It is not known if Douglass was familiar with these images, but they surely would have made their mark upon him if he had known them-as they have on so many viewers since their discovery in the attic of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in 1976. Zealy, a Columbia, South Carolina, photographer, produced a group of daguerreotypes of Africans and African Americans for Agassiz to support his ideas on the origins of human diversity. When Douglass took to the podium to argue against these men’s ideologies dressed up as natural science, whose theories influence our political discourse even today, nearly two hundred years later, he often did so by celebrating picture making in general and photography in particular. Louis Agassiz, the Harvard professor who did much to bring the scientific debate on human diversity into public view, was one of “the Notts and Gliddens”-indeed, he contributed a chapter to Types of Mankind-and Douglass often singled him out in his lectures. “ The Notts and Gliddens,” as Douglass called this group, insisted and labored to prove that humans were not of one kind the world over, but belonged to distinct and permanent types: “races.” These men sought in particular to prove that humans of one type, Africans and their descendants, were not only inferior to whites, but formed an altogether different species. Gliddon, authors of the popular compendium of racialized science Types of Mankind (1854). That such a test was necessary, that Douglass had to posit photography in this way-arguing that it was “ an important line of distinction between man and all other animals”-reminds us where he lived and when: the slaveholding, segregated states of America.ĭouglass specifically aimed his contention “that man is everywhere a picture-making animal” at the men who comprised the “ American school” of ethnology in the mid-nineteenth century, including Josiah C. The ability to make pictures, he reasoned, was therefore evidence of one’s humanity. People the world over, regardless of color or culture, were fascinated with pictures-making, sharing, and posing for them in vast numbers. Picture making, he said, was a peculiarly human endeavor. “The power to make and to appreciate pictures belongs to man exclusively,” he told a Boston audience on December 3, 1861, and repeated on more than one occasion. He also found in the practice of photography evidence of human nature. Douglass, for one, although a great man of words, again and again let the pictures speak for themselves.īut Douglass was not attracted to photography solely on account of its affordability, flexibility, and supposed objectivity. In this sense, at least, photography was indeed democratic: it could be used by practically anyone to suit their purpose. Show the world what I am- what we are-his portraits seem to say show them that the camera, like nature, cares not one whit about skin color, or any other detail, but instead records everything equally and without prejudice. Douglass himself, a former slave who became a leading abolitionist, was the most photographed American of the nineteenth century, and each time he sat for a portrait, he knew precisely what he was doing. Even “the humblest servant girl” could now afford to have her picture made, and many did. It was, as numerous people have claimed, a truly democratic medium. Young or old, man or woman, Black or white-everyone could experience the power of this new medium by looking at a photograph, yet so, too, could everyone wield it by being photographed. Knowing this, he praised the picture-making arts broadly but particularly welcomed the new medium of photography because it put this tool within everyone’s reach. Frederick Douglass, “Lecture on Pictures,” 1861įrederick Douglass understood that a picture could do its work with little fuss, communicating clearly and directly, yet with considerable power. All they can reasonably ask of us is that we place them on the wall, in the best light, and for the rest allow them to speak for themselves. Pictures, like songs, should be left to make their own way in the world.
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