The most photographed man of the 19th century was not Edison, or Emerson, or Einstein. It wasn’t Jefferson, and it wasn’t Lincoln. In fact, the most photographed man of the 19th century was not, per the letter of the law, even a “man” at all, but an escaped slave from Maryland who believed in the ways photography could reshape our notions of humanness. “Negroes,” said Frederick Douglass, “can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists.” It was by the hands of those artists that the Black subject was annihilated and subsumed by a font of stereotype. And so, newly in possession of his body, Douglass sought to unmoor it from the distortions of the white colonial gaze: the minstrel performances, the lynching postcards, the myth of the “happy slave,” and all the other constructs that get in the way of the truth. Across 160 portraits, Douglass crafted an image of himself that was defiant and solemn, dignified and powerful. Which is to say he made images of himself that he could love.
Of course, he wasn’t the only one who intuitively understood that photography was a battleground: What the poet Elizabeth Alexander calls “the Black interior” is often absent from textbooks and gallery surveys. Before the camera, a portrait could be achieved only by the delicate hand of a commissioned painter, and having someone sit was such a long and expensive process that the practice was confined to the upper classes. But when the daguerreotype process reached New Orleans in the 1840s—perhaps in the hand of a Black man, though his ancestry is contested—suddenly “the humblest servant girl,” as Douglass said, could have a portrait of herself, too. So, it’s no coincidence that free Black families rushed to have their likenesses captured in a visual climate that
