Harvard rediscovered the daguerreotypes in its archives in the mid-1970s. The images, taken around 1850, are some of the earliest photographs of enslaved people in the United States, which also makes them some of the earliest portrait photographs. Unforgettable are the startled, horrified, desperate, and deeply arresting gazes of the sitters. The images are so remarkable that artist Carrie Mae Weems used them for her blistering series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995). In response, Harvard threatened to sue Weems for copyright infringement (in a surprise resolution, the university instead acquired Weems’s series). Legal issues of ownership aside, Lanier’s most arresting claim is that she and her family, as descendants of the enslaved people depicted in the photos, have been violated by the images—as have their ancestors, who bodies have been kept in a kind of perpetual exposure, a permanent state of trauma. This echoes Saidiya Hartman’s claim, in Scenes of Subjection (1997), that the circulation of depictions of slavery reproduce its abjection, and that as a result the dead are never safe from the living. When I learned that Lanier’s lawyer represented Trayvon Martin’s family, my mind went immediately to another murdered black teenager, Michael Brown: to the way that his body was photographed and filmed dead on the ground with no one shielding him and few demanding that the image-making stop. Lanier’s case is based on her status as a descendant of enslaved people, but by extension it is also about the continued violations, humiliations, and violence U.S. visual culture reigns down on black bodies.
Matthew Fox-Amato’s Exposing Slavery is a valuable aid for thinking through this tangle of issues around race, sight, power, and bodies. For Fox-Amato, slavery and the Civil War were central to the development of photography. This is consistent with what we know about how major historical events shape visual culture and art. This is true of historical analysis, as well: events lead and images trail behind. Rare is the history book that includes more than six or seven images as illustration for the text. Indeed, academic presses actively discourage more than that, as both too expensive and negligible to the scholarly value.
As Fox-Amato shows, both sides of the debate over slavery—and then of the war fought in its name—were interested in the power photography seemed to possess to document objective truth. As a result, we must reorient our thinking to see “photographic self-representation as a historical force.” Equally crucial, we must “reconceiv[e] the past as a world of picture-makers.” For black Americans, photographs—and especially composed portraits—served as documents of selfhood, power, and presence. Photography also empowered white slave-owners and abolitionists in more openly polemical ways, documenting slavery or staged depictions of it to alternately uphold or condemn it.