Matthew Fox-Amato’s Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (2019) considers photography’s place at the root of the battle over slavery before, during, and after the Civil War. In daguerreotypes, tintypes, and stereoscopes defending, opposing, rejecting, and remembering the enslavement of Black people in the United States—“slavery produced a key element of modern political culture” (p. 13). Art historians and other scholars have emphasized the Civil War’s confluence with the democratization of photography. But as Fox-Amato points out, a focus on the Civil War alone fails to capture the earlier development in the 1840s and 1850s of a visual grammar of white authority shared by white people on both sides of the slavery issue. Simultaneously, enslaved people and fugitives from slavery such as Frederick Douglass used photography as a means of self-presentation and communication with kinfolk from whom they had been separated by sale or flight. When illustrated newspapers, such as Frank Leslie’s and Harper’s Weekly, arrived in the mid-1850s, photographers’ studios had been active—from New York to New Orleans—for at least a decade. By the start of the Civil War, photography was “a common cultural ground between North and South” (p. 3), according to Fox-Amato.
Enslavers, for instance, quickly adapted their arguments for the benevolence of slavery to the new medium. One common photographic motif the author terms “chattel Madonnas” (p. 45), featured an enslaved woman with a white child in her lap. Enslavers took pride in displaying their children in the arms of the enslaved women forced to care for them. Fox-Amato argues that with the medium of photography, enslavers found yet another way—as with fugitive slave advertisements and violence—to “police the personhood” (p. 18) of enslaved people.
The decreasing cost and widening availability of photographers’ studios, however, meant that elite and middle-class Whites did not have a monopoly on the medium.
Enslaved people working on steamships, in ports, and in towns and cities in the South where multiple studios plied for business, witnessed the rising popularity of portrait photography. Historians and archaeologists have known for some time that enslaved people could also be independent consumers with money earned from being hired out, selling handicrafts, or cultivating garden plots. Less was known, however, about their ability to procure a photograph of themselves.