“Picture and Progress” new book on African Americans & Photography

July 9, 2012 in Features, TALD

Thomas Askew - Library of Congress Image No. LC-USZ62-69912LC-USZ62-69912 via www.DDFR.tv

Duke University Press published the new book “Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity”. Maurice O. Wallace, professor of English and African & African American Studies at Duke University, co-edited the new book with Shawn Michelle Smith, associate professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.In this new book, professor Wallace looks at the effect of early photography on the identity of African Americans.

“Frederick Douglass was very hopeful and optimistic about the new technology, photography.

He imagined that pictures would necessarily yield a certain kind of social, political and cultural progress, not just for the African American but for the nation, as a whole.”-Maurice O. Wallace, co-editor

Duke University Press

“Pictures and Progress explores how, during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, prominent African American intellectuals and activists understood photography’s power to shape perceptions about race and employed the new medium in their quest for social and political justice.

In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines consider figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois as important and innovative theorists and practitioners of photography.”

Check out the book trailer on Youtube: http://bit.ly/MPAyEM

For more information about the book: http://bit.ly/O0wJwn

Learn more about the PBS documentary on African American photography “Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People”

Library of Congress - U.S. Colored Infantry - Image No. LC-B8171-7890 - via ww.DDFR.tv

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