24 December 2012
Picturing freedom:
How former slaves
used photography to
imagine and create their
new lives after Emancipation
A scruffy African-American family stands outside their run-down home while a dapper young man sits up straight in a waistcoat and suit: These are the never-before-seen faces of slavery and Emancipation, revealing families’ lives before and after they were freed.
The images themselves played a key part in allowing the men, women and children freedom – being distributed through the northern states as propaganda during the push for abolition, and employed by former slaves to showcase their new images.
More than 150 of the photographs feature in a new book, Envisioning Emancipation, which has been published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 on January 1.
On the road to freedom: An African American soldier in Union uniform with wife and daughters between 1863 – the year of the Emancipation Proclamation – and 1865
Changes: Photography was also used a propaganda to show how former slaves could become respectable people. Left, a studio portrait of an African American sailor taken between 1861 and 1865. Right, a self-liberated teenage woman with two Union soldiers in 1862
At work: Fugitive African Americans fording the Rappahannock River in Virginia in 1862 – the year before the Emancipation ProclamationMost of the images, which reveal what freedom looked like for black Americans in the Civil War era, were taken between the 1850s and the 1930s.They have been collated by Dr. Deborah Willis, a professor at the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and Dr. Barbara Krauthamer, an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
The women spent years searching museums and archives throughout the country in a bid to expand the photographic record that would allow readers to look at race and freedom in a new way.
‘We wanted a range of images that showed the scope of the thinking about what freedom looked like,’ Dr. Willis told the New York Times. ‘We consciously looked for black photographers; we consciously looked for images of women, whose stories have often not been included.’
Respectable: A woman, Sarah McGill Russwurm, is pictured next to her brother, Urias Africanus McGill, a merchant in Liberia. They are pictured in 1854
Working together: A photograph from 1864 reads: ‘Colored army teamsters, Cobb Hill, Va’. It is one of 150 pictures in a new book about photography and Emancipation
Horrors: The authors also discovered never-before-seen battle pictures. Here, men collect the bones of soldiers killed in battle, Cold Harbor, Virginia in 1865
Forging on: Left, a soldier in Union uniform between 1863-1865, Right, a formerly enslaved man holds a horn with which slaves were called, near Marshall, Texas
And as they searched, they found numerous images challenging the ideas of slavery – ‘images that have gone missing from the historical record,’ Dr. Willis said.
Alongside pictures of enslaved people on plantations, there were images of wealthy black families posing together, black Union soldiers, Emancipation Day celebrations and reunions between former slaves, the Times reported.
The book also contains photographs taken in the bid for emancipation. There are ‘before’ and ‘after’ images of children, showing how they could transform into respectable youngsters, and slave children with white skin to create sympathy among white northerners.
Other images allowed northerners to witness the cruelty of slavery and the respectable individuals the former slaves had become. And black leaders, including Frederick Douglass and abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, often turned to the medium, to further their abolitionist campaigns.
Careers: Susie King Taylor, pictured left in 1902, was the first African American to teach openly in a school for former slaves. Pictured right in 1915 is Booker T. Washington, a teacher, author, orator, and adviser to Republican presidents. He would speak on behalf of black people who lived in the South
New life: A whole family poses by a building in Savannah, Georgia in 1907
Smart: The caption reads: ‘District of Columbia, Company E, Fourth U.S. Colored Infantry, at Fort Lincoln’. The image was taken between 1862 and 1865
Documenting change: This image of an African American woman holding a white child in 1855 features in a new book, Envisioning Emancipation
There are also examples of how photography was used by the supporters of slavery, using images as evidence of its ‘natural order and orderliness’.
And, following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the use of photography evolved – eventually being used by black men and women to show off their new, postslavery looks and to portray their hopes of freedom.
Subsequently, the book, which was published earlier this month, shows how photography was central in the war against slavery, racism and segregation
GOOD
March 5, 2013
Portraits of Freedom:
An Intimate Photo Exploration
of Emancipation
What did freedom look like, asked Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer when they set out to compile the impressive tome Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, a photographic history of the African American journey from slavery to emancipation during and after the Civil War. Published to coincide with the 150 anniversary of emancipation this past January, the book highlights 150 rare photographs that show slaves and formers slaves as dignified, beautiful, and full of pride—imagery not often emphasized when exploring the era. GOOD spoke with Krauthamer about what these photographs reveal about the time of slavery, and America as a nation.
