Within a few years of the invention of the first commercially successful photography process in 1839, American slaveholders had already begun commissioning photographic portraits of their slaves. Ex-slaves-turned-abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass also came to see how sitting for a portrait could help them project humanity and dignity amidst northern racism. In the first decade of the medium, enslaved people had begun entering southern daguerreotype saloons of their own volition, posing for cameras, and leaving with visual treasures they could keep in their pockets. And, as the Civil War raged, Union soldiers would orchestrate pictures with fugitive slaves that envisioned racial hierarchy as slavery fell. In these ways and others, from the earliest days of the medium to the first moments of emancipation, photography powerfully influenced how bondage and freedom were documented, imagined, and contested. By 1865, it would be difficult for many Americans to look back upon slavery and its fall without thinking of a photograph. This book explores how photography altered, and was in turn shaped by, conflicts over bondage. Drawing upon an original source base that includes hundreds of unpublished and little-studied photographs of slaves, ex-slaves, and abolitionists as well as written archival materials, it puts visual culture at the center of understanding the experience of late slavery. It assesses how photography helped southerners to defend slavery, slaves to shape their social ties, abolitionists to strengthen their movement, and soldiers to imagine and pictorially enact an interracial society during the Civil War. With diverse goals, these peoples transformed photography from a scientific curiosity (in the early 1840s) into a political tool (by the 1860s). While this project sheds new light on conflicts over late American slavery, it also reveals a key moment in the much broader historical relationship between modern visual culture and racialized forms of power and resistance.

About the Author
Matthew Fox-Amato is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Idaho. He is a historian of visual and material culture.

Reviews
Lavishly illustrated, the book...urges historians to rethink the antebellum U.S. as a highly visual society in which people practiced, produced, and consumed photographic images. It similarly demands photo- and art-historians...rethink the political ramifications of early photography.... An original and compelling contribution to nineteenth-century American history, the book channels our view through the photographic lens, which shaped the self-understanding of a young nation approaching conflict. * Carolin Goergen, Revue francaise d'etudes americaines *
Remarkable and pathbreaking...Fox-Amato's study of the photographic history of slaves and ex-slaves brilliantly assembles disparate bits of visual and textual evidence into telling insights about white American racial stereotypes and black resistance that reverberate into the present. His work shows how difficult it is to get at the truth of the slave experience, and how rewarding it is when the historical and visual detective work is done so thoroughly and effectively. The implications for our own time make reading this visual story difficult but looking away impossible. * Terrie Dopp Aamodt, American Historical Review *
An important contribution to the histories of slavery, abolition, visual culture politics, and photography. Moreover, the book's central argumentative thread shows how in the antebellum United States each of these domains were intertwined with the others in more subtle ways... than historians have previously appreciated. Scholars will rightfully be turning to these pages again and again for the important and under-remarked case studies that Fox-Amato brings to light through his deep and creative archival work....This research would be noteworthy on its own, even if it were not also paired in the book with deft storytelling, sensitive analysis, and a real dedication to seeing subtle stories in the materials. * Monica Huerta, New England Quarterly *
Exposing Slavery gives some revealing insights on a somewhat overlooked aspect of ideological warfare. * Jon Guttman, Civil War Times *
Exposing Slavery is a significant contribution to 19th and 20th -century visual studies examining the relationship between race, representation, and photography. Fox-Amato's book is meticulous research that is well organized and cohesive, managing to cover a great number of themes. * Earnestine Jenkins, Reviews in History *
Exposing Slavery deserves rich praise for casting light on the role that photography played in the institution of slavery, and how various agents adopted the photographic lens as a way of identifying themselves and others in line with their ideological perceptions. Fox-Amato engages with an archive that, despite its silences, is richly fleshed out in this text. By unearthing new materials and offering a new framework through which to consider these images and texts, Exposing Slavery will inspire discussion on the nature of photography in the nineteenth century for some time to come. * Emily R. Brady, American Nineteenth Century History *
original, richly illustrated, and brilliant book * Library Journal *


Awards
Winner of Finalist, Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.



Book Information
ISBN 9780190663933
Author Matthew Fox-Amato
Format Hardback
Page Count 360
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 1g
Dimensions(mm) 157mm * 236mm * 25mm