Troubling Dignity, Seeking Truth: Black Feminist Vision and the Thought-World of Black Photography in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In this paper, I revisit the thought-world of nineteenth century black photography between two of its most important practitioners: Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. In the history of black photography, and increasingly in Black Studies writ large, these two figures drive discourses on visuality and freedom. Typically leading with Douglass’ own lectures on pictures, we study both Douglass and Truth as figures who understood the stakes of representation, its utility for abolitionist movement, and its possibilities for black self-image. While its critical to hold Douglass and Truth together, I aim, in this paper, to linger in the differences between their approaches to photography as a realm of thought and practice. I argue that Douglass pursued a comportment of dignity reliant on a gendered presentation of dominance and revolutionary leadership, while Truth, in a different vein, enacted an image-body politic that was intentionally entangled with the visual logics of property and objectification particular to black women’s bodies within slavery. By foregrounding Truth rather than Douglass in this intellectual genealogy of the visual, I want to gesture toward a black feminist vision that can open up the work of photography in Black Studies as we continue to think about what kinds of subjects and subjectivities photographs produce, complicate, and unravel.

Keywords:

• black visual culture
• history of photography
• visual studies

Notes

Notes

1 Unknown (American). 1864. Sojourner Truth, “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance”. Photographs. Place: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org. http://library.artstor.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/asset/SS7731421_7731421_11384124.

2 Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

3 Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9, no. 2 (1995). Smithsonian Institution. University of Chicago Press. 55.

4 Ibid., 49.

5 Elaine Coburn, “Critique de la raison nègre: A Review,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3, no. 2 (2014): 178.

6 Grigsby, 13.

7 Ibid., 13–14 & 193.

8 Ibid., 13.

9 Ibid., 184.

10 Ibid., 185.

11 For more on black feminist theorizing of the visual field from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, see Nicole Fleetwood’s Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Jasmine Nichole Cobb’s Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2015), Courtney R. Baker’s Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015), and Tina Campt’s Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); for more on the black female body in photography over time, see Deborah Willis’ and Carla Williams’ canonical work, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002).

12 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 70.

13 Ibid., 15.

14 John Stauffer, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York, NY: Liveright, 2015).

15 M. O. Wallace and S. M. Smith, Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 9.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., 10.

18 Willis et al., 20.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., 1.

21 Douglass as quoted by Wallace, 6.

22 Theodore Stanton, “Frederick Douglass on Toussaint L'ouverture and Victor Schoelcher,” The Open Court 1903, no. 12 (2010), 759. Article 7.

23 Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 7.

24 F. Douglass, “Pictures and Progress: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 3 december 1861,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 3, ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 472.

25 Augusta Rohrbach, “Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White,” in Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2012), 89.

26 Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), 60.

27 Rohrbach, 89.

28 Davis, 61.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., 62

32 Ibid., 63.

33 Rohrbach, 87.

34 Ibid., 62.

35 Ibid., 90.

36 Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth: A life, A Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc, 1996), 187.

37 Ibid.

38 Willis et al., 54.

39 Painter, 187.

40 Rohrbach, 90.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid., 94.

43 Willis et al., 30.

44 Ibid.

45 Nicole Fleetwood, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 8.

46 Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jovonna Jones

Jovonna Jones is a PhD Candidate in African and African American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in Black cultural history, aesthetics, and visual studies.