Review: Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America, by Matthew Fox-Amato

Abstract

Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America , by Matthew Fox-Amato. Oxford University Press, 2019. 360 pp./$39.95 (hb).\n\n\n\nAmerican photography s role in shaping nineteenth-century attitudes around slavery has been explored in a range of academic disciplines, including art history, American studies, African American studies, women s and gender studies, and literary studies. The photograph has been studied as a valuable discursive object from which we can glean information about how enslaved black people were viewed by the state, violated at the hands of slave-owning families, and mobilized for consensus purposes by Northern abolitionists prior to the Civil War. Ex-slaves such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman realized the political stakes of image-making in the production, circulation, and formation of more liberating portraits of black identity. Provided that nineteenth-century photography illuminates so clearly the politics at play in both the defense of and protest against the United States slave economy, its absence in American historical scholarship is particularly curious.\n\nMatthew Fox-Amato works to address this gap in Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America , which not only historicizes the rise of the daguerreotype in the US during American slavery, but takes on the task of telling a more expansive account of nineteenth-century photographic culture in the US. This account argues that the South played a more active role in the production of slave photography than previously articulated in nineteenth-century scholarship on US photographic culture. Through extensive archival research, Fox-Amato pieces together, for instance, how central daguerreotypes were for slaveholders, who would commission family portrait-style images of their slaves. These commissioned photographs reveal the paradoxical perception of slaves by their masters, who viewed them as property yet “framed” …