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Full download Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America Matthew Fox-Amato file pdf all chapter on 2024
Full download Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America Matthew Fox-Amato file pdf all chapter on 2024
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EXPOSING SLAVERY
EXPOSING
SLAVERY
Photography, Human Bondage,
and the Birth of Modern Visual
Politics in America
Matthew Fox-Amato
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with
the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the
Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fox-Amato, Matthew, author.
Title: Exposing slavery : photography, human bondage, and the birth of
modern visual politics in America / Matthew Fox-Amato.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018024380 (print) | LCCN 2018042200 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190663940 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190663957 (Epub) |
ISBN 9780190663933 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Slaves—United States—Social conditions—19th century. |
Slaves—United States—Portraits. | Portrait photography—United
States—History—19th century. | Photography—Social aspects—United
States—History—19th century.
Classification: LCC E449 (ebook) | LCC E449 .F768 2019 (print) |
DDC 306.3/6200222—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024380
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.,
United States of America
For my mom
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Policing Personhood 18
2. Enduring Images 69
3. Realizing Abolition 103
4. Domesticating Freedom 160
This book has its roots in the generosity and support of so many people.
I am thrilled to be able to thank them, beginning with my early men-
tors. To Mark Jerng, Tim McCarthy, and Werner Sollors: thank you
for inspiring me as thinkers and teachers and setting me on a path to
study the past.
In the Department of History at the University of Southern California,
I wrote the dissertation that became this book, and I had the good for-
tune of an excellent committee. I am especially grateful to my advisor,
Richard Fox. It was a joy to work with Richard, whose imaginative
approach to history and unwavering support were instrumental in ad-
vancing this project. His passion for the vitality of ideas is a model for
what a historian can be. For her intellectual generosity and persistently
keen insights about this project, I am thankful to Karen Halttunen.
Vanessa Schwartz’s intellectual spark and creativity continue to aston-
ish me, and I have benefitted greatly from conversations with her
about visual culture and from her support. I also benefitted from Leo
Braudy’s expansive knowledge of American culture. The Visual Studies
Graduate Certificate and Visual Studies Research Institute created a
vibrant community to study all things visual and aided my work with
a summer fellowship and the Anne Friedberg Memorial Grant. I thank
Dornsife College for a graduate fellowship and the college doctoral
fellowship. At USC, I owe a debt of gratitude to many more: Elinor
Accampo, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Jen Black, Catherine Clark, Justin Clark,
A ckn owled g m en ts
x
On august 24, 1839, the Great Western set sail from Bristol, England,
carrying copies of the London Globe that described the much-anticipated
technical details of the daguerreotype process, a French invention
that many said would demolish old ways of picturing and seeing the
world. One commentator typified the enthusiasm when he exclaimed,
“What would you say to looking in a mirror and having the image
fastened!!”1 By the end of September, the London Globe had reached
all corners of the United States, from Boston to New Orleans, and
Americans had read about Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s image-
making technique.2 The invention that seemed to break so forcefully
from the past gave rise to many visions of its future. Certain artists
bristled at the increasingly common idea that daguerreotypy would
render painting obsolete. “If you believe everything the newspapers
say,” artist Thomas Cole noted, “you would be led to suppose that the
poor craft of painting was knocked in the head by this new machinery
for making Nature take her own likeness, and we nothing to do but to
give up the ghost.”3 Others were more optimistic. Inventor Samuel
Morse saw the medium as a boon to science. “The naturalist is to have
a new kingdom to explore,” Morse proclaimed after viewing a da-
guerreotype of a spider.4 In this still crude process, one man even
imagined the makings of surveillance cameras: “What will become of
1
E xp osin g S la v er y
2
the poor thieves, when they shall see handed in as evidence against
them their own portraits, taken by the room in which they stole, and
in the very act of stealing!”5
In 1839, however, no one foresaw that the daguerreotype would
alter the institution of American slavery. But new technologies spark
unintended consequences. By the mid-1840s, American 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 confirm and
project humanity and dignity amidst northern racism. In the first
decade of the medium, enslaved people had begun entering southern
daguerreotype saloons of their own volition, posing for cameras, and
leaving with visual treasures they could keep in their pockets. Years
later, 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 con-
tested. By 1865 it would be difficult for many Americans to look back
upon slavery and its fall without thinking of a photograph.
The historical relationship between slavery and photography is the
subject of this book. Despite enormous scholarly attention paid to the
history of antebellum bondage over the past half century, its inter-
twined development with photography has gone largely unstudied.
This oversight can be chalked up to the long-standing preference for
written over visual sources in the discipline of history, to the limited
consideration of the photographic business in the antebellum South,
or to the scattered nature of the photographic archive. Perhaps the
subject fell through the porous disciplinary cracks between history,
the history of photography, and art history. Whatever the case may be,
pressing questions remain unanswered about the historical collision
between a particular social structure and a new visual technology that
took the United States by storm. How did photography shape the cul-
ture and politics of American slavery? And how, in turn, did slavery
shape the development of photography—as an aesthetic form and as
a set of cultural practices?
It will not surprise scholars that antislavery activists sought out
photography, for they had long drawn upon the media technologies at
I n tr od u ction
3
actors, even though they did not operate the cameras, used personal
and mass-produced photographs toward various ends.16 Fusing the
methods of history and visual-culture studies means, in this case, il-
luminating images and image-making as important aspects of lived
experience and informal politics. It means reconceiving the past as a
world of picture-makers.
Enslavers, enslaved people, abolitionists, and Civil War soldiers
form the backbone of this study because of their deep investment in
two vital social and political problems of the Civil War era—problems
they addressed, to a striking degree, through photography. The first
concerned the character and destiny of enslaved African Americans:
who, precisely, were enslaved people, and who might they be? These
questions were rendered increasingly pressing by the sectional crisis
of the 1850s (over the potential spread of slavery) and the eventual
demise of bondage during the Civil War. At the center of the debate
was the commodification of human beings and the worldview that
propelled it. As many ex-slaves would testify in their narratives and
lectures, American slavery was defined by the paradoxical legal and
cultural status of slaves as both people and property. For Frederick
Douglass, the determining quality of bondage was not “the relation in
which a great mass of the people are compelled to labour and toil
almost beyond their endurance,” though he surely stressed that slav-
ery entailed a brutal labor regime. It was, instead, “that relation by
which one man claims and enforces the right of property in the body
and soul of another man.”17 Or as ex-slave James W. C. Pennington
hauntingly put it, “The being of slavery, its soul and body, lives and
moves in the chattel principle.”18
This person/property contradiction has, of course, long been cen-
tral to American historians’ views of slavery, ever since David Brion
Davis famously articulated it in The Problem of Slavery in Western
Culture. For Davis, the “inherent contradiction of slavery lay not in its
cruelty or economic exploitation, but in the underlying conception of
man as a conveyable possession with no more autonomy of will and
consciousness than a domestic animal.”19 Later scholars have shown
how this contradiction played out on the ground, in the southern
courtrooms where slaves were “human subjects and the objects of
property relations,” and inside the many bustling slave markets of
the antebellum South, where slaves were turned into people with
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