ESSAYS ON THE MIRROR OF RACE

To read a spe­cific essay, click on its title. To learn more about an author, click on the author’s name.

[Author], A Freak­ish White­ness: The Cir­cass­ian Lady as Sideshow Spec­ta­cle What lies behind mid-19th cen­tury por­traits of white women with strange names, exotic cos­tumes, and wildly frizzed hair?

Mar­tin A. Berger, White Suf­fer­ing and the Branded Hand
This essay ana­lyzes the social and racial sig­nif­i­cance of an unusual mid-nineteenth-century daguerreo­type of a white abolitionist’s branded hand.

Erina Duganne, Black Civil War Por­trai­ture in Con­text
An inves­ti­ga­tion into the kinds of mean­ings that pho­to­graphic por­traits of black Civil War sol­diers had at the time of their mak­ing as well as some of the chal­lenges that such a recov­ery poses for his­to­ri­ans today.

Gre­gory Fried, “True Pic­tures”: Fred­er­ick Dou­glass on the Promise of Pho­tog­ra­phy
This essay explores the ideas of Fred­er­ick Dou­glass on the rev­o­lu­tion­ary sig­nif­i­cance of pho­tog­ra­phy for the cause of abol­ish­ing slav­ery and for advanc­ing human equality.

Joan Gage, A White Slave Girl: “Mulato Raised by Charles Sum­ner“
A nar­ra­tive of dis­cov­ery about one of the first pho­tographs used to pro­mote the abo­li­tion­ist cause.

Carol Good­man, “As White as Their Mas­ters”: Visu­al­iz­ing the Color Line
A dis­cus­sion of the ambi­gu­ity of the color line in 19th cen­tury visual rep­re­sen­ta­tions of race.

Maria Helena P. T. Machado, Flávio dos San­tos Gomes, and John M. Mon­teiro, Three Essays on Agas­siz in Brazil
This series of essays explores an impor­tant but little-known col­lec­tion of ethno­graphic pho­tographs made by the Swiss-American nat­u­ral­ist Louis Agas­siz dur­ing an expe­di­tion to Brazil in 1865–66.

Molly Rogers, “Fair Women Are Trans­formed into Negresses“
A med­i­ta­tion on writ­ing about oppressed indi­vid­u­als pho­tographed for sci­en­tific pur­poses, and whether it is pos­si­ble to lib­er­ate such peo­ple through an act of imagination.

Molly Rogers, Louis Agas­siz: Full Face and Pro­file
A bio­graph­i­cal approach to pho­tographs of slaves, con­sid­er­ing the images in rela­tion to the per­sonal and pro­fes­sional atti­tudes of the nat­u­ral­ist who com­mis­sioned them.

Shawn Michelle Smith, A Spirit Pho­to­graph
An analy­sis of a “spirit pho­to­graph,” a form of pho­tog­ra­phy thought to bridge this world and the next.

We will be adding essays on a reg­u­lar basis. Please come back again to see what is new.