American 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...
Skip Nav Destination
Close
Article navigation
December 2019
Book Review|
December 01 2019
Review: Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America, by Matthew Fox-Amato
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).
Lucy Mensah
Lucy Mensah
Lucy Mensah is a visiting assistant professor in the Museum and Exhibition Studies Graduate Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century African American visual culture.
Search for other works by this author on:
Afterimage (2019) 46 (4): 81–84.
Citation
Lucy Mensah; Review: Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America, by Matthew Fox-Amato. Afterimage 1 December 2019; 46 (4): 81–84. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2019.464007
Download citation file:
Close
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.