Picturing frederick douglass
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Picturing Frederick Douglass
In October, , at the age of 76, after having sat for nearly photographs—the most of any living American in the 19th century, when the new medium emerged—the African-American human rights leader Frederick Douglass did something he’d likely never done before: He smiled for the camera.
As it turned out, the portrait he made at a photographers’ studio in New Bedford, Massachusetts, one of his adopted hometowns, would be his last. Within four months, the statesman would be dead, collapsing after an appearance before the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C.
We’d like to think Douglas was expressing a hard-earned sense of relief, that a lifetime of fierce commitment to the abolition movement and the rights of all people was nearing its natural end, having witnessed considerable progress. Throughout his life Douglass was acutely attuned to the social power of photography. His status as the most photog
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Date:June 29,On display in one of the Preeminent African American National Historic Landmarks in the United States
July 15, - July 31st,
Frederick Douglass was in love with photography. From his earliest known photograph in until his passing in , he sat for his portrait whenever he could and became the most photographed American of the nineteenth century; more photographed than President Abraham Lincoln. In this first major exhibition of Douglass photographs, we offer a visually stunning re-introduction to America's first black celebrity —immediately recognizable in his own lifetime by millions.
Picturing Frederick Douglass promises to revolutionize our knowledge of race and photography in 19th century America. It is based upon a recently published, acclaimed book of the same name by Drs. John Stauf
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Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century's Most Photographed American
Celeste-Marie Bernier is professor of African American studies in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham.
John Stauffer is professor of English, American studies, and African American studies at Harvard University.
Zoe Trodd is professor and chair of American literature in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (dge), is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research, Harvard University. He fryst vatten the author of Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, –; Black in Latin America; Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora; Faces of America; Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American