Troubling Dignity, Seeking Truth: Black Feminist Vision and the Thought-World of Black Photography in the Nineteenth Century

In this paper, I revisit the thought-world of nineteenth century black photography between two of its most important practitioners: Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. In the history of black photography, and increasingly in Black Studies writ large, these two figures drive discourses on visuality and freedom. Typically leading with Douglass’ own lectures on pictures, we study both Douglass and Truth as figures who understood the stakes of representation, its utility for abolitionist movement, and its possibilities for black self-image. While its critical to hold Douglass and Truth together, I aim, in this paper, to linger in the differences between their approaches to photography as a realm of thought and practice. I argue that Douglass pursued a comportment of dignity reliant on a gendered presentation of dominance and revolutionary leadership, while Truth, in a different vein, enacted an image-body politic that was intentionally entangled with the visual logics of property and objectification particular to black women’s bodies within slavery. By foregrounding Truth rather than Douglass in this intellectual genealogy of the visual, I want to gesture toward a black feminist vision that can open up the work of photography in Black Studies as we continue to think about what kinds of subjects and subjectivities photographs produce, complicate, and unravel.