Representational Justice: Picturing Equality
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. As one of the first theorists to write about the nature and function of photography, Douglass understood that political representational justice—the ability to recognize each other in the full range of our complexity as human beings—was unprecedented and remains as urgent a cause in our own time as it was in his own.
Douglass led by example. Over the long course of his storied career, he was photographed more than anyone else in the United States. For Douglass, photography was a vehicle for promoting racial equality. The small, emerging middle class of African Americans followed suit and sat for their own photographic portraits when daguerreotype studios spread across the United States in the 1840s. After the Civil War, African Americans of all classes sought out photography studios to affirm that they could now be “seen,“ following the long and dire centuries of “social death“ inherent to the nature of human slavery. As technology became cheaper through the following decades, more and more free African Americans could afford to have their photograph taken and be seen on their terms.
Frederick Douglass’s crucial insight? That photography possessed the potential to achieve in the realm of representation that which he most ardently sought in the social and political realities of the country he loved so passionately: to be, effectively, a leveler of race, of class, of gender.
He saw that this new, mesmerizing, and affordable technology could achieve what social moments aspired to achieve but, painfully had not yet been able to do. He championed photography as prophetic of all that society could be, a place where the astonishing variety of faces that constitute the nation could occupy their full measure of equality within their splendid frames. These persuasive photographs from the dawn of photography remind us how important representation is in a democratic society: to be seen as we see ourselves and to see others as they wish to be seen.
This exhibition refocuses on these enthralling studio portraits of African Americans, the majority from the collection of Greg French, and the strikingly compelling individuals who sat patiently for their likenesses in photographic studios across the country. It sets these photographs in conversation with the works of Sir Isaac Julien, the celebrated contemporary filmmaker and installation artist whose Lessons of the Hour (2019) pays homage to Douglass’s extraordinary life and legacy. it also salutes the studio practice of pioneering African American photographers from Douglass’s day, including James Presley Ball (J.P. Ball) of Cincinnati (featured in Julien’s Lessons of the Hour) and Augustus Washington, one of the finest African American daguerreotype photographers whose studio was in Hartford from 1846 to 1853.
In considering Julien’s contemporary images alongside historical photographs, this exhibition reframes our understanding of these now anonymous sitters and their still unheralded lives, inviting further research into their lost identities. Seen alongside Julien’s poignant quotations of these earlier photographic histories, the works selected for display in the following rooms both reveal the unsung beauty of self-possessed life in America and call attention to the continued importance of photography for representational justice and equality today.
…redeeming through image and sound the breaches and terrors of a broken history.
—STUART HALL, FROM “ASSEMBLING THE 1980S: THE DELUGE—AND AFTER“