Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America

by Matthew Fox-Amato

Within a few years of the introduction of photography into the United States in 1839, slaveholders had already begun commissioning photographic portraits of their slaves. Ex-slaves-turned-abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass had come to see how sitting for a portrait could help them project humanity and dignity amidst northern racism. In the first decade of the medium, enslaved people had begun entering southern daguerreotype studios of their own volition, posing for cameras, and leaving with visual treasures they could keep in their pockets. And, as the Civil War raged, Union soldiers would orchestrate pictures with fugitive slaves that envisioned racial hierarchy as slavery fell. In these ways and others, from the earliest days of the medium to the first moments of emancipation, photography powerfully influenced how bondage and freedom were documented, imagined, and contested. By 1865, it would be difficult for many Americans to look back upon slavery and its fall without thinking of a photograph.

Exposing Slavery explores how photography altered and was, in turn, shaped by conflicts over human bondage. Drawing on an original source base that includes hundreds of unpublished and little-studied photographs of slaves, ex-slaves, free African Americans, and abolitionists, as well as written archival materials, it puts visual culture at the center of understanding the experience of late slavery. It assesses how photography helped southerners to defend slavery, enslaved people to shape their social ties, abolitionists to strengthen their movement, and soldiers to pictorially enact interracial society during the Civil War. With diverse goals, these peoples transformed photography from a scientific curiosity into a political tool over only a few decades.

This creative first book sheds new light on conflicts over late American slavery, while also revealing a key moment in the relationship between modern visual culture and racialized forms of power and resistance.

Genres: History, Photography, Nonfiction, Art

360 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2019

Reviews

[Valleri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many thanks to Oxford University Press, and to the author, for giving me the opportunity to win this giveaway! Exposing Slavery was not a quick and easy read. It gave me so much to think about. I think people today consider using photographs to make political arguments something recent and innovative. Innovative it is ... but recent it's not. It's a tool with roots nearly two centuries old. I am rather passionate about photography so reading details about daguerreotypes during the 1840s, followed by the ambrotype, and the tintype was very interesting to me. Exposing Slavery details the use of photographs by slaveholders, abolitionists, and Union soldiers, in order to explore the politics of the moment. AND SLAVES, which I found interesting.

I struggled to read many parts of the book. I felt my heart being ripped out as I read how slaves were treated. The images of whippings and scars on the slaves were beyond horrific. Strangely enough, though, one of the images that bothered me the most was the daguerreotype the slaveholders had taken of Isaac Jefferson in order to prop it up in the kitchen so that the slaveholders could laugh every time they saw it. However, it was satisfying to read how anti-slavery activists used photography to persuade Americans that bondage was immoral.

I'll admit that some parts of the book went over my head and I felt as though I were reading a textbook. I can't imagine the amount of research it took to write this book! It boggles my mind.

The book, itself, is a beautiful hardback book, with glossy pages, and many, many interesting images. Again, I say thank you for pulling my name out of the hat!

[Frederic · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book, documenting the relationships between photography and slavery in the US. The analysis is detailed and well-referenced, and there are many photographs (plus some engravings and paintings) reproduced at very high quality; the entire book is printed on high-quality coated paper so that color prints are interspersed through the text rather than gather in a section of plates. Some of the images are disturbing, as one might expect given the subject. This is an academic book, and there's little sugar-coating or simplifying of the relationships depicted and hidden in these images – but it's an important subject given its due here.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully, well-made book with so much info in it. The pages are glossy and are of fine quality paper. The book is very heavy for it's size.
So many illustrations are included depicting the introduction of photography in the US of slaveholders and their slaves, ex slaves, abolitionists and more.
Very interesting book that I received from Goodreads giveaways. I appreciate the opportunity to read and review this book