Our rights in the United States have been secured and retained not only by laws and social customs, but also by how we see or refuse to see “the other.“
This truth is one that Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), abolitionist, author, newspaper publisher and editor, orator and statesman, recognized more than any man of his time.
Learn more about Frederick Douglass’s impact and legacy in I Am Seen…Therefore, I Am: Isaac Julien and Frederick Douglass.
Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers—and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS, FROM “PICTURES AND PROGRESS,“ 1864-65
Sir Isaac Julien’s immersive, multi-screen film installation Lessons of the Hour anchors an exploration of Douglass’ reflections on image-making, race, and citizenship.
Co-curated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Founder of Vision & Justice, and presented in collaboration with The Amistad Center for Art & Culture, the exhibition brings together rare nineteenth-century daguerreotypes—on public view for the first time—saluting the studio practices of the African American photographers of Douglass’s era, as well as the many compelling sitters who sought to have their images captured and remembered.
For Douglass, photography embodied the potential to allow, for the first time, a person to be seen as they desired to be seen, especially members of the working class, the socially marginalized, women, and most certainly, African Americans.
The photographic image played a vital role in expanding political and economic equality and social justice by allowing Black men and women of all classes to define themselves on their own terms, outside of and against racist representations of “Blackness.“
Lessons of the Hour
Isaac Julien’s Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass (2019) is an immersive interpretation of the life and legacy of Douglass, especially his early and formative journey to the United Kingdom from 1845–1847. Julien's artistic brilliance invites us to consider how time-past, present, and future-is bound inextricably together and to ask what lessons Frederick Douglass's profound and prophetic insights about the new media of photography can teach us today.
Watch “I Am Seen, Therefore I Am…“ curators Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Professor Sarah Elizabeth Lewis in conversation with artist Sir Isaac Julien about the ways image and history weave throughout his work.
Opening Artist Conversation at The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art | May 19, 2023
