Picturing Frederick Douglass (PBK)
Picturing Frederick Douglass is a work that promises to revolutionize our knowledge
of race and photography in nineteenth-century America. Teeming with historical detail,
it is filled with surprises, chief among them the fact that neither George Custer
nor Walt Whitman, and not even Abraham Lincoln, was the most photographed American
of that century. In fact, it was Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the ex-slave
turned leading abolitionist, eloquent orator, and seminal writer whose fiery speeches
transformed him into one of the most renowned and popular agitators of his age.
Featuring:
- Contributions from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kenneth B. Morris, Jr. (a direct Douglass descendent)
- 160 separate photographs of Douglass―many of which have never been publicly seen and were long lost to history
- A collection of contemporaneous artwork that shows how powerful Douglass’s photographic legacy remains today, over a century after his death
- All Douglass’s previously unpublished writings and speeches on visual aesthetics
- 317 illustrations
