2006/10/26 by Mandy Reid · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Photography and Visual Culture
paper · doi:10.1080/17460650601002412
openalex publication_date 2006/10/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The advent of photography in the nineteenth‐century United States functioned as a new tool that racial scientists employed to illustrate their theories about racial differences. The focus in this article is on the ways in which the camera allegedly captured the ‘essence’ of blackness, as Louis Agassiz, a prominent racial scientist contended. While racial scientists rendered slaves biological specimens, stripping them of their clothing, identity and anything other than their physiognomy, the former slave Sojourner Truth refuted such a reductive understanding of race. By carefully constructing an image of black womanhood antithetical to the ‘scientific’ understandings of the vast distinctions between Anglos and those with African ancestry, Truth reconceptualized the work photography could do to help Americans make sense of race. In considering scientific slave daguerreotypes alongside the cartes‐de‐visite Truth commissioned and sold to support herself, this article examines the relationships between a developing visual culture, racial science and sentiment and how they worked both together and against one another literally to illustrate the meaning of blackness in the United States in the 1850s–1870s.