnapped or assaulted (109). Secondly, in curating friendship albums (historically a white genteel woman’s leisure activity), Black women adopted a strategic “optic of respectability” which created alternative representations to the racist caricatures produced in the white press mocking Black women’s class mobility. Racist satire in the white press often targeted Black women specifically, ridiculing Black people’s inability to “integrate into the domestic space of a national home” (151).
Dr. Cobb’s work is a testament to the fact that art not only depicts reality, it creates it. Prior to emancipation many could not even imagine that Black people would be free. Representation of Black people had been completely structured by the white imagination. It was through the innovative work of Black creators that Black freedom became seen as possible.
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