African American soldier in Union uniform with wife and two daughters; Photographer unknown, 1863–1865
GOOD: You went through over 1,000 photographs. How did you select the ones to use in the book?
BARBARA KRAUTHAMER: We looked at photographs from all over the country in museums, libraries, the Library of Congress, university archives, private collections. We were looking for images that we thought really illuminated our central question: “what did freedom look like?” We wanted to show a range of experiences from the 1850s when black and white abolitionists were involved in the anti-slavery fight through the early 20th century to think about what freedom looked like generations after emancipation—how the legacy of emancipation was remembered and preserved.
Studio portrait of an African American sailor; Photographer: Ball and Thomas Photographic Art Gallery, 1861–1865
Susie King Taylor; Photographer unknown, 1902
GOOD: Were you surprised by any of the photographs that you came upon?
KRAUTHAMER: One of the things we were struck by were certain continuous themes that we saw from the 1850s through the 1960s: those of dignity, pride and perseverance, sometimes in the most oppressive of times in the United States.
Whole family at the Hermitage, Savannah, Georgia; Photographer unknown, 1907
GOOD: The book was inspired by this image of a woman named Dolly whose photograph was on a wanted flyer. Her owner was trying to get her back, and you tried to uncover her story.
KRAUTHAMER: Yes, we don’t know why the photograph was taken, but it’s attached to a hand written notice because Dolly freed herself by running away in 1863. Her master wrote this notice offering a reward for her return, put her photograph on it, and saved that notice long after she was gone, and the war had ended and slavery was abolished. He was still clinging to this image of her, and she had gone off and made her own life far away from him.
GOOD: Another interesting image was one with a teenage girl, and these two union soldiers—it looks like they are holding a gun to her head, but actually it was a common pose at the time.
KRAUTHAMER: That’s another story of a young woman who freed herself by running away, and she escaped dressed as a young boy and the soldiers were escorting her to safety. The photographer who made the picture was a prominent African American photographer, and in the pose they’re holding their guns to their chest in this proud patriotic pose, but in the composition it looks like they’re aimed at her head.
Self-liberated teenage woman with two Union soldiers, Jesse L. Berch, quartermaster sergeant, and Frank M. Rockwell, postmaster; Photographer: J. P. Ball, 1862
GOOD: What was it like for an African American photographer working then?
KRAUTHAMER: They enjoyed considerable success and so we featured images by a number of African American photographers and we deliberately looked for those images to highlight their roles as consumers and patrons of photography, but also as photographers creating these images and documenting this history. Photography was understood as a skilled, artistic profession, and they were skilled businessmen and skilled photographers at their craft. They worked mostly in cities—northern cities primarily, but not exclusively.
Emancipated Slaves—White and Colored: Wilson Chinn, Charles Taylor, Augusta Boujey, Mary Johnson, Isaac White, Rebecca Huger, Robert Whitehead, Rosina Downs; Photographer: Myron H. Kimball, 1863
GOOD: Were they primarily working with African American subjects?
KRAUTHAMER: Both. Augustus Washington for example photographed African American subjects, but he also made the very famous portrait of the abolitionist John Brown. Before the Civil War, slaveholders often had portraits made of their families with a slave on the side, or an enslaved woman holding their child to showcase their wealth, but also to present images of slavery as benign—to show that these people were well cared for, and well clothed.
Nursemaid with her charge, Arkansas; Photographer unknown, 1855
Then there’s another series we showcase commissioned by the Swiss born scientist Louis Agassiz, who was on the faculty of Harvard, and traveled to South Carolina with a photographer to make portraits of enslaved Africans and their American born descendants. His goal was to use photography as a tool to document racial difference and to prove that there were different orders of human beings: Africans constituted a different type of human being than Europeans. He had these photographs made to present people as scientific specimens. So we use those images to show the counterpoints of what black photographers and black photographic subjects and others who understood the power of photography to make these political arguments about the nature of humanity, the nature of freedom, of citizenship.
GOOD: After studying these photographs, what can we take away from this and apply to race relations today?
KRAUTHAMER: The real idea that we wanted to convey was of African American involvement in shaping their own lives and communities and to show African Americans as architects of their own history. They were engaged in political debates, fighting for freedom, people who were freeing themselves from slavery—they weren’t just waiting to be emancipated. We also wanted to show a long history of dignity and perseverance—people’s sense of themselves as beautiful, intelligent, and creative.
>via: http://www.good.is/posts/portraits-of-freedom-an-intimate-photo-exploration-of-emancipation