Picturing Frederick Douglass

"With 160 photographs, many never before seen, this book provides a strong visual history of Douglass and his era. Douglass believed that photography had extraordinary social power, and the inclusion of previously unpublished writings and speeches on visual aesthetics show him to be an important theorist of the new art form." -- Barbara Hoffert - Library Journal "Picturing Frederick Douglass marries all of my present interests: legacies of slavery; beautiful images of a beautiful man; and the first theory of photography as a democratic medium capable of social change. Stunningly original and elegantly written and designed, it will inspire anyone interested in the links between the visual and the verbal." -- Sally Mann, author of Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs "Douglass emerges here out of photographic technology"s earliest years, with majestic beauty, and through the power of his own self-creations. The book is the result of intrepid research and brilliant analysis; it charts Douglass"s life visually, allowing him to look back at us wryly, wistfully, wrathfully." -- David W. Blight, Yale University, and author of the forthcoming Frederick Douglass: A Life "In Picturing Frederick Douglass, Stauffer, Trodd, and Bernier offer exhilarating scholarship and our idea of Douglass and our sense of photography in nineteenth-century America are deepened. This is brilliant and very moving work." -- Darryl Pinckney, author of High Cotton, Out There and Black Balled: The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy "Picturing Frederick Douglass marks a significant turn in the long history of Douglass's reception. Both as a subject for photography and as a critical theorist who reflected on the democratic, humane, and truth-telling powers of the medium, Douglass emerges in this beautiful volume in a completely new light." -- W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Seeing Through Race "Nothing less than a masterpiece in the fields of biography, African-American history, and not least of all the neglected area of iconography...A riveting instant classic and a pure pleasure to behold." -- Harold Holzer, winner of the Lincoln Prize and author of Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion "Picturing Frederick Douglass is to be shared, studied, read and repeated every six months, not only in the classroom but in our living rooms...Beautifully researched and storied...A true treasure!" -- Deborah Willis, author of Reflections in Black and the acclaimed documentary, Through a Lens Darkly