Through A Lens Darkly Short Shot Series with Deborah Willis: “Dolly – Runaway”
Through A Lens Darkly Short Shot Series with Barbara Krauthamer: “Finding a Lost Photo”
“Tasting Freedom, at Last, in Black, White and Sepia”
By: Felicia R. Lee
December 21, 2012
“Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 on January 1, brings together more than 150 images — half never seen by the public — that depict the many ways slavery, Emancipation and freedom were represented by photography during the Civil War era and beyond.”
- Emancipation Day parade, April 3, 1905 in Richmond, Va. Courtesy of Library of Congress via The New York Times
“Dr. Deborah Willis, a professor and the chairwoman of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and Dr. Barbara Krauthamer, an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, said that in compiling the book they hoped to expand the photographic record in a way that would stimulate fresh considerations of race and freedom. They spent years searching museums, libraries and other archives around the country, poring over more than 1,000 photographs.”
“‘We wanted a range of images that showed the scope of the thinking about what freedom looked like,’ said Dr. Willis in a joint interview with Dr. Krauthamer in the library of the photography department at Tisch. ‘We consciously looked for black photographers; we consciously looked for images of women, whose stories have often not been included.’ “
- Photograph of Sarah McGill Russwurm, 1854. Courtesy of Temple University Press via Daily Mail
“Mostly, she added, they sought evocative photographs of everyday life, to form a collection that could serve, in Dr. Krauthamer’s words, as ‘a family album’ of ‘the collective African-American experience.’ “
“What they found were mainly ‘images that have gone missing from the historical record,’ Dr. Willis said.”
“The lives of black people at that time are ‘such an abstraction, except for cinematic images,’ Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, says. ‘There are real images, though.'”
- Studio portrait of an African American sailor taken between 1861 and 1865. Courtesy of Temple University Press via Daily Mail
Susie King Taylor, pictured left in 1902, was the first African American to teach openly in a school for former slaves. Courtesy of Temple University Press via Daily Mail
By: Daily Mail Reporter
December 24, 2012
“The images themselves played a key part in allowing the men, women and children freedom – being distributed through the northern states as propaganda during the push for abolition, and employed by former slaves to showcase their new images.”
“There are also examples of how photography was used by the supporters of slavery, using images as evidence of its ‘natural order and orderliness’.”
“And following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the use of photography evolved – eventually being used by black men and women to show off their new, post slavery image and to portray their hopes of freedom.”
“Subsequently, the book… shows how photography was central in the war against slavery, racism and segregation.”
- A soldier in Union uniform between 1863-1865. Courtesy of Temple University Press via Daily Mail
To read the complete New York Times article, visit “Tasting Freedom, at Last, in Black, White and Sepia”.
To read the complete Daily Mail article, visit “Picturing freedom: How former slaves used photography to imagine and create their new lives after Emancipation”.
